This book contains a collection of papers delivered at a Conference in 1991 which not only marked the retirement of Professor Molenaar from the chair of Maritime Economics at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, but which also saw the founding of the World Association of Maritime Economists. Since this is a book about maritime economics by maritime economists, it is hardly surprising that it does not contain very much of direct and immediate interest to the maritime lawyer. That being said, it does address a number of very interesting questions which are familiar to lawyers interested in marine policy and provides a (fairly) accessible flavour of the nature of discussion surrounding them from an economists’ perspective.

The opening chapters, for example, look at the rise of the Korean and the decline of the former East German merchant fleet. The lawyer’s interest in such phenomena is primarily that of establishing the consequences for jurisdiction and regulation and, in consequence, they tend to evaluate such trends in these terms. These chapters address the economics of such developments and provide an informative alternative model. Similar comments apply to other questions raised, in particular that concerning social costs and pricing in shipping (Chap. 8). And it often does seem to be an “alternative”, rather than complementary model, if only because, to this lay reader, the thrust of many of the papers lies in a cautioning against overstating the national interest in preserving and developing national shipping industries by means of economically inefficient interventionism.

To take an example, Goss and Marlow argue that “There have been so many errors in so many Governments’ policies towards shipping, and they have generally combined such high expense with such limited effectiveness, that one must be tempted to fall into the trap of saying that the best policies are those which involve the smallest levels of governmental activity, the lowest levels of public expenditure and the least chance of serious error. Yet externalities are always with us, and