Paul Streeten's Lectures are to be applauded doubly. They are a worthy tribute to a gifted man. They are also an eloquent testimony to Streeten's own talents and accomplishments, both considerable. Here we have the richness of Streeten's ideas, evidence of an intellectually curious scholar reaching out into several disciplines and successfully blending insights from them and his enormous practical experience in the developing countries into a stimulating work.

How does one select from this menu of ideas, all interesting and worthy of debate? Perhaps I can focus on the central unifying theme which I believe underlies the many things that Streeten says. This, evidently, is the theme of the role of the state. Streeten considers this in relation to both domestic and international aspects of the question.

At the outset, I should note that there is a fundamental symmetry in the way domestic and international issues can be analysed. One can think of the international economy as consisting of interactions between nation states just as the nation state is composed of different domestic agents. This makes for a natural comparative advantage for trade theorists when questions of domestic income distribution are at stake. Since trade theorists quite naturally look at national impacts, positive and normative, their models and methods of analysis provide the natural general-equilibrium tools for analysing domestic income-distributional questions.