By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze problems independently, not just those that happen to dominate the headlines at the time of the book's writing. The World Economy has never glorified theory for its own sake. Any theory worth presenting is worth teaching students to use. The World Economy is self-contained. It defines all necessary concepts and does not rely on students' memory of other economics courses.
Numerous tables tie abstract concepts to their measurable counterparts.
We believe that an international economics course should familiarize students with the empirical reality of the world economy as well as with abstract models of it. This is reflected in more frequent use of real-world data than is typical in other texts. In addition, we refer frequently to common errors or misinterpretations in the popular press. Learning how to read the newspaper or listen to the evening news with a keen eye and ear is at least as important as learning how to read the scholarly literature. One example of this integration is our focus on the distributional consequences of policy throughout both the international trade and open-economy macroeconomics sections of the book.