In this modern study of the causes of nationalization, experts in British industrial history analyze the public ownership debates, and explain how many well-informed and moderate groups came to believe that the public ownership of certain major industries would be economically beneficial. During Attlee's Labour governments of 1945-51, a number of important industries, including coal, electricity, the railways and gas were taken into public ownership, and legislation was passed for the nationalization of the steel industry. It was then argued that nationalization would lead to an improvement in the efficiency of these key sectors, on which the rest of British industry depended for inputs. Today, such a policy would be almost unthinkable. This study examines the historical issues and uses detailed case studies of industries to explore the public ownership debate.

Chen provides an analysis of the political economy of rural development in China during the reform era. Revolving around the central theme of statecraft, Chen's study gives a concise and comprehensive treatment of the interaction of ideology and politics with central policy and economic growth. He examines China's economic reform in historical perspective, characterizes China's economic and political transformation since the reform, and proposes that the Chinese Communist Party is being transformed into a party of economics while China's ideology is becoming market-oriented communal socialism.

In addressing the issue of the Chinese path of development, Chen discusses the role of local party organizations in China's modernization drive and the microform of market-oriented communal socialism in the newly emerged village conglomerate, highlights the challenges that China faces at the turn of the new century after 20 years of economic reform, and analyzes the context of the introduction of village elections in 1990, and the establishment of Deng Xiaoping's Theory as a new ideological discourse at the 15th National Congress as well as the rationale behind them. In examining the connection between the two goals of statecraft --improving people's welfare and strengthening the state--and between central policies and local initiatives, Chen provides a study that will be of great interest to scholars, students, and other researchers involved with contemporary Chinese politics and development.

The growth of China's foreign trade in recent years has been widely attributed to its economic reforms and open door policies. This book outlines the process of China's trade reforms over the past two decades and assesses the impact of these reforms on the economy. The author provides a quantitative analysis to trace China's evolving commodity pattern of trade and changing comparative advantage structure over the entire reform period. Comparison is made between the trade patterns and comparative advantage to reveal the dynamic effects of the recent economic reform on resource allocation efficiency.

This influential volume, which has been revised and updated for the twenty-first century, includes both new material and more detailed expositions of existing arguments. Although so-called 'real' theories of business cycles and growth are prevalent in contemporary mainstream economics, Controversies in Monetary Economics suggests that those economists who have instinctively focused on monetary factors in explaining macroeconomic behaviour are more genuinely 'realistic'. The author combines an explanation of past and present monetary controversy with practical proposals for the conduct of monetary policy in the contemporary global economy. Several alternative approaches are discussed, ranging from the traditional quantity theory to post Keynesian theories of endogenous money. This insightful book will be of interest to all those concerned with monetary economics and macroeconomics, including academic researchers, graduate and senior undergraduate students - particularly those looking for an alternative to current economic orthodoxy - and historians of economic thought. Practitioners in central banks, international financial institutions, the financial markets and finance ministries will also find this work invaluable.

This volume explores Japan's industrialization from the perspective of "indigenous development", focusing on what may be identified as "traditional" or "indigenous" factors. Japanese industrialization has often been described as the process of transferring or importing technology and organization from Western countries. Recent research has, however, shown that economic development had already begun in pre-modern period (Tokugawa-era) in Japan. This economic development not only prepared Japan for the transfer from the West, but also formed the basis of the particular industrialization process which paralleled transplanted industrialization in modern Japan. The aim of the volume is to demonstrate this aspect of industrialization through the detailed studies of so-called "indigenous" industries. This collection of papers looks at the industries originating in the Tokugawa-era, such as weaving, silk-reeling and pottery, as well as the newly developed small workshops engaged in manufacturing machinery, soap, brash, buttons, etc. Small businesses in the tertiary sector, transportation and commerce, are also observed. Available for the first time in English, these papers shed new light on the role of "indigenous development" and our understanding of the dualistic character of Japan's economic development.

As the most important figures in the history of economics, the work of John Maynard Keynes is nearly without precedent in the history of economics. THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE, first published in 1919, achieved great notoriety due of its contemptuous critique of the French premier as well as President Woodrow Wilson. Keynes criticized the Allied victors for signing the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, which would have ruinous consequences for Europe. At the time, few world and economic leaders appreciated his criticisms as Keynes saw his worst fears realized in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the resulting devastation of World War II. JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (1883-1946) was born into an academic family. His father, John Nevile Keynes, was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge where he taught logic and political economy while his son was educated at Eton and Cambridge. Most importantly, Keynes revolutionized economics with his classic book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This work is generally regarded as perhaps the most influential social science treatise of the 20th Century, as it quickly and permanently changed the scope of economic thought. Interestingly, Keynes was a central member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of upper-class Edwardian aesthetes that served as his life outside of economics, which included Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey.

Money is more than just a medium of financial exchange: across time and place, it has performed all sorts of cultural, political, and social functions. This volume traces money in German-speaking Europe from the late Renaissance until the close of the twentieth century, exploring how people have used it and endowed it with multiple meanings. The fascinating studies gathered here collectively demonstrate money's vast symbolic and practical significance, from its place in debates about religion and the natural world to its central role in statecraft and the formation of national identity.

Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say I am strong.-Joel 3:10

Beating Plowshares into Swords inaugurates an extraordinarily ambitious effort by Paul Koistinen to compose a comprehensive and wide-ranging study on the economics of American warfare from the colonial period to the present. When completed, this multi-volume project will stand as the definitive work on a complex subject that until now has been superficially treated or completely ignored.

Koistinen focuses not upon battlefields and battles but upon the means used to make and sustain the armies and navies that have fought in such horrific arenas. Drawing upon a vast array of sources in a number of diverse fields, he analyzes how America has mobilized itself for the conduct of war. He argues that to fully understand that process we must closely examine the complex interrelations among economic, political, and military institutions within the context of relentless modernization and technological innovation.

In this first volume, Koistinen describes how an undeveloped "preindustrial" economy forced Americans to fight defensive wars of attrition like the Revolution and the War of 1812. By the time of the Mexican War, however, a gradually maturing economy allowed the U.S. to use a much more offensive-minded strategy to achieve its goals. The book concludes with an exhaustive examination of the Civil War, a conflict that both anticipated and differed from the total wars of the industrialized era. Koistinen demonstrates that the North relied upon its enormous economic might to overwhelm the Confederacy through a strategy of annihilation, while the South bungled its own strategy of attrition by failing to mobilize effectively a much less-developed economy.

With this and subsequent volumes, Koistinen's sweeping synthesis provides a panoramic view that enlarges and in significant ways alters our vision of the turbulent relationship between war and society in America.

This is the first full account of the evolution of the government of London from the tempestuous days of the Commune in the late twelfth century to the calmer waters of Tudor England. Caroline Barron shows how the elected rulers of London developed ways of dealing with both demanding monarchs and quarrelsome city inhabitants. The remarkable survival of the city's own records makes it possible to trace, in unexpected detail, the inner workings of civic politics and government over three hundred years.

This book provides a historical background of the American business cycle, challenges the validity of conventional Keynesian ideology, and presents a bold, alternative theory of how production leads to wealth in our modern economy. The United States is mired in the aftermath of booming economic prosperity, resembling the trouble recently experienced by the Japanese economy due partially to similar Keynesian bailouts and subsidies. Now more than two years into the current financial crisis, Americans are starting to wonder if we can ever escape the consequences of past mistakes. If our "recovery" plan continues along the previous paths that generated economic bubbles and unemployment, then we are destined for failure. Destined for Failure: American Prosperity in the Age of Bailouts provides a conceptual framework previously available only to those with formal university training. It explains the effects of government regulation, political interference in the housing and job markets, misallocation of resources in health and education, moral hazard, environmental constraints, and excessive taxation. The authors provide insight into their view of Keynesian economics as an outdated, detrimental ideology, and take the Bush and Obama administrations to task for budget deficits and cronyistic subsidies and bailouts. The senior author is a distinguished economist who supplemented his in-depth knowledge with contributions from two of his brightest undergraduate students Seven graphical representations and three data tables highlight key information Index provides the reader with easy access to specific topics throughout the text More than 20 case studies apply the general theory of the book to real-world examples, each concluding with specific policy proposals

E.A. Wrigley, the leading historian of industrial England, exposes the inadequacy of what was once accepted wisdom regarding England's industrial revolution and suggests what he believes should replace it. He examines the issues from three viewpoints: economic growth; the transformation of the urban-rural balance; and demographic change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, he shows why England's early modern economy and society grew faster and more dynamically than its continental neighbors.

This book theoretically and empirically investigates the emergence of strong money demand in wartime Japan (1937-1945), its disappearance after the end of the war (1945-1949), and the reemergence of strong money demand in contemporary Japan (from 1995 to the present) in terms of the effects on fiscal activities and the price level. An augmented fiscal/monetary theory of the price level is constructed from a close examination of the strong money demand present in these periods. Then, profoundly puzzling phenomena such as mild deflation despite monetary expansion, low long-term interest rates despite fiscal unsustainability, and weak aggregate demand despite near-zero rates of interest, all of which are actually being observed in contemporary Japan, can now be interpreted in line with the above augmented theory. In the present, strong money demand at near-zero rates endows the Japanese government with maximum fiscal flexibility. However, if it disappeared for some reason, prices would surge to the quantity theory of money level, and fiscal sustainability would have to be restored. In the future, alternative currency units issued by private banks might carry out a purge of such strong demand for the yen.

Charles MacKay's groundbreaking examination of a staggering variety of popular delusions, crazes and mass follies is presented here in full with no abridgements. The text concentrates on a wide variety of phenomena which had occurred over the centuries prior to this book's publication in 1841. Mackay begins by examining economic bubbles, such as the infamous Tulipomania, wherein Dutch tulips rocketed in value amid claims they could be substituted for actual currency. As we progress further, the scope of the book broadens into several more exotic fields of mass self-deception. Mackay turns his attention to the witch hunts of the 17th and 18th centuries, the practice of alchemy, the phenomena of haunted houses, the vast and varied practices of fortune telling and the search for the philosopher's stone, to name but a handful of subjects. Today, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds is distinguished as an expansive, well-researched and somewhat eccentric work of social history.

As today's world develops and evolves, so does its economics. New economic approaches have begun to emerge, but traditional methods are still being implemented. As both systems provide different solutions to society's economic issues, thoughtful research and analysis is required regarding the tactics and strategies that both theories utilize. Comparative Approaches to Old and New Institutional Economics is an essential reference source that discusses the sequential history of these two economic theories as well as their application to global fiscal disputes. Featuring research on topics such as international relations, business management, and institutionalism, this book is ideally designed for economists, analysts, managers, researchers, practitioners, academicians, and students seeking coverage on the parallel methods of these economic philosophies.

This book explores Austrian capital theory and Austrian business theory from the perspective of modern economics. Sustainable change within the production structure is examined in relation to time preference, the Boehm-Bawerkian theory of capital and interest, and the Hayek Triangle. In turn, the impact of monetary shocks and boom-bust cycles is detailed, with a particular focus on the Ricardo Effect, dynamics of money supply, and the natural rate of interest. This book aims to present a new framework for Austrian economics that will make these ideas applicable to both mainstream economic models and modern economists. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in the history of economic thought and the political economy.

The untold story of the mysterious company that shook the world.

On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.

In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire—one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting. Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed, and national glory that Huawei helped to build—and that has also ensnared it.

This edited collection examines the evolution of regional inequality in Latin America in the long run. The authors support the hypothesis that the current regional disparities are principally the result of a long and complex process in which historical, geographical, economic, institutional, and political factors have all worked together. Lessons from the past can aid current debates on regional inequalities, territorial cohesion, and public policies in developing and also developed countries. In contrast with European countries, Latin American economies largely specialized in commodity exports, showed high levels of urbanization and high transports costs (both domestic and international). This new research provides a new perspective on the economic history of Latin American regions and offers new insights on how such forces interact in peripheral countries. In that sense, natural resources, differences in climatic conditions, industrial backwardness and low population density areas leads us to a new set of questions and tentative answers. This book brings together a group of leading American and European economic historians in order to build a new set of data on historical regional GDPs for nine Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. This transnational perspective on Latin American economic development process is of interest to researchers, students and policy makers.

This second part of a two-volume series examines in detail the financing of America's major wars from the Spanish-American War to the Vietnam War. It interweaves analyses of political policy, military strategy and operations, and war finance and economic mobilization with examinations of the events of America's major armed conflicts, offering useful case studies for students of military history and spending policy, policymakers, military comptrollers, and officers in training.

Business Cycles in Economic Thought underlines how, over the time span of two centuries, economic thought interacted with cycles in a continuous renewal of theories and rethinking of policies, whilst economic actions embedded themselves into past economic thought. This book argues that studying crises and periods of growth in different European countries will help to understand how different national, political and cultural traditions influenced the complex interaction of economic cycles and economic theorizing. The editors of this great volume bring together expert contributors consisting of economists, historians of economic thought and historians of economics, to analyse crises and theories of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This is alongside a comprehensive outlook on the most relevant advances of economic theory in France, Germany and Italy, as well as coverage of non-European countries, such as the United States. Several of the highly prestigious Villa Vigoni Trilateral Conferences formed the background for the discussions in this book. This volume is of great interest to students and academics who study history of economic thought, political economy and macroeconomics.

Wages have always been a major expense for businesses. This fascinating book studies the impact of spiralling wage demands in a cotton factory in Ghent during the 19th century and the efforts of management to reduce this cost through investment in new technology and stricter employment policies. The workers' responses to wage cutting are also considered.
The importance of this study lies in its unique collection of wage data -- more than 200 pay books and 100 ledgers from the Voortman cotton factory -- which show, in great detail, the hourly, daily and yearly wages for all categories of workers between 1835-1913. Various aspects of wages are addressed including: changing living and working conditions; wages of women and children in relation to the 'family wage economy'; wage comparison between workers at Voortman and workers in other industries and regions; productivity, purchasing power and industrial relations.

Property Rights in Land widens our understanding of property rights by looking through the lenses of social history and sociology, discussing mainstream theory of new institutional economics and the derived grand narrative of economic development. As neo-institutional development theory has become a narrative in global history and political economy, the problem of promoting global development has arisen from creating the conditions for 'good' institutions to take root in the global economy and in developing societies. Written by a collection of expert authors, the chapters delve into social processes through which property relations became institutionalized and were used in social action for the appropriation of resources and rent. This was in order to gain a better understanding of the social processes intervening between the institutionalized 'rules of the game' and their economic and social outcomes. This collection of essays is of great interest to those who study economic history, historical sociology and economic sociology, as well as Agrarian and rural history.

At a time of persistent national strife on a worldwide scale, this book addresses the inadequately covered subject of the reciprocal relationships between nationalism, nation and state-building, and economic change. The exploration of the economic element in the building of nations and states cannot be confined to Europe; therefore, the diverse yet interlinked case studies in this volume cover all continents.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

aI am not aware of a book that covers the same ground as this one--let alone one that does so using such thorough research and with such technical competence.a
Anthony M. Gould, Universite Laval

"Jacobs offers a history of the federal government's efforts to curb labor racketeering. The heart of his text focuses on the results achieved by employing Civil RICO suits to weed out organized crime from unions long mired in corruption. The Justice Department has mounted twenty such efforts since 1982, and Jacobs's book is the first to provide a comprehensive assessment of this controversial tactic. He tackles this ambitious project with a combination of detailed research, clear writing, and judicious consideration, all of which have been a hallmark of his previous texts on corruption and organized crime. The result is a must read book for anyone interested in the problem of union corruption and what to do about it."
--"Industrial and Labor Relations Review"

"Jacobs, legal scholar and expert on the Mafia, sets out to show how the Mob has distorted American labor history, explaining the relationship between organized crime and organized labor, as well as recent federal efforts to clean up unions"
--"Booklist"

"James Jacobs, a New York University law professor and author of Mobsters, Unions and Feds, says Mafiosi were hired by union organizers in the early twentieth century to combat company toughs. Now, he says, they specialize in 'selling the rights of workers.'"
--"USA Today"

"Jacobs further burnishes his reputation for advancing the study of organized crime in America with his latest work of scholarship, billed by the publisher as 'the only book to investigate how the mob has distorted American labor history.' This worthy successor to "Gotham Unbound" and "Busting the Mob" is an exhaustive, albeit sometimes repetitive, survey of the grip La Cosa Nostra has exerted on the country's most powerful unions. While many will be familiar with the broad outlines of the corruption that riddled the Teamsters, which is recounted by the author, his summary of some lesser-known examples of pervasive labor corruption help illustrate his thesis that the entire American union movement has suffered from the intimidation and fear the mob used to gain and maintain control of unions. Especially valuable is Jacobs's examination of the relatively recent use of the RICO law to bring dirty unions under the control of a federally appointed independent trustee, and the book's posing of hard questions about the mixed success those monitorships have had."
--"Publishers Weekly"

"Jacobs has covered a wide range of legal issues, including such hot-button topics as hate crime laws and gun control, but he always returns to the world of mobsters and the men and women who investigate, prosecute, and sentence them."
--"NYU Today"

"James Jacobs brilliantly documents and analyzes a remarkable and untold chapter in the history of American law enforcement. This groundbreaking book should be a starting point for officials around the world who confront powerful organized crime groups."
--Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York and former Director, National Institute of Justice

"A pathbreaking work. For 50 years, organized crime has been the elephant inorganized labor's living room, unacknowledged and unexplained. Jacobs has critically analyzed every facet of this apparently intractable problem--from its roots to the federal government's various efforts to challenge organized crime's influence. From this point forward, no one can think critically about this problem without relying on Jacobs' work."
--Robert Luskin, General Executive Board Attorney, Laborers' International Union of North America

"Jacobs presents a near encyclopedic account of the Mafia's infiltration, control and exploitation of four major national unions and a number of large local unions. It is a sordid frightening story of violence, corruption and oppression, the betrayal of union members and extortion of employers, defiance of the law and disregard for human decency. This disturbing story should be required reading for all who seek strong and more democratic unions, all who would protect the rights of workers, and all who are concerned for the health of our political and social processes."
--Clyde Summers, Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania Law School

"A fabulous and fascinating book. Jacobs demonstrates the continuing impact of organized crime on the American union movement, and details the legal mechanisms developed in recent years to combat mob influence. History has come home to haunt us, and Jacobs makes the case for using law to fight against the mob for union democracy."
--Stanley N. Katz, Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

"Jacobs demonstrates that while it has been remarkably difficult to defeat labor racketeering, much has been achieved. This will be welcomenews to all who root for the revitalization of the labor movement."
--Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, Cornell University

Nowhere in the world has organized crime infiltrated the labor movement as effectively as in the United States. Yet the government, the AFL-CIO, and the civil liberties community all but ignored the situation for most of the twentieth century. Since 1975, however, the FBI, Department of Justice, and the federal judiciary have relentlessly battled against labor racketeering, even in some of the nation's most powerful unions.

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the first book to document organized crime's exploitation of organized labor and the massive federal clean-up effort. A renown criminologist who for twenty years has been assessing the government's attack on the Mafia, James B. Jacobs explains how Cosa Nostra families first gained a foothold in the labor movement, then consolidated their power through patronage, fraud, and violence and finally used this power to become part of the political and economic power structure of 20th century urban America.

Since FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, federal law enforcement has aggressively investigated and prosecuted labor racketeers, as well as utilized the civil remedies provided for by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute to impose long-term court-supervised remedial trusteeships on mobbed-up unions. There have been some impressive victories, including substantial progress toward liberating the four most racketeer-ridden national unions from the grip of organized crime, but victory cannot yet be claimed.

The only book to investigate how the mob has exploited the American labor movement, Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the most comprehensive study to date of how labor racketeering evolved and how the government has finally resolved to eradicate it.

This book illustrates the role of international economic advisors in the development of Israel's economic policies. Based on extensive archival and historical research, it presents case studies on the policy impacts of the world-renowned advisors Michal Kalecki, Abba Lerner, Richard Kahn, Milton Friedman, Herbert Stein and Stanley Fischer. The authors evaluate the contributions of these advisors to policy developments in various fields, including international trade and capital flows, exchange rates, fiscal and monetary policy, industrial policy and labor relations. Readers will discover a wealth of previously unpublished information on these advisors' activities, perspectives on policy and interactions with policymakers and the public. Using the Israeli experience as a guide, the authors subsequently derive general hypotheses regarding the conditions that are conducive to the success of economic advisors.