Global Collective Action

This book examines how nations and other key participants in the global community address problems requiring collective action. The global community has achieved some successes, such as eradicating smallpox, but other efforts to coordinate nations’ actions, such as the reduction of drug trafficking, have not been sufficient. This book identifies the factors that promote or inhibit successful collective action at the regional and global level for an ever-growing set of challenges stemming from augmented cross-border flows associated with globalization. Modern principles of collective action are identified and applied to a host of global challenges, including promoting global health, providing foreign assistance, controlling rogue nations, limiting transnational terrorism, and intervening in civil wars. Because many of these concerns involve strategic interactions where choices and consequences are dependent on one’s own and others’ actions, the book relies, in places, on elementary game theory that is fully introduced for the uninitiated reader.

• Accessible to a wide audience • Policy-relevant analysis of a large set of global challenges • Up-to-date treatment of global dependency issues

1. Future perfect; 2. ‘With a little help from my friends’: principles of collective action; 3. Absence of invisibility: market failures; 4. Transnational public goods: financing and institutions; 5. Global health; 6. What to try next? Foreign aid quagmire; 7. Rogues and bandits: who bells the cat?; 8. Terrorism: 9/11 and its aftermath; 9. Citizen against citizen; 10. Tales of two collectives: atmospheric pollution; 11. The final frontier; 12. Future conditional.

\'Todd Sandler has a reputation in his field for being a thought-provoking and innovative thinker, and his latest book does not disappoint. … this is a fascinating, innovative and thought-provoking tome, which explores some of the most serious problems facing the world today from a fresh and rigorous economic perspective. Global Collective Action is extremely well-written, readable, lively, and even at times entertaining. This book comes highly recommended, both for professional economists and the interested lay person. It would also be suitable for post-graduate or possibly advance undergraduate students.\' Economic Issues