Book reviews 77 specific areas and increases profit and reduces profit variability. Part 5: This part looks at policy issues. Keith Coble and Thomas Knight review crop and revenue insurance. They briefly review US history on crop in- surance and then present a farm decision model using actual production history yield insurance. That model provides a framework to discuss the literature on crop insurance, covering crop insurance demand, moral hazard, and adverse selection. They then talk about future directions for crop insurance research. Joseph Glauber and Keith Collins discuss the role and im- pact of the federal government in risk management, including disaster payments and crop insurance. They present the rationale for government intervention and the history of US intervention with a table showing annual costs since 1981. Bruce Gardner considers the risks stemming from uncertainty about agricultural policies, which have been less investigated than the stabilising role of policies. He first describes some selected historical episodes and then presents a conceptual basis for analysis that includes welfare economics and political economy. He looks at some of the evidence of policy uncertainty on agricultural performance. Mark Met- calfe, David Sunding, and David Zilberman discuss risk management and the environment within two contexts: policy strategies to manage environmental and health risks, and strategies to manage the risks facing farmers. They present methodologies and re- sults related to environmental regulatory policies to limit public exposure to high concentrations of agri- cultural contaminants. They also present methodolog- ical approaches and some results on how manage- ment of agricultural risks influences environmental quality. Part 6: The final part includes two chapters that summarise the book. Wesley Musser and George Patrick investigate whether risks really matter to farm- ers. I suppose one would expect this to be the lead chapter in the book, since if risks do not really matter to farmers, then the rest of the chapters are moot. Obviously, though, risk does matter to farmers, at least sometimes, as discussed by Musser and Patrick. They discuss the sources and responses to risk. They also discuss when expected profit maximisation is the relevant paradigm as contrasted to including elements of risk into the decision process. The final chapter of the book by Richard Just and Rulon Pope summarises the work of the various chap- ter authors. They conclude that much, but obviously not all, of the discussion falls within eight major themes: arguments of the utility function, psychol- ogy of risk, risks are often endogenous, long-term is a key, information is important, aggregate data does not work on micro issues, data availability is a key research limitation, and the expected utility paradigm is not dead but can often be improved upon. Researchers studying agricultural risk and decision making will find this book useful in their research tasks. The book covers a breadth of topics and in- dividual chapters are informative and generally well presented and written. Loren Tauer 451 Warren Hall, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Tel.: +1-607-255-4402 E-mail address: lwt1@cornell.edu (L. Tauer) doi: 10.1016/S0169-5150(03)00041-0 Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Global- ization Inge Kaul, Pedro Conceicao, Katell Le Goulven and Ronald U. Mendoza (Eds.); Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, published for the United Na- tions Development Program, 2003, US$ 39.95, (646 + xxii) pages, ISBN 0195157419 This is a big book about an important subject. Global public goods (GPGs) are a vital component of an increasingly globalized world. Some of the major problems facing society are global in nature, and yet they are not, despite their relevance and relatively clear nature (at least at first), generally well under- stood. Consequently, they tend to be overlooked in consideration of world affairs. To the extent that GPGs are overlooked, it certainly is not the fault of the Development Studies Program of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Headed by Inge Kaul, this group has been, since 1999 with the publication of Global Public Goods: Inter- national Cooperation in the 21st Century (Kaul et al.,