International Economics or World Economics?

Abstract

The topic area of international economics in conventional sense, as appearing in most of the standard textbooks is much more limited, and its viewpoint is narrower, than what is required in the light of the state of an increasingly globalised world economy functioning as an organic system with interdependencies and interactions among all its parts. A proper and up-to-date world economics, as distinguishably from it, while discussing also, but in a historical context and critically, the theoretical and methodological fundaments of international economics, applies an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to the contemporary world economy. It extends its investigation to the structural changes, unequal relations, disequilibrium, crises and institutional problems of the latter, to the various effects of globalisation and technological revolutions, to world-wide activity of transnational corporations, and touches also such global problems as climatic changes, international security, migration, sustainability of development, etc. It partly involves development studies and economics of integration, too, or at least it links with them.