Surgery and the Yamabe invariant

We study the Yamabe invariant of manifolds obtained as connected sums along submanifolds of codimension greater than 2. In particular, given a compact smooth manifold M which does not admit metrics of positive scalar curvature, we prove that the Yamabe invariant of M is an upper bound for the Yamabe invariant of any manifold obtained by performing surgery in M on spheres of codimension greater than 2 .