Publisher's Synopsis
The concept of structure-functionalism introduces a new approach and tool of analysis into economic theory and practice. Analysis of the long term becomes deterministic and qualitative, and is orientated by specific categories of productive or institutional structures, which are organic and changing components of every national economy. This approach has marked Europe's road from the European Coal and Steel Community to the European Union in a dialectical course for convergence and approximately uniform rate of growth of the members' economies. Structures reflect real productive potential, the real aggregates of an economy and point out the essential need for prices, interest and currency rates to express the structures of the entire economy. The same approach shows the cause of high unemployment plaguing industrially developed countries, the sources of international monetary crises, the functional differences between the USA and the EU, the fall of Communism, as well as the causes of the Bretton-Woods collapse and the philosophy required for a new International Monetary System. Structure-functionalism reveals the nightmarish danger stemming from the ethnocentric monetarist mechanism of international markets and the obligation to give top priority to economies. Old practices and models have to be revised since basic economic concepts are differentiated within the framework of global cooperation. Rules, principles of operation and values are transformed in the shape of the challenges of a new era.
