In the introduction to his book Dr. Harder has very clearly described its purpose and organization. I only want to add for the English-speaking reader a few words on the place the present text is likely to have in the cur rent literature. At first Dr. Harder's undertaking might come as a surprise. Only a few years ago, Zeisel's Say it with Figures gave the market research practi tioner some ideas of how simple figures and tables could be successfully employed; Langhoff's publication for the American Marketing Associa tion presented some pertinent mathematical models in the most elemen tary form; why should a German author believe he can already introduce us to serious mathematical procedures for use in product management and advertising? After reading the book, incredulity turns into pleasure because of the skill with which the author has pursued his task. As a matter of fact, the book can serve two audiences who at first glance might appear to have quite opposing interests. For the mathematically trained market re searcher, the book has the marked advantage of combining a variety of ap proaches not ordinarily mixed in one volume. If the market researcher be gan as an economist he is already familiar with difference equations and time series analysis; if he moved in from psychology, he is already ac quainted with factor analysis. But as he reads this book, he finds the two worlds well integrated.

In this book Lee Rudolph brings together international contributors who combine psychological and mathematical perspectives to analyse how qualitative mathematics can be used to create models of social and psychological processes. Bridging the gap between the fields with an imaginative and stimulating collection of contributed chapters, the volume updates the current research on the subject, which until now has been rather limited, focussing largely on the use of statistics. Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences contains a variety of useful illustrative figures, introducing readers from the social sciences to the rich contribution that modern mathematics has made to our knowledge of logic, structures, and dynamic systems. A beguiling array of conceptual systems, topological models and fractals are discussed which transcend the application of statistics, and bring a fresh perspective to the study of social representations. The wide selection of qualitative mathematical methodologies discussed in this volume will be hugely valuable to higher-level undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, sociology and mathematics. It will also be useful for researchers, academics and professionals from the social sciences who want a firmer grasp on the use of qualitative mathematics.

In the autumn of 1961 Jan Salomon ('Mars') Cramer was appointed to the newly established chair of econometrics at the University of Amsterdam. This volume is published to commemorate this event. It is well-known how much econometrics has developed over the period under consideration, the 25 years that elapsed between 1961 and 1986. This is specifically true for the areas in which Cramer has been actively interested. We mention the theory and measurement of consumer behaviour; money and income; regression, correla tion and forecasting. In the present volume this development will be high lighted. Sixteen contributions have been sollicited from scholars all over the world who have belonged to the circle of academic friends of Cramer for a shorter or longer part of the period of 25 years. The contributions fall broadly speaking into the four areas mentioned above. Theory and measurement of consumer behaviour is represented by four papers, whereas a fifth paper deals with a related area. Richard Blundell and Costas Meghir devote a paper to the estimation of Engel curves. They apply a discrete choice model to British (individual) data from the Family Expenditure Survey 1981. Their aim is to assess the impact of individual characteristics such as income, demographic structure, location, wages and prices on commodity expenditure.

It is beyond any doubt that East-Central European countries such as Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia has dramatically changed its shape through its radical transition from centrally planned to the market economies in last 7 years. Many economists divide the process of economic transformation into areas of Stabilization, Liberalization, and Privatization/Restructuring. The traditional view is that stabilization and liberalization can be achieved rather quickly-by balancing budgets, balance of payments, tightening money supply, freeing prices and liberalizing trade-but that the area of privatization is one that could be moved to the future and will require much more time. Until 1991, none of the post-communist nations except former East Germany (which had a large decree of support from West Germany) had succeeded in privatizing large numbers of enterprises, even though more than two years had passed since the changes in government in these nations. The privatization has been, however, seen as an extremely important part of reform package together with stabilization and liberalization especially in the Czech Republic from the very beginning. The Czechs originally as a part of the Czechoslovak Federal Republic embarked on an unprecedented path that should have lead not only to stabilization and liberalization, but also to very rapid, mass privatization of its sector of large enterprises that have dominated its economy to an extreme extent.

At the end of 1992, things will never again be the same inside the European Economic Community (EEC), because, as that year draws to a close, the aims of the Single Act of European Union (SAEU), which became law in July, this year, will have become effective - thus creating a 'real' Common Market. This will mean that there will no longer be any obstacles to the free movement of goods between the Member States. Equally, and for the first time in the EEC's history, internal capital movements will be absolutely free, there will no longer be any exchange controls and it will be possible to freely establish financial services between EEC countries. Likewise, as currently being proposed by Lord Cockfield, wide variations in the levels of value added tax (VAT) between Member States will not be allowed. Also, in the case ~f the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), it will no longer be possible (nor even necessary) to have the monetary compensatory amounts (MCA's). All these changes - but especially the increased freedom in capital movements - will have profound consequences for the different regions of the Community and it will be desirable to have a much more dynamic Regional Policy before 1993. Last, but by no means least, a greater number of decisions inside the Community will be made by majority voting and the Parliament will be endowed with enhanced powers.

This monograph presents a detailed examination of a variety of issues pertain ing to pricing in the context of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), a designation that I much prefer over Comecon. It situates itself within the contours of the pricing problematique that I have recently analyzed as one component of the broader aspects of monetary cooperation, essentially among the Eastern European countries (see Chapters 4 and 5 of Brabant, 1987). The suggestion that I elaborate in detail on the circumstances under which prices for regional trade within the framework of the CMEA are determined was 'strongly' urged by an anonymous referee of Brabant (1986b) and Josef Brada, the editor of Journal of Comparative Economics. Both evidently felt that the comparatively commodity-specific pricing issues that I have presented piecemeal in half a dozen articles or so since 1984 had remained too narrow, largely configured as they inevitably were by the empirical findings of exercises applied to a small number of commodities, as discussed here in Chapter 7. Under the circumstances, I saw little point in attempting to set forth these in tricate issues in a comprehensive framework. Perhaps the central motivation was that many of the regional pricing issues in the CMEA have, by and large, remained quite obscure and intractable. They might be crucial determinants in some isolated cases, as I was trying to verify.