Customer Reviews

Global Collective Action

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In Global Collective Action, Todd Sandler uses the tools of economics and game theory to illuminate global challenges ranging from pollution to pandemics. Since virulent microbes, suicidal terrorists, and environmental pollutants don't respect borders, economists increasingly struggle to discover how we might use incentives to reduce global threats without undermining individual autonomy or market economies. Global Collective Action is a welcome contribution to this field, and one that is readily accessible to non-specialists. It is, nevertheless, a bit dry in places, especially in later chapters.

"What factors promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional or global level?" This is the question the author seeks to answer. Where his previous book, "Global Challenges" ends, this book begins.

Why is it that some treaties and world organizations "have achieved so much while others have accomplished so little?" The answer hinges on the type of problem being addressed. For example, although chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and greenhouse gases (GHGs) are both air pollutants that easily circulate around the globe, why is it that the international treaty dealing with CFCs has been widely credited with reducing the destruction of the ozone layer, but the Kyoto Protocol, for reducing GHGs, appears to have accomplished very little?

Twelve chapters analyze a host of global collective action problems, including orbiting satellites, transnational terrorism, AIDS, Smallpox, the United Nations, and nuclear proliferation.

1. Future Perfect
2. "With a Little Help from My Friends": Principles of Collective Action
3. Absence of Invisibility: Market Failures
4. Transnational Public Goods: Financing and Institutions
5. Global Health
6. What to Try Next? Foreign Aid Quagmire
7. Rogues and Bandits: Who Bells the Cat?
8. Terrorism: 9/11 and Its Aftermath
9. Citizen against Citizen
10. Tales of Two Collectives: Atmospheric Pollution
11. The Final Frontier
12. Future Conditional

Although the author writes in a dry, academic style there are occasional flashes of humor, and the book is filled with numerous charts, graphs, tables and figures that clearly illustrate his points. In addition he brings sharp insight and clear thinking to publicize important subjects that often end up being buried in dusty journal articles sitting on library shelves.

Full Disclosure: In 1997 the author oversaw my Ph.D. dissertation and some of our work is cited in the text.