This book explores the development of state welfare in Taiwan, focusing on the interconnection between capitalist development and state welfare from 1895 to 1990, using an integrated Marxist perspective to which the capitalist world system, state structure, ideology, and social structure are considered simultaneously. It argues that neither citizenship nor welfare needs were the concern of Taiwanese social policies. A decline in legitimacy and risen social movements forced the state to expand welfare, namely the National Health Insurance, in the 1980s.

This book explores the role of national fiscal policies in a selected group of Euro-area countries under the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, the authors characterize the response of output to fiscal consolidations and expansions in the small Euro-area open economies affected by high public and private debt. It is shown that the macroeconomic outcome of fiscal shocks is strongly related to debt levels. The Euro-area countries included in the investigation are Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, over the sample period 1999-2016, i.e., the EMU period. The main econometric tools used in this research are structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models, including panel VAR models. The available literature relating to the subject is also fully reviewed. A further closely investigated topic is the potential spillover effects of German fiscal policies on the selected small Euro-area economies. Moreover, in the perspective of the evolution of the Euro Area towards a full Monetary and Fiscal Union, the authors study the effects of area-wide government spending shocks on aggregate output and other macroeconomic variables during the EMU period. The closing chapter of the book considers evidence on the consequences of austerity policies for European labour markets during recent years.

This informative research review discusses the most prominent papers within the economics of structural change and growth. This piece focuses on research that investigates the causes and consequences of structural change with either theoretical or calibrated models, mindfully referring to some of the most celebrated literature over the last two decades. The research review analyses literature covering the impact structural change has on an array of economic factors including convergence, per capita income and spatial development. Prefaced by an original introduction from the editors, this collection would be well suited to scholars and macro-development economists wishing to extend their knowledge of this compelling topic.

With real case stories, Wells and Ahmed bring to life both the hopes for and the failures of international guarantees of property rights for investors in the developing world. Their cases focus on infrastructure projects, but the lessons apply equally to many other investments. In the 1990's inexperienced firms from rich countries jumped directly into huge projects in some of the world's least developed countries. Their investments reflected almost unbridled enthusiasm for emerging markets and trust in new international guarantees. Yet within a few years the business pages of the world press were reporting an exploding number of serious disputes between foreign investors and governments. As the expected bonanzas proved elusive and the protections weaker than anticipated, many foreign investors became disenchanted with emerging markets. So bad were the outcomes in some cases that a few notable infrastructure firms came close to bankruptcy; several others hurriedly fled poor countries as projects soured.
In this book, Louis Wells and Rafiq Ahmed show why disputes developed, point out how investments and disputes have changed over time, explore why various firms responded differently to crises, and question the basic wisdom of some of the enthusiasm for privatization. The authors tell how firms, countries, and multilateral development organizations can build a conflict-management system that balances the legitimate economic and social concerns of the host countries and those of investors. Without these changes, multinational corporations will lose profitable opportunities and poor countries will not gain the contributions that foreign investment can make toward alleviating poverty.

Based on long-term research, this book comprehensively and systematically discusses the industrialization process in China, analyzing the level, characteristics, achievements and experiences as well as the problems faced. It also provides answers to important questions related to economic development and the industrialization process in China, such as what level of industrialization China has achieved and whether China can become an industrialized country. Lastly, it offers an explanation of China's economic development from the perspective of industrialization.

This volume fills an important gap in the existing economic literature. While much has been written about Japan's pre-1990s institutions and economic performance, this text is unique in its forward-looking orientation - trying to understand not only the institutional and structural changes that have already reshaped Japan in the 1990s, but to identify the critical trends and institutional changes that will mould Japan's new economy over the next decade.

This book explores the economic and social development of the Western Balkan region, a group of six countries that are potential candidates for EU membership. It focuses on the key economic issues facing these countries, including the challenge of promoting economic growth, limiting public deficits and debt, and fostering international trade relations. Given the severe impact of the recent economic crisis on social welfare in the region, it also investigates the nature and extent of social exclusion, a factor likely to produce future political instabilities if not effectively addressed by a return to sustainable economic growth. The contributions explore these issues in light of the major influence of EU policy instruments and advice, which are currently guiding the economies along an accession trajectory to future EU membership.

Dynamic Systems in Management Science explores the important gaps in the existing literature on operations research and management science by providing new and operational methods which are tested in practical environment and a variety of new applications.

This book examines EU Eastern Partnership taking into account geopolitical challenges of EU integration. It highlights reasons for limited success, such as systematic conflict of EU External Action. In addition, the book analyses country-specific issues and discusses EaP influence on them, investigating political, economic and social factors, while seeking for potential solutions to existing problems. The reluctance of the Eastern countries to the European reforms should not reduce political pro-activeness of the EU. The authors suggest that EaP strategies should be reviewed to be more reciprocal and not based solely on the EU-laden agenda. This book is one of the good examples of cooperation between scholars not only from EaP and EU countries, but also from different disciplines, bringing diversity to the discussion process.

A provocative analysis of how government presence in the workplace has caused diminishing profits for American businesses and has led to increased levels of unemployment. As more and more workers are being placed on unemployment, the need for bold and immediate action is necessary. Sinas lays out a viable solution to our unemployment crisis, and takes the government to task for its increasingly destructive intervention in the workplace.

Since graduating from Michigan State University with a Master's Degree in Labor and Industrial Relations, he has directed human resources departments in both union and non-union environments, with complete HR management responsibilities for domestic and foreign operations. He currently directs the human resources consulting services for The PR Companies, which own and operate businesses involved in human resources outsourcing, recruiting, staffing, and business coaching.

Sinas provides hundreds of clients with solutions to their human resources issues and guides them through the myriad of employment laws and regulations. He has conducted extensive training in the areas of employment law; regulatory compliance; performance management; effective supervision; and employee recruitment. He has been the keynote speaker at various trade associations, industry groups, client companies, Chambers of Commerce and human resource seminars.

At the beginning of the 21st century, in Japan and most of the continental European economies, we can observe a shift from what has been labelled a "corporatist" system to more market-oriented structures. Regulatory competition caused by the globalization of markets is increasingly placing the traditional legal institutions of these jurisdictions under severe strain. This is especially true for the services markets. Of these, the markets for financial services and telecommunications services have to adapt most urgently. These adaptations are already underway to varying extents and degrees, made possible by a mixture of de-regulation and re-regulation. In this volume, scholars from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Japan as well as practitioners from various institutions lay out the theoretical foundations and means for these developments. Through critical analysis, the various contributions show what has been reached so far in Europe and Japan and what remains to be achieved in the future.

Large multinational corporations shape our lives to an enormous extent. How is the growth, power, and significance of big business to be explained and understood? Focusing on the issues of ownership, control, and class formation, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes explores the implications of changes in the nature of big business, which affect both the businesses themselves, and the economic and political milieu in which these multinationals operate. Up-to-date empirical evidence is reviewed in a wide-ranging comparative framework that covers Britain and the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and many other societies, including emerging forms of capitalism in China and Russia. Unlike other specialist texts in the area, Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes relates its concerns to issues of social stratification and class structure. The first and second editions of the book (under the title Corportations, Classes and Capitalism) were enthusiastically received, and the present edition reviews new theoretical ideas and empirical evidence that has emerged in the ten years since the second edition appeared. The text has been completely re-written and re-structured, and it relates its concerns to contemporary debates over `disorganized capitalism' and post-industrialism.

In How Language Informs Mathematics Dirk Damsma shows how Hegel's and Marx's systematic dialectical analysis of mathematical and economic language helps us understand the structure and nature of mathematical and capitalist systems. More importantly, Damsma shows how knowledge of the latter can inform model assumptions and help improve models. His book provides a blueprint for an approach to economic model building that does away with arbitrarily chosen assumptions and is sensitive to the institutional structures of capitalism. In light of the failure of mainstream economics to understand systemic failures like the financial crisis and given the arbitrary character of most assumptions in mainstream models, such an approach is desperately needed.

This edited volume focuses on specific, crucially important structural measures that foster corporate change, namely cross-border mergers. Such cross-border transactions play a key role in business reality, economic theory and corporate, financial and capital markets law. Since the adoption of the Cross-border Mergers Directive, these mergers have been regulated by specific legal provisions in EU member states. This book analyzes various aspects of the directive, closely examining this harmonized area of EU company law and critically evaluating cross-border mergers as a method of corporate restructuring in order to gain insights into their fundamental mechanisms. It comprehensively discusses the practicalities of EU harmonization of cross-border mergers, linking it to corporate restructuring in general, while also taking the transposition of the directive into account. Exploring specific angles of the Cross-border Mergers Directive in the light of European and national company law, the book is divided into three sections: the first section focuses on EU and comparative aspects of the Cross-border Mergers Directive, while the second examines the interaction of the directive with other areas of law (capital markets law, competition law, employment law, tax law, civil procedure). Lastly, the third section describes the various member states' experiences of implementing the Cross-border Mergers Directive.

One of the primary functions of law is to ensure that the legal structure governing all social relations is predictable, coherent, consistent and applicable. Taken together, these characteristics of law are referred to as legal certainty. In traditional approaches to legal certainty, law is regarded as a hierarchical system of rules characterized by stability, clarity, uniformity, calculable enforcement, publicity and predictability. However, the current reality is that national legal systems no longer operate in isolation, but within a multilevel legal order, wherein norms created at both the international and regional level are directly applicable to national legal systems. Also, norm creation is no longer the exclusive prerogative of public officials of the state: private actors have an increasing influence on norm creation as well. Social scientists have referred to this phenomenon of interacting and overlapping competences as multilevel governance. Only recently have legal scholars focused attention on the increasing interconnectedness (and therefore the concomitant loss of primacy of national legal orders) between the global, European and national regulatory spheres through the concept of multilevel regulation.

In this project the author uses multilevel regulation as a term to characterize a regulatory space in which the process of rule making, rule enforcement and rule adjudication (the regulatory lifecycle) is dispersed across more than one administrative or territorial level and amongst several different actors, both public and private. The author draws on the concept of a regulatory space, using it as a framing device to differentiate between specific aspects of policy fields. The relationship between actors in such a space is non-hierarchical and they may be independent of each other. The lack of central ordering of the regulatory lifecycle within this regulatory space is the most important feature of such a space. The implications of multilevel regulation for the notion of legal certainty have attracted limited attention from scholars and the demand for legal certainty in regulatory practice is still a puzzle. The book explores the idea of legal certainty in terms of the perceptions and expectations of regulatees in the context of medical products - specifically, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, which can be differentiated as two regulatory spaces and therefore form two case studies. As an exploratory project, the book necessarily explores new territory in terms of investigating legal certainty first in terms of regulatee perceptions and expectations and second, because it studies it in the context of multilevel regulation.

Help the world bridge the digital divide by learning an easy-to-use method that allows everyone to enjoy the benefits of the Internet using just a phone and their voice. Computer and technology expert Emdad Khan pinpoints the factors that affect the use of technology, including the language divide. While the English-speaking world dominates the Internet, it's possible for all people to reap its benefits using just their voice in their native language. The Voice Internet ushers in a new era of access to technology. It eliminates the need to learn a new language, is affordable, and overcomes problems associated with many devices, such as needing to use a small keypad and screen. Get ready to learn how Voice Internet technology rides on existing infrastructure; how to take further steps to harness the benefits of the Internet; and how this technology can positively affect economies and cultures. If you are a decision maker, governmental policy maker, teacher, entrepreneur, philanthropist, or someone concerned with helping humanity enjoy access to the Internet, then this guidebook provides you with the knowledge to take action. Bridge the gaps that limit the usage of technology and open up the "Internet for Everyone."

This book explores the changing socio-economic and technological landscape of the 21 century and what it means. It adopts an industrial economic approach, whilst proposing a road map leading to the adoption of a 'societal market economy' model as an appealing and politically acceptable third-way between capitalism and socialism.

Agent-based models are tools that provide researchers in economic fields with unprecedented analytical capabilities. This book describes the power of agent-based models along their methodology, and it provides several examples of applications spanning from public policy evaluation to financial markets.

Transforming Management in Central and Eastern Europe analyses changes in enterprises in seven European countries since 1989 - Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovakia. Economic trends have differed vastly between these countries, but nevertheless, there are common objectives, common problems, and significant similarities in developments. This book shows the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the Socialist and the post-Socialist periods. It argues that Central and Eastern European countries are developing a distinctive, hybrid form of post-Socialist economic system, largely dominated by enterprise managers in alliance with state administrations-politicized managerial capitalism. Privatization has not transformed management practices, competition has.

A number of developing countries, including small island states have common problems that have affected their development and growth. Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives can be used to address some of these issues, but these developing countries need to understand what is needed to implement them, in order to improve economic conditions. While many of these countries have access to technologies that can be used to assist in knowledge management, relevant and low cost KM initiatives need to be considered in improving their existing KM processes. Sectors critical to the growth of these developing countries include health care, crime management, disaster recovery management, small and medium size enterprise development. Knowledge Management for Development: Domains, Strategies and Technologies for Developing Countries highlights the opportunities in these sectors and provides advice as to how these countries should go about understanding, building and adopting the relevant KM strategies and technologies. This book identifies appropriate technologies which should be considered to increase productivity within the identified sectors in the developing countries and also sectors in where knowledge management initiatives can yield maximum value. It also considers the constraints of these territories, recommending appropriate technologies and strategies for KM initiatives. It provides advice on how these technologies should be adopted in these sectors of developing countries. Investing in these strategies should benefit these countries development and growth.