From the wild swings of the stock market to the online auctions of eBay to the unexpected twists of the world's post-Communist economies, markets have suddenly become quite visible. We now have occasion to ask, "What makes these institutions work? How important are they? How can we improve them?"

Taking us on a lively tour of a world we once took for granted, John McMillan offers examples ranging from a camel trading fair in India to the $20 million per day Aalsmeer flower market in the Netherlands to the global trade in AIDS drugs. Eschewing ideology, he shows us that markets are neither magical nor immoral. Rather, they are powerful if imperfect tools, the best we've found for improving our living standards. A New York Times Notable Book. W. W. Norton & Company

For the past several decades, the conventional - and, until recently, the predominant - perspective on development in the international donor community has been that countries are poor because they lack resources, infrastructure, education, and opportunity. By this logic, if rich countries could only transfer enough resources and technology, improve human capacity enough, and support health and education enough, development would occur. To be sure, greater public resources, better physical infrastructure, and stronger public health and education are essential for development. But they are not enough, and they are not most crucial factor.

Expanded scientific activity is thought to benefit national economic development through improved labor force capacities adn the creation of new knolwedge and technology. However, scientific research activity expands as a global process and reflects the penetration of societies by a general rationalistic world culture. The authors point out that scientific expansion and the accompanying cultural penetration legitimate a board progressive agenda of social amelioration (e.g., by identifying environmental and health problems, and social welfare and human rights issues) that can result in regulation and direct constrainsts on productive economic activity in teh short term. Thus, science can be seen as encouraging a trade-off between short-term economic growth and boarder (and longer-term) social development. The effects of dimensions of scientific infrastrucutre on national economic growth are examined over the 1970-1990 period. Cross-national analyses show that the size of a nation's scientific labor force and training system has a positive effect on economic development, supporting conventional theories. However, indicators of national involvement in scientific research activity show negative effects on economic growth. Corollary analyses show that this negative effect is partially explained by the expansion of scientific activity into more socially relevant domains (e.g., medicine, environmental sciences, etc.) thus supporting the main arguments.