Book excerpt: This title was first published in 1979. A number of valuable and interesting publications have appeared in the last few years on East-West cooperation. These studies, which by means of interviews and direct contacts with the firms concerned have shed some light on a subject that in the past had remained little known, also provided us with extremely valuable incentives. Most of these studies dealt only with individual aspects of cooperation, particularly the legal and microeconomic aspects. The quantitative data used, however, did not easily lend themselves to comparison. Eastern European studies more often contained the views of the respective governments than the experiences of enterp rises involved in cooperative undertakings. In this book the authors have attempted to provide a unified picture of the most important problems of East-West cooperation. The motivations and goals of those concerned, in all their m icroeconomic, macroeconomic, commercial, and political aspects, are brought together with the pertinent legal and institutional factors and are analyzed.