THIS ISSUE of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity contains articles, a report, and discussions presented at the fifty-sixth conference of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, which was held in Washington, D.C., on April 7 and 8, 1994. The first article examines how changing U.S. trade patterns, particularly trade with developing countries, have affected U.S. manufacturing. The second...

The publication of the first article in this issue, “Realizing Strategic Value through Center-Edge Digital Transformation in Consumer-Centric Industries,” provides a unique opportunity to pay tribute to the first author, Paul Gray, who passed away last year. Please join me in thanking Omar El Sawy, Guillermo Asper, and Magnus Thordarson for continuing to revise this article co-authored with Pau...

We are honored to pay tribute to Johannes (Hans) J. Duistermaat (December 20, 1942–March 19, 2010), a world leading figure in geometric analysis and one of the foremost Dutch mathematicians of the twentieth century, by presenting a collection of contributions by someofHans’s colleagues, collaborators, and students. Duistermaat’s first striking contribution was his article “Fourier integral oper...

THE PROBLEMS OF INFLATION and recession continued to occupy the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity in its seventeenth conference, held in Washington on September 11-12, 1975. One or another aspect of these problems is investigated in each of the four articles and two reportsi n this issue of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. The stock-market decline of 1973-74 imposed more than $500 bill...