U.S. economic policy toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Meeting the Japanese challenge

Recent Books uncertainty about the present state of the systems, the response of the system to policy measures, unforeseen future events, and errors in measurement. In part, this book offers a report on a project funded by the National Science Foundation that involved both engineers and economists. The project was explicitly designed to transfer some methodological tools of control theory from engineers to economists and to use those tools to shed light on economics problems. Time Series Models. A.C. Harvey. New York: Halstead Press, John Wiley and Sons, 1981. 229 pp. $39.95. A presentation of the theoretical basis for the techniques used to analyze time series and the models used to estimate them. While this book can be regarded as a companion volume to the author’s earlier book, The Econometric Analysis of Time Series, the two books are self-contained. In this volume, there is more stress on creating an understanding of what the various models are capable of and the ways in which they can be applied. After a brief introduction, Harvey takes up in turn stationary stochastic processes and their properties in the time domain, analysis in the frequency domain (spectral analysis), state space models and the Kalman filter, estimation of autoregressive-moving average models, model building and prediction, and selected topics in time series regression. U.S. Economic Policy toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Meeting the Japanese Challenge. Lawrence B. Krause. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1982. 98 pp. $14.95 ($5.95 paperbound). This study focuses on the economic relations between the United States and the ASEAN countries with an eye to meeting the Japanese economic challenge. According to Krause, the ASEAN countries-Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand-represent the growing markets in the world in which American business must succeed if the American economy is going to prosper. But, in order to improve American competitiveness there, Krause argues, America must manage to sustain reasonably strong and noninflationary economic growth at home; revise laws that discourage exports to and foreign investment in ASEAN countries; and change the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the human rights amendments, the taxation of Americans abroad, and the antitrust laws to reflect the realities of the world marketplace.

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