Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In contrast to the more economically and politically oriented approach in traditional views on sustainable development, the central idea in alternative, more participatory and culturally oriented versions is that there is no universal development model which leads to sustainability at all levels of society and the world. Communication for sustainable social change advocates for an integral, multidimensional and dialectic process that can differ from society to society, community to community, and context to context. This book presents a number of fascinating case studies on the Asian and African perspectives, which asserts the latest challenges in both theoretical and applied areas.

The success of Brazil in the large-scale production and use of fuel ethanol has been widely discussed and analyzed by other countries interested in adopting policies designed to encourage the use of biofuels. Within this context, certain questions arise: Could the Brazilian experience be replicated in other countries? What were the conditions that enabled the creation of the Brazilian Proalcool (National Ethanol Program and what lessons can be learned? To examine these issues, it is important to understand the functioning of the key, interconnected markets (those for sugarcane, sugar and ethanol), which, from their inception, were the objects of extensive government intervention until 1999. Two main conditions enabled the creation of Proalcool: robust production of sugarcane and sugar (tightly regulated by the government, which applied the numerous regulations then in place); and the military regime that was in place at the time, whose decision-making and enforcement powers were quite broad, facilitating the carrying out of the necessary actions, as well as making it easier to coordinate the activities of the various stakeholders and sectors involved. This book increases understanding of the functioning of the sugarcane supply chain in Brazil, not only during the phase of government intervention but also in recent years (in the free-market environment). The lessons, positive and negative, gleaned from the Brazilian experience can contribute to reflection on and the development of alternative modalities of biofuel production in other countries, making the book of interest to scholars and policy-makers concerned with biofuel and renewable resources as well as economic development.

A look at how the low productivity in Latin America and the Caribbean is preventing the region from catching up with the developed world. The authors look beyond the traditional macro explanations and dig all the way down to the industry and firm level to uncover the causes. The book examines productivity growth by focusing on the extreme heterogeneity of sectors and firms, emphasizing the importance of policies that allow firms to thrive and expand. The book zeros in on the critical services sectors, particularly those, such as transportation and retail, with important repercussions on the rest of the economy. It challenges the argument that the region is condemned to stagnation and examines a number of policy levers that can transform its economies.

Since 1957, more than 45 African countries have received aid from China, yet until recently little has been known about the effectiveness or impact of this assistance. Brautigam provides the first authoritative account of China's experience as an aid donor in rural Africa. In a detailed and highly readable analysis, the author draws on anthropology, economics, organization theory and political science to explain how China's domestic agenda shaped the design of its aid, and how domestic politics in African countries influenced its outcome.

As witness to one of the world's great crises in recent times, academics and students, business people, national and international government analysts, policy makers and political leaders worldwide have been pre-occupied by an effort to adequately unravel or sufficiently understand the factors that have brought about the so-called Asian financial, currency or economic crisis and hopefully to find plausible cures or solutions to it. This book examines the impact of economic globalization in developing economies and it applies empirical studies of all of the major countries to theoretical perspectives on the crisis.

The world is seeing a shift in economic power from west to east. Japanese FDI differs from the American example, and this will become crucial. This book tracks trends in Japanese FDI to other Asian countries, suggests future policies, analyzes methodological aspects, and provides an overview of Japanese FDI.

Since the mid-1970s, the tropical savanna, known as Cerrado, has been transformed into one of the world's largest grain-growing regions. This book explores how and by what Brazil achieved inclusive and sustainable growth in the Cerrado.

This book develops a human capital model to explain transformational growth within different stages of economic development, which will induce technological changes and consequently will require a change in human capital. China is a case study in transition and can provide useful lessons to other emerging economies.

Though considerable research literature is now available on China-India relations, most of it still follows a conventional narrative, viewing the relationship through the narrow conflictual prism limited to South Asia than in the new, larger perspective, especially in the context of emerging East Asian dynamics. This book offers comprehensive analyses of some of these issues in papers addressing two broad themes. One, significant trends in the relationship between China and India on a range of issues, including economic development models, their military strategies, and the boundary dispute; and two, how others are responding to the rise of India and China and their impact on East Asia. Together, the chapters constitute a comprehensive study on both China-India relations and their concurrent rise, including a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Written by some of the top experts on the subject from India, China, Japan, and Taiwan and covering a broad range of issues, the book will generate considerable interest in understanding this relatively neglected dimension of today's East Asia.

World hunger is prevalent yet receives relatively less attention compared to poverty. The MDGs have taken a step to address this with the resolution of halving the number of starving people in the world by 2015. Hunger though is not a straightforward problem of producing enough to feed the world's population; it has many cross-cutting dimensions. This volume discusses the significance of human rights approaches to food and the way it relates to gender considerations, addressing links between hunger and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, agricultural productivity and the environment.

The global business area has witnessed a remarkable radical change. The recent spectacular rise of emerging economy multinationals sets numerous questions requiring explanation and understanding. Successes and Challenges of Emerging Economy Multinationals investigates a broad variety of cases presenting clear evidence of fast successful internationalization of emerging economy multinationals originating not only from big economic players such as China, India and Russia but also from other successfully internationalizing emerging countries, namely South Africa and Poland. In terms of size, the firms vary from huge multinational firms such as Huawei, Tata and Gazprom, to really small high technology firms. The in-depth analysis conducted in this book leads to the indication of numerous novel directions for further theoretical expansion and new empirical research.

Economists have come a long way in understanding the economic growth process since Adam Smith. Economic growth research has not only had a great impact on policy making, it has also generated a large and diverse literature. Designed to facilitate teaching and research on economic growth, this book will help the scholar and student to navigate the literature on determinants of economic growth. The book's opening essay highlights the important theories and empirical findings, while the bibliography includes over 1,200 annotated entries. International in scope, the volume covers individual-country studies, cross-country comparative studies, and cross-continent and worldwide research.

With chapters arranged by continent and country, the book enables the reader to quickly find titles of particular interest. Although the focus is on English-language titles, the book includes works in other languages as well. Coverage includes both books and articles. With this book, the reader can navigate through the literature accumulated over 45 years in just a few hours.

Financial (unofficial) dollarization is widely seen as a critical source of financial fragility in both developing and emerging economies. This volume provides a rigorous and balanced perspective on the causes and implications of dollarization, and the basic policies and options to deal with it: the adaptation of the monetary and prudential frameworks, the development of local-currency substitutes, and the scope for limiting dollarization through administrative restrictions.

This 72nd volume in the series discusses such topics as the influence of the environment, the effect of the type of regime, regional case studies, and generalizations.

This book reviews the experience of 14 countries with external liberalization and related policies, based on papers written by national authors following a common 0000oeconomic methodology. The methodology, the papers' main results, and policy implications are summarized in the introductory chapter.
The book reports on a follow-on project to the country studies presented in Lance Taylor (ed.), External Liberalization, Economic Performance, and Social Policy, OUP, 2001. The new project represents a significant extension of the earlier work in that it focuses principally on formerly socialist European economies (Hungary, Poland, Russia), Asian economies (consistently growing China, India, Singapore, and Vietnam; the 1997-98 crisis victims Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand; and cyclically stagnant Philippines and Turkey). Brazil is also included as an important comparator. Macroeconomics has traditionally been less actively pursued in Asia and the transition economies than, say, in Latin America. The 1997-98 crisis awoke the Asians to the importance of macro, and the present book is in part a response to the development.
A distinguishing feature of the book is the common methodology, which focuses on the mechanisms via which effective demand is generated and the interactions of labor productivity, employment growth, and income distribution. The country papers show clearly how trade and capital account liberalization along with changes in the real exchange rate affected demand, productivity, and employment at the country level. They also trace through shifts in the overall income distribution and the incidence of poverty. The authors of the papers bring a wealth of insightinto their thick descriptions a la Clifford Geertz's famous Balinese cockfight about how diverse economies responded to rather similar reform packages and offer lessons about ongoing institutional change. They also suggest policy shifts that may help make economic performance better in the future than it has been in the past.

Contemporary international aid consists of a wide range of various support programs, where the end-result in many cases not only reflects the needs of the recipient country, but also the interests of the donor country. In Science and Politics of Foreign Aid - Swedish Environmental Support to the Baltic States it is shown that this particular support has been directed primarily towards areas of joint concern, such as air pollution and effluents to the Baltic Sea. Environmental problems with primarily local effects have, to a large extent, been neglected in the Swedish support program. The requirement on the Baltic recipient countries to finance a specific fraction of each joint program with local resources has furthermore drained the local national environmental budgets from resources, making it very difficult for these countries to mitigate various local environmental hazards by themselves.

In contrast to many previous foreign aid studies where various donor country biases often are suggested but not empirically validated, this book gives an in-depth view of how a particular support program is influenced by specific and self-interested considerations.

This book addresses how China could avoid the middle-income trap. Professor Li Yining proposed the framework and wrote the first article. Under Li's guidance, other articles were written by researchers at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. It is well known that China's reform has been highly successful, but there are still many unsolved institutional problems. The book's authors suggest that the middle-income trap is composed of three traps. Firstly, there is the "development system trap". Secondly, the "social crisis trap " and finally, the "technology trap". In order to avoid these traps, it is important for China to intensify its economic reform, to lessen the gap between the rich and poor, and to enhance innovations in technology as well as the capital market.This book uses both theoretical and case studies to discuss agricultural modernization, new urbanization, the urban-rural gap, income growth, community management, pastoral areas of medicine and the newly-industrializing economy, etc.

This book provides an overview of recent advances in Integrated Community-Managed Development (ICMD) as an innovative strategy for the community-based development of local institutions in order to achieve lasting poverty reduction and empowerment. The original approach presented here to improving the lives and livelihoods of the poor takes a critical stance on the failing concept of conventional community development, as it is based on the shifting paradigm of 'bottom-up' cooperation and development, where recent regional autonomy policies are enabling national services to successfully integrate with local institutions at the community level. Based on recent experiences in South-East Asia, where the implementation of an alternative approach to integrating financial, medical, educational, communication and socio-cultural services has led to increased community participation and impressive poverty reduction, the book highlights the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of this innovative strategy. The potential offered by applying the newly developed 'ICMD formula' worldwide as a function of themes, principles and services is reflected in the book's diverse range of contributions, written by respected researchers and practitioners in the fields of development economics and financial management.

This volume argues that a renewed commitment to sound macroeconomic policies and structural reforms is needed for countries in South East Europe, or 'the Balkans' achieve to sustainable prosperity, along with enhanced support from the international community. New fiscal and financial architecture has valuable lessons for policymakers in SEE.

As a result of the regional debt crisis, most governments of Latin America in the 1980s entered into a process of profound policy change, from an import substitution oriented strategy to a focus upon export-promotion, with an emphasis upon market liberalization. According to mainstream economic theory, the effect of this shift would be to favour agriculture. This book, with contributors from Latin America and Europe, surveys the results on agriculture of a decade of policy change.

Although the phrase "North-South divide" is not heard so much these days, the core issues which divide rich countries from poor countries in global politics are still very much with us. This path-breaking book offers a new way of thinking about these questions, grounded in the insights of global political economy and an interpretation of contemporary global politics as a contest between competing country development strategies.

."..presents an excellent overview of the study of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and the directions in which it has evolved in recent years...Individually but especially together, the contributors of this volume do a fine job at providing a contextualized and fluid understanding of TEK...I have no hesitation in recommending this volume not only to anyone wishing to catch up on recent developments in TEK research, but also as a useful teaching resource in a range of anthropology courses." JRAI

"This volume succeeds in its purpose to dislodge enduring western notions of TEK traditional environmental knowledge] as static and to firmly center it within an analytical framework of landscape, process, and power...The critical perspectives of the authors of this book would prompt lively discussion in the classroom, and the books grounding in ethnographic detail and applications are of interest to both research academics and practitioners." Ethnobiology Letters

In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK or that incorporating it into development projects will improve the physical, social or economic well-being of marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume argue that to accurately and appropriately describe TEK, the historical and political forces that have shaped it, as well as people's day-to-day engagement with the landscape around them must be taken into account. TEK thus emerges, not as an easily translatable tool for development experts, but as a rich and complex element of contemporary lives that should be defined and managed by indigenous and local peoples themselves.

Serena Heckler received her Ph.D. in ethnobotany, environmental anthropology and sustainable development from Cornell University and is a research fellow at Durham University. She has lived and worked with the Wothiha of the Venezuelan Amazon, studying the ways in which the market economy and demographic change have affected their environmental knowledge. She is currently undertaking participatory research on similar themes with the Shuar of Ecuador, in collaboration with the Intercultural University of Indigenous Peoples and Nations-Amawtay Wasi based in Quito, Ecuador.

This important and timely book is at the forefront of the increasing interest in regional competitiveness in the face of ever stronger global forces. Distinguished contributors discuss issues including the impact and implications of European expansion as well as developments in the Asia-Pacific region. They also examine the driving forces, backgrounds, obstacles and opportunities for regions to become powerful global players. This highly topical book contains a wealth of empirical material and is underpinned by a thorough investigation of the theory and methodology of policy strategies for the positioning of regions in the new global economy. It will be a major source of reference for scholars, policymakers, economic planners and institutions alike in the field of regional science.

Advanced Cultural Districts explores the organisational design issues within the cultural heritage sector, with particular focus on the advanced forms of cultural districts for local socio-economic development.

Financial statecraft' goes beyond sanctions against rogue states. The aims of financial statecraft may be defensive or offensive, its targets bilateral or systemic, and its instruments financial or monetary. Regions and countries profiled include Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan.