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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Development studies
Conventional wisdom has it that government management of the economy is the means to transform a backward economy into a dynamic, modern one. Yet, after decades of international aid programs, development planning is today largely perceived as a failure paralyzed by its own bureaucracy and inefficiency. Despite billions of dollars of investment, development successes are few and far between and waste and mismanagement abounds. This book showcases a diverse range of development experiences in order to ascertain the reasons for this quagmire. Case studies of development planning in China, India, post-WWII Japan, South Korea, Africa, and Eastern Europe, and of foreign aid programs (including the Marshall Plan) illustrate the insights an Austrian approach provides toward an understanding of the failure of government development planning. While economists working within the Austrian tradition have previously addressed development issues, this volume represents the first full-length treatment of the subject from a modern market process perspective. Exploding the hegemony of the traditional development paradigm, The Collapse of Development Planning addresses one of the most pressing issues of international political economy. Contributing to the volume are: George Ayittey (American University), Wayne T. Brough (Citizens for a Sound Economy, Washington, DC), Young Back Choi (St. John's University), Steven Hanke (Johns Hopkins University), Steve Horwitz (St. Lawrence University), Shyam J. Kamath (California State University, Hayward), Shigeto Naka (Hiroshima City University), David Osterfeld (St. Joseph's College), Manisha Perera (University of Northern Colorado), Jan S. Prybyla (Pennsylvania State University), Ralph Raico (State University College, Buffalo), Parth Shah (University of Michigan, Dearborn), Kurt Schuller (Johns Hopkins University), Kiyokazu Tanaka (Sophia University, Tokyo), and Mark Thorton (Auburn University).
This book examines women, money, and political participation in the Middle East and North Africa focusing on women's capacity to engage local political systems. In particular, it considers whether and how this engagement is facilitated through specific types of financial flows from abroad. Arab countries are well-known rentier states, and so a prime destination for foreign aid, worker remittances, and oil-related investment. Alongside other factors these external monies have elicited dramatic shifts in gender-related social norms and expectations both from the state and the domestic population, affording certain women the opportunity to enter the political arena, while leaving others behind. The research presented here expands the discussion of women in rentier political economy and highlights their roles as participants and agents within regional templates for economic development.
This book provides a thorough introduction to and examination of agricultural value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, the authors introduce the economic theory of agri-food value chains and value chain governance, focusing on domestic and regional trade in (and consumption of) food crops in a low-income country context. In addition to mainstream and heterodox thinking about value chain development, the book pays attention to political economy considerations. The book also reviews the empirical evidence on value chain development and performance in Africa. It adopts multiple lenses to examine agricultural value chains, zooming out from the micro level (e.g., relational contracting in a context of market imperfections) to the meso level (e.g., distributional implications of various value chain interventions, inclusion of specific social groups) and the macro level (underlying income, population and urbanization trends, volumes and prices, etc.).Furthermore, this book places value chain development in the context of a process the authors refer to as structural transformation 2.0, which refers to a process where production factors (labor, land and capital) move from low-productivity agriculture to high-productivity agriculture. Finally, throughout the book the authors interpret the evidence in light of three important debates: (i) how competitive are rural factor and product markets, and what does this imply for distribution and innovation? (ii) what role do foreign investment and factor proportions play in the development of agri-food value chains in Africa? (iii) what complementary government policies can help facilitate a process of agricultural value chain transformation, towards high-productive activities and enhancing the capacity of value chains to generate employment opportunities and food security for a growing population.
This edited volume examines the leadership and legacy of Ghana's Jerry John Rawlings within the broader context of Africa's leadership and democratic governance. The central purpose of the book is threefold. First, it examines the role and place of good and effective political leadership in the development of Africa. Second, it situates Jerry Rawlings' political style and legacy in the annals of democratic governance in post-independence Africa. Finally, the book adds to the knowledge and understanding of former President Rawlings as one of Africa's preeminent and transformational political leaders. Taking an interdisciplinary and Pan-African approach, this volume will be of great interest to scholars, policymakers, and students of African politics, African studies, governance, political leadership, democracy, development studies, and political economy.
This timely monograph focuses on India and Brazil's use of compulsory licensing, one of the most significant and controversial TRIPS flexibilities. This is a topical work at this critical time when the COVID-19 has stirred up the debate about compulsory licensing and access to medicines. A closer look into the historical use of compulsory licences in certain countries can offer some takeaways for the current situation. The author studies historical developments and political conditions of the patent system and compulsory licensing from the earliest stage to the modern arena, with a great emphasis on TRIPS. After conducting a cross-national study of India and Brazil, the book moves on to evaluate the different philosophies on compulsory licensing of multilateral organizations such as the EU, the WIPO, the WTO, and NGOs. This important book will strongly appeal to intellectual property students, academics, policymakers, and lawyers practicing in the area. It will also be of interest to academics working in the areas of international law, development, and public health as well as state actors and others with relevant concerns working in multilateral organizations.
This open access edited volume critically examines a coherence building opportunity between Climate Change Adaptation, the Sustainable Development Goals and Disaster Risk Reduction agendas through presenting best practice approaches, and supporting Irish and international case studies. The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted existing global inequalities and demonstrated the scope and scale of cascading socio-ecological impacts. The impacts of climate change on our global communities will likely dwarf the disruption brought on by the pandemic, and moreover, these impacts will be more diffuse and pervasive over a longer timeframe. This edited volume considers opportunities to address global challenges in the context of developing resilience as an integrated development continuum instead of through independent and siloed agendas.
The stated aim of much development assistance is the reduction of poverty. This book examines how development interventions might be more effectively targeted to achieve this aim. Part One provides an overview of planning for poverty reduction, and evidence on the extent and causes of poverty. Part Two examines participatory approaches to development planning. Part Three assesses macro-economic strategies and programs for poverty reduction. Part Four concludes with a microeconomic analysis of the distribution of benefits from investment projects.
Rather than focusing upon advanced countries, where civil society growth is seen as a post-market development, this volume explores developing countries, with case studies examining grassroots developments and experiences. The desirability, efficiency and effectiveness of market institutions as viewed by civil society organizations is addressed in this important collection, which moves the debate from acceptance or criticism of global markets to focus upon the case of rural development where local social relations and economic exchange remain more powerful and relevant than the operation of markets .
What did South African AIDS activists contribute, politically, to early international advocacy for free HIV medicines for the world's poor? Mandisa Mbali demonstrates that South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) gave moral legitimacy to the international movement which enabled it to effectively push for new models of global health diplomacy and governance. The TAC rapidly acquired moral credibility, she argues, because of its leaders' anti-apartheid political backgrounds, its successful human rights-based litigation and its effective popularization of AIDS-related science.The country's arresting democratic transition in 1994 enabled South African activists to form transnational alliances. Its new Constitution provided novel opportunities for legal activism, such as the TAC's advocacy against multinational pharmaceutical companies and the South African government. Mbali's history of the TAC sheds light on its evolution into an influential force for global health justice.
The book reviews globalisation by identifying causes behind the discontent it has produced in recent years. It variously engages in economics, political economy, development and policy discourses to study experiences of countries and institutions in managing and adjusting to globalisation. Extending the analysis to latest global developments, including the remarkable advance of technology and digitalisation, and political and economic upheavals caused by COVID19, the book collects varied academic perspectives and reflects on the present as well as future. Comprising chapters written by distinguished academics and policy experts, the book is a rare collection of cross-disciplinary objective evaluations of globalisation.
In the 21st century, advancements in the digital world are bringing about rapid waves of change in organizational management. As such, it is increasingly imperative to discover ways for businesses to adapt to changes in the markets and seize various digital marketing opportunities. Improving Business Performance Through Innovation in the Digital Economy is an essential reference source for the latest research on the impact of digital computing. It investigates new economic and entrepreneurial approaches to enhancing community development. Featuring research on topics such as business ethics, mobile technology, and cyber security, this book is ideally designed for knowledge workers, business managers, executives, entrepreneurs, small and medium enterprise managers, academicians, researchers, students, and global leaders seeking coverage on the management of sustainable enterprises.
This book summarizes how globalizing capitalism-the economic system now presumed to dominate the global economy-can be understood from a geographical perspective. This is in contrast to mainstream economic analysis, which theorizes globalizing capitalism as a system that is capable of enabling everyone to prosper and every place to achieve economic development. From this perspective, the globalizing capitalism perspective has the capacity to reduce poverty. Poverty's persistence is explained in terms of the dysfunctional attributes of poor people and places. A geographical perspective has two principal aspects: Taking seriously how the spatial organization of capitalism is altered by economic processes and the reciprocal effects of that spatial arrangement on economic development, and examining how economic processes co-evolve with cultural, political, and biophysical processes. From this, globalizing capitalism tends to reproduce social and spatial inequality; poverty's persistence is due to the ways in which wealth creation in some places results in impoverishment elsewhere.
This book covers a wide range of the issues in development studies. Recognizing the existence of manifold challenges in achieving and sustaining economic development, it is divided into four sections-(i) The Macroeconomy: Foreign Trade, Structural Transition and the Environment, (ii) Health and Standard of Living, (iii) Education, Human Capital and Evolution of the Employment Quality in India, and (iv) Banking and Credit: Access, Efficiency and Stability. The book brings together a right mix of senior and young economists who use cutting edge econometric techniques and/ or revisit a perennial question with much sharper focus and tools to unravel insights that are important and will inform tomorrow's theorisation and policy making. The volume looks at important questions like spatial concentration of low infant and child health outcomes, trade liberalisation and export quality, intergenerational occupational mobility, multidimensional poverty incidence in rural India, robustness of the banking sector, to name a few. To do so, the contributions use novel and esoteric methods like machine learning, spatial econometrics, system GMM, quintile regression and counterfactual decomposition (QRCD), and so on. The rich collection holds importance for researchers and policy makers alike, and also for practitioners working in different developmental sectors..
On January 20, 1949 US President Harry S. Truman officially opened the era of development. On that day, over one half of the people of the world were defined as "underdeveloped" and they have stayed that way ever since. This book explains the origins of development and underdevelopment and shows how poorly we understand these two terms. It offers a new vision for development, demystifying the statistics that international organizations use to measure development and introducing the alternative concept of buen vivir: the state of living well. The authors argue that it is possible for everyone on the planet to live well, but only if we learn to live as communities rather than as individuals and to nurture our respective commons. Scholars and students of global development studies are well-aware that development is a difficult concept. This thought-provoking book offers them advice for the future of development studies and hope for the future of humankind.
This book makes an important contribution to the conflict literature and to new ways of thinking about agency and social life in fragile contexts. It does this by engaging with often ignored peace infrastructures. In this book, the contributors highlight different ways in which non-violence is deployed by Africa's youth to navigate difficult violent contexts. Drawing on empirically grounded case studies from the Central African Republic to Zimbabwe, this book explores how similar (or indeed the same) social infrastructures can be deployed for both violence and non-violence and the important factors that drive many youth to take the non[1]violence option even when order appears to collapse around them. The authors also explore how, for instance, systems of organizing survive violent disruptions to the so-called rhythms of everyday life, and, when they do, how they are then repurposed by youth to help them survive violence.
An examination of how small firms in developing countries acquire technological capability, the knowledge and skills required to operate technology effectively, and the ability to adapt it to local conditions. It aims to fill a gap in the established literature on technological capability, which has neglected the small scale sector in spite of the important role it plays in employment generation. The author develops a methodology for a quantitative assessment of the learning process, using case material from the small scale capital goods sector in Pakistan's Punjab Province.
Shallow capital markets are a key bottleneck for private sector development in Latin America. Still, there is not a large literature on capital markets and corporate governance, or on the politics of regulatory reform and business associations, focused on this region. To help address this gap, this new book introduces private equity into the financial development debate through a Latin American lens. The author looks at the cases of Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina. And proposes a shift in the financial development discussion from institutional explanations focused only on rules to an actor-based argument centered on the role of institutional investors, in particular pension funds .
This book looks at a substantively new model of educational philosophy and its application within the field of tertiary education, in relation to socio-economic development in Southeast Asian members of the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC). Focusing on and drawing from the cross-regional South East Asian Cooperation (SEACO), a network promoting regional economic cooperation, the author presents a thoughtful evocation of a new orientation to educational philosophy and policy within the development context in the time of, and relating to, COVID-19. The generalized worldview of Islamic educational and socio-economic development model is laid down in relation to the philosophy of education and an ethical-scientific structure of development in terms of the theory of knowledge (epistemology, episteme). The foundation of scientific thought and a comparative Islamic worldview in understanding the unified reality of 'everything' is presented. The objectivity of socio-scientific learning at all levels of educational development is further explained within the context of SEACO and its think tank vis-a-vis a reconstructive perspective in which the Islamic episteme of the unity of knowledge and its substantive methodology is addressed and unpacked. The book is relevant to policymakers and scholarly researchers in Islamic philosophy and development and higher education in Southeast Asia and in the Muslim world and more broadly for the world of learning.
This bibliographical survey of energy and the development of West Africa contains 774 entries and materials on all but one country of the region. This selectively annotated bibliography covers books, journal articles, conference and seminar proceedings, published and unpublished papers, and official documents. The majority of the materials were published after 1970, but earlier literature is included if important for understanding energy development and West Africa today. Most references are in English, but a few entries appear in French, German, and Russian. Roughly 70 percent of the entries have been annotated. This unique bibliography is intended for broad-interdisciplinary academic and professional use. Entries are grouped under four main sections: 1) developing countries, 2) Africa, continent-wide, 3) West Africa, regional, and 4) individual West Africa countries. Entries are also listed under general sub-headings and in relation to energy sources, such as alcohol, oil and gas, uranium, hydropower, solar, wind, and wood. Author and subject indexes refer to entry numbers.
This book uses qualitative research methods to examine why students in an Indian context are being identified as having learning disabilities on criteria that are largely drawn from the context of the Global North. It explores the push towards English language instruction as a possible factor that affects poor academic outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds who may be first-generation learners or English language learners. The book contrasts the different outcomes and supports for academically struggling students across low-income and middle-income backgrounds, with evidence to suggest that, despite the inclusionary principles of Education For All, this label is creating a marginalized group of students.
This book examines the defence and security challenges facing the
new South Africa in the context of development and nation-building
priorities. The transformation of security policy during the
transition from apartheid and since the April 1994 elections is
examined. Challenges facing the defence force and the police
service are examined and the relationships between defence,
development and domestic and external security are explored in an
integrated way which points to a policy framework for security in
the developing world.
In Poverty from the Wealth of Nations , the author presents an analysis of the evolution of global disparities that goes beyond the earlier neo-Marxist critiques of global capitalism. He moves beyond their narrative by inserting two additional asymmetries into the global economy - those created by 'unequal races' and unequal states. The author analyzes not only the power of markets, but the powers that shaped these markets. More importantly, he marshals cross-country evidence to show that loss of sovereignty retarded industrialization, human capital formation and economic growth.
This book presents a multidimensional perspective on the interlinkage between human development, community characteristics and public service delivery with special reference to India. The chapters in the book analyze the influence of public service delivery on human development from neo-classical as well as Marxian point of view. Thus, the expositions in the book provides a balanced mix of macro and micro approaches in the study of development. The analytical discussions are supplemented by case studies and empirical estimates so as to demonstrate the applicability of the theory and the theoretical discourse about human development, community network and the success and failures of critical public services in the Indian context. The methodology followed in the chapters involves critical survey of existing literature, case studies, field survey and use of econometric techniques as well as statistical tools of index construction. While contributors are primarily scholars from neo-classical economics discipline, some are intellectuals from the field of political economy and development studies. Given the wide array of development perspectives, this book is of interest not only to students and researcher of development economics, social science and management, but also a valuable reading for development practitioners and policy makers, who would be interested in understanding how community and public institutions interact to determine access to health, education and social security services that shapes the wellbeing of disadvantaged populations. The lessons and implications are extremely pertinent to other emerging economies, in particular those in South Asia.
As young people constitute the future development of Cuba, constant analysis of their diverse life experiences is necessary in new and diverse publications by a variety of researchers. This book examines how youth practices intersect with and are influenced by development - economic, human, psychological, social - and how young people negotiate and influence development trends in Cuba. The point of departure for Youth and Development in Cuba is a pluralistic understanding of youth(s) - that is, juventud(es) in Spanish - seen as an active generational subject, influenced sociohistorically, as a kind of collective identity. The collection of chapters from international scholars addresses issues relevant to young people, their experiences and participation in a variety of contexts and explores the diversity of factors that intervene in and shape the current problematiques of young people in Cuba's eastern province of Holguin
Relying on micro-evidence on the repercussions of civil conflicts, this edited book explores theories and policies of post-conflict peacebuilding. Reconsidering existing knowledge on the civil conflict and peacebuilding processes in particular, it empirically presents the relationships between conflict dynamics and citizens' norms, values, and preferences in the post-conflict context. Once it occurs, civil conflict brings enormous suffering on the local society. As a consequence of wartime coercion and violence that tear it apart, citizens come to harbor fear, distrust, and hatred of others, especially of those who are in different sociopolitical groups. This can significantly alter the pre-conflict norms and values of the citizenry and make reconciliation difficult across groups in the aftermath of the conflict. To tackle these problems, post-conflict peacebuilding should be well designed so that it can widely cover and sufficiently deal with conflict-affected citizens. This approach urges us to pay serious attention to the individual-level impact of the conflict process and dynamics. The importance of micro-level analysis does not disregard that of normative and/or macro-level approaches to the development of peacebuilding policies. However, the micro-level approach is better able to capture wartime civil-military relations that largely vary between individuals. The book is aimed at linking academic knowledge with policy development in peacebuilding. To reflect existing policy frameworks in peacebuilding, the implications of micro-evidence-based studies for conflict-affected societies are discussed here. A bottom-up approach pursued throughout this book allows us to elaborate desirable policy schemes for peacebuilding that conform to local contexts. |
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