This book presents the results of a joint meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences where renowned international scholars discussed the importance of education in an increasingly globalized world. The papers cover a wide range of topics, including immigration, education in developing countries, knowledge transfer, social, economic, cultural, and political conditions in global education, technology, communication, access to information and knowledge, as well as, bio-anthropological issues.

Discussions of economic policy argue that an adequate level of profitability is a precondition for avoiding future unemployment. This book studies the rationale for this statement. The analysis is built round a simple model of the Harrod Doman type and extends the study of fixed-price equilibria by considering a dynamic process whose major components are capital accumulation and shifts in income distribution. The Keynesian depression, characterized by a sustained lack of demand, is found to be particularly stable. Lack of productive capacity may also occur when profitability has been too low. In this case, the resulting unemployment stimulates corrective shifts of prices and wages. However, such unemployment may last for some time and is more likely to be followed by Keynesian unemployment than by inflationary full employment. The first and last chapters consider the problem in less formal but more general terms. They discuss both the methodology for the study of the relationship between profitability and unemployment, and the role of various factors that the simple model neglects.

In this collection of essays. Edmond Malinvaud aims at explaining what he learned as a government statistician, particularly with respect to the unemployment problems of the last two decades. The government expert must forecast for diagnosing spontaneous trends or assessing the likely impact of public decisions. Such forecasts rely on a more or less intensive analysis. To understand the main distinction between frictional and disequilibrium unemployment requires a more rigorous conceptual apparatus than is often acknowledged; this leads to a properly defined Beveridge curve playing the major role. The most vexing issue concerns the effect of real wages on the medium term trend of labour demand; it cannot be well grasped without a good understanding of investment, for which the author presents his reference model.

This volume distils the thinking of an international group of leading economists on the changing roles of governments and markets in economic and social development. It argues that government has a vital role to play in facilitating the effective functioning of markets, even though the recent tendency has been to withdraw from direct involvement in certain sectors of the economy and to reduce intervention and control in others.