Walter Isard – författare

Demonstrating the ways in which work in a broad range of fields can be pulled together in the analysis of conflict, this book provides the reader with a general introduction to the principles of conflict analysis and lays a methodological foundation for the further development of the interdisciplinary field of peace science. The text begins with an extensive survey of arms race models, from the classic Richardson model to models exploring the effects of factors such as the domestic and international economic environment, public opinion and party politics, and weapons technology and information development. The processes of individual and group problem-solving, in both crisis and non-crisis conditions, are examined, drawing on work in economics, operations research, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Building on this diverse body of work, the author moves on to develop a framework for conflict management with which to approach a variety of conflict situations and applies this procedure to the United States-Soviet arms control conflict. Walter Isard is cited by Mark Blaug as one of the Great Economists Since Keynes (CUP, 1989 paper edition).

This landmark textbook introduces students to the principles of regional science and focuses on the key methods used in regional analysis, including regional and interregional input-output analysis, econometrics (regional and spatial), programming and industrial and urban complex analysis, gravity and spatial interaction models, SAM and social accounting (welfare) analysis and applied general interregional equilibrium models. The coherent development of the materials contained in the set of chapters provides students with a comprehensive background and understanding of how to investigate key regional problems. For the research scholar, this publication constitutes an up-to-date source book of the basic elements of each major regional science technique. More significant, it points to new directions for future research and ways interregional and regional analytic approaches can be fused to realise much more probing attacks on regional and spatial problems - a contribution far beyond what is available in the literature.

The book portrays how a new unique social science field of study evolved and describes the formation of a society associated with the field. It starts with the rise of Hitler, the advent of the Keynesian Revolution, the intense mathematization of economics and relates how an individual's creative thinking, later supplemented by that of others, was able to effectively combat the strong resistance of conventional social sciences-economics and geography in particular to attain full scale recognition as a basic social science area covering the sorely neglected theoretical and related applied analysis of spatial, locational and regional phenomena. It depicts the first stage of development in North America, then because of demonstrated applied findings on problems where only theory and just talk existed in economics and geography, spread rapidly into Europe, Japan, India, Australia, South Korea and Latin America, and recently into Indonesia and China and elsewhere.It has become today, in the mind of the founder and author, to be among the leading areas of study (if not the leading one) in attacking the globalization problems -economic, political and cultural- of the world economy and its major regions.