Countries establish defence industries for various reasons. Chief among these are usually a concern with national security, and a desire to be as independent as possible in the supply of the armaments which they believe they need. But defence industries are different from most other industries. Their customer is governments. Their product is intended to safeguard the most vital interests of the state. The effectiveness of these products (in the real, rather than the experimental sense) is not normally tested at the time of purchase. If, or when, it is tested, many other factors (such as the quality of political and military leadership) enter into the equation, so complicating judgments about the quality of the armaments, and about the reliability of the promises made by the manufacturers. All of these features make the defence sector an unusually political industrial sector. This has been true in both the command economies of the former Soviet Union and its satellites, and in the market or mixed economies of the west. In both cases, to speak only a little over-generally, the defence sector has been particularly privileged and particularly protected from the usual economic vicissitudes. In both cases, too, its centrality to the perceived vital interests of the state has given it an unusual degree of political access and support.

Principles of Macroeconomics by Howard J. Sherman and Michael A. Meeropol differs from other texts in that this book stresses far more the inherent instability of the macro-economy. The details of the business cycle come early and are integrated throughout the core of usual macro topics (C, I, G, X). The book puts inflation into its proper perspective by recognising that unemployment is the much greater threat to the economic well being of the vast majority of the people. Instead unemployment and its human toll are given far greater emphasis than other texts. The Keynesian model is fully developed; so is the statistical analysis of Wesley Mitchell. The neoclassical model is covered in both its historical evolution and in its implications for current policy debates. Finally, there is strong coverage of the Euro-zone crisis and its linkages to the United States.

Some vols. include supplemental journals of "such proceedings of the sessions, as, during the time they were depending, were ordered to be kept secret, and respecting which the injunction of secrecy was afterwards taken off by the order of the House".