This is a key year for the evolution of international markets. The global economy is experiencing the most severe downturn since the thirties, it is temporarily leaving a path of sustained growth that characterized the last decades, and is facing an impressive decline of trade between countries. Banks are going bankrupt, the stock market has crashed, rms are going out of bu- ness or drastically reducing their production and exports, workers are being red and investment in new business creation or innovation is shrinking. Meanwhile, consumers con dence has dropped at its minimum, aggregate demand has been declining for months and expansionary policies and int- national coordination have failed to counteract the crisis until now. It is quite likely that all this will change sooner or later, but at the end of this crisis our understanding of the macroeconomy may change as well. In front of these crucial events, this book is not an attempt at proposing a radically new way of interpreting macroeconomic phenomena, and, as a m- ter of fact, it is not even a book on macroeconomic theory. My more modest goal is to collect a number of insights derived from recent research on the role of competition and innovation in the analysis of three topics: business cycles, trade and growth through innovations.

"The last decade has seen a lively debate in macroeconomics, with an increasing criticism on the model that seemed to be dominant in literature since the end of the 1990's, the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE, hereafter) and, consequently, the birth of some new theoretical approaches and methodologies"--

Endogenous Growth, Market Failures and Economic Policy develops, within a rigorous formal framework, innovative and unconventional macroeconomic policy perspectives that can be deduced from the New Growth Theory in the presence of market imperfections, adopting the standard structure of fiscal, monetary and trade policy for the book. For instance, the introduction of monopolistic competition leads to positive growth effects of fiscal policy as well as protection of infant industries.

This book presents a selection of contributions on the timely topic of structural reforms in Western economies, written by experts from central banks, the International Monetary Fund, and leading universities. It includes latest research on the impacts of structural reforms on the market economy, especially on the labor market, and investigates the results of collective bargaining in theory and practice. The book also comprises case studies of structural reforms. A literature survey on the topic serves as a valuable source for further research. The book is written by and targeted at both academics and policy makers.

Most market structures are neither perfectly or monopolistically competitive: they are characterized by a few large firms that are engaged in strategic interactions in their production and investment decisions and whose number is endogenous. The theory of endogenous market structures analyzes markets in partial and general equilibrium where strategies affect entry and entry affects strategies, and exogenous primitive conditions on technology and preferences affect the equilibrium. We discuss applications to industrial organization, international trade, business cycle theory, international finance, growth and implications for welfare and for competition, trade, fiscal and monetary policy.

We provide a unified approach to imperfect (monopolistic, Bertrand and Cournot) competition equilibria with demand functions derived from symmetric preferences over a large but finite number of goods. The equilibrium markups depend on the Morishima Elasticity of Substitution/Complementarity between goods, and can be derived directly from the utility functions and ranked unambiguously. We characterize the endogenous market structures, their dependence on market size, income and firms' productivity and compare them with the optimal allocations. Finally, we apply our results to the case of preferences such as Generalized Leontief, Generalized linear and Generalized quadratic that we introduce in the literature on imperfect competition.

In chapter 2 we concluded that the present public choice and marxist approaches to the study of political processes, as far as relevant for the analysis of economic policy making, are unsatisfactory, for reasons of incoherency, insufficient empirical support, and lack of specificity~ It was suggested that a different approach to the subject might be fruitful. To that purpose, we now turn our attention to the so-called interest function approach to the study of politico-economic phenomena, that has been developed by Van Winden (1983). See also Van Winden (1987), Van Velthoven and Van Winden (1986). Without paying too much attention to the specific conduct of and intricate relationships between voters, politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups, the interest function approach intends to combine valuable elements of the marxist and public choice analyses. According to Van Winden (1983, p. 12) "this means that in studying the interaction between state and private sector, attention should be paid to: - social classes, and the impact of class/power relationships on political and economic processes; - the way that social power structures (involving the real control over state activities) are maintained or altered; - the relative autonomy of political processes (involving the state) and its consequences for, as well as its dependence on economic processes; - individual motivations; - the possibility of mathematical formalization. " Section 3. 2. will give a general introduction to the concepts and the line of argument of the interest function approach.

When writing the preface the main work has been done. What remains is thanking all those people who directly or indirectly contributed to the out come. My thanks go to my family and friends for their encouragement towards the completion of this book. Among the academic profession, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Dr. Harald Scherf, my academic teacher, first. During the years at Hamburg University I benefitted especially from his profound knowledge of Keynesian theory. His way of examining an argument in an unbiased way helped me a lot to carry out the reseach I wanted to do. His confidence enabled me to finish the work. A part of the book was written while I was a visiting fellow at DELTA, Paris, where I am particularly indebted to Roger Guesnerie. I have benefitted from his encouragement, advice, and gentle criticism during discussions and seminars, especially on the topic of the time structure of economic dynamics. I would like to acknowledge the hospitality and stimulating atmosphere at DELTA. Different versions of the manuscript, or parts of it have been read by Prof. Dr. Manfred Holler, Dr. Jorg Bibow and Dr. Gabriele Kasten. Their comments and suggestions were quite helpul and are gratefully acknowledged. Additionally, I have to thank Prof. Dr. M. Funke and Prof. Dr. V. Timmer mann.

The crisis of the so-called Golden Age regime has been paralleled since the late 1960s by an increasing importance of market exchanges as opposed to vertically integrated manufacturing activity, leading to major changes in the size structure of firms. These changes have generally taken the form of an employment shift towards low-scale firms, lower average size and a higher number of manufacturing units. This book tries to explain on theoretical grounds the reasons for such important discontinuity.