Overview of the Special Issue prepared under the direction of Guest Editor Robert Stern. Robert M. Stern, the Guest Editor of this special issue of the Global Economy Journal, is Professor of Economics and Public Policy (Emeritus) in the Department of Economics and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1958. He was a Fulbright scholar in the Netherlands in 1958-59, taught at Columbia University for two years, and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1961. He has been an active contributor to international economic research and policy for more than four decades. He has published numerous papers and books on a wide variety of topics, including international commodity problems, the determinants of comparative advantage, price behavior in international trade, balance-of-payments policies, the computer modeling of international trade and trade policies, trade and labor standards, and services liberalization. He has collaborated with Alan Deardorff (University of Michigan) since the early 1970s and with Drusilla Brown (Tufts University) since the mid-1980s in developing the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade. He is currently working with Drusilla Brown and Kozo Kiyota (Yokohama National University) on the computational modeling and analysis of preferential and multilateral trade negotiations, and issues relating to the scope of the WTO and concepts of fairness in the global trading system with Andrew Brown.
