This book analyses the ongoing reform of the European economic union in the light of the new objective of 'stability of the euro area as a whole' in Article 136(3) TFEU. On the basis of the relevant legal sources, it qualifies this objective as the obligation to preserve the existence of the monetary union, the establishment of which was an EU goal laid down in Article 3(4) TEU. While to date the objective has been achieved through fiscal and macroeconomic consolidation in the member states and the activation of stabilisation mechanisms in cases of emergency, the book argues that full stability requires a better system of economic governance, either through a process of partial fiscal centralisation or the return to a more efficient and sustainable market discipline of public finances. It also analyses the concrete legal challenges these raise, including compliance with the conferral principle, the longstanding democratic deficit of the governance and the balance between financial solidarity and fiscal responsibility.

This book, a third edition, has been significantly expanded and updated. It revisits the process of institutional change: its characteristics, determinants and implications for economic performance. New chapters address the significance of Post-Communist transition, the differences and importance of initial conditions in institutional building, and, social norms, values, and happiness. Other chapters have been expanded to include, for example, a focus on the Washington consensus, commentary on the 2008 financial crisis, state capacity and corruption, and new findings on redistribution and inequality. With specific focus on Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, this revised edition examines the process of development, and its interdependence with institutions.

This authoritative book on China's oil demand and government policies and practices rests on two essential foundations: first and foremost on the author's considerable knowledge of China's oil situation and prospects, together with his access to Chinese energy literature and data; and secondly, on that insight afforded to him and, therefore, his readers from his fluency in Chinese.

The author analyzes the Chinese oil market and the rising pressure on Beijing to reform policies which constrain China's ability to meet soaring demand and to pay for crucial imports at a time of growing political and economic uncertainties. Dr Wang acknowledges the importance of China meeting its growing domestic oil demand, if at all possible, through national production. The sheer weight of China's population, and its burgeoning requirements as industrialization spreads into most regions, dwarfs the needs of others and places unprecedented strain on international oil trades.

The author stresses the fact that the outcome is hard to define, yet the time required to tackle the nation's energy needs is not limitless. Moreover, he reminds the reader of the perennial difficulty in meeting widely disparate economic and energy needs in different regions of the vast country.

This book explores the history of leisure in Chinese culture by tracing the development of Chinese philosophy and leisure values in Chinese tradition and civilization. It addresses the tremendous changes in Chinese society brought about by the country's rapid economic development and the impact on Chinese culture and leisure. It considers the social, political and economic challenges facing China, from corruption to sharpening inequalities, from ecological crisis to the need for a revival of Chinese culture and for political democratization. It suggests that leisure can exert an invisible and formative influence on people's lifestyle and value system and considers ongoing trends in the development of leisure activities as they relate to modern Chinese society and social reform.

Storage and Commodity Markets is primarily a work of economic theory, concerned with how the capability to store a surplus affects the prices and production of commodities. Its focus on the behaviour, over time, of aggregate stockpiles provides insights into such questions as how much a country should store out of its current supply of food considering the uncertainty in future harvests. Related topics covered include whether storage or international trade is a more effective buffer and whether stockpiles are more useful in raw or processed form. Several chapters are devoted to analysing such government programmes as price bands, buffer stocks, and strategic reserves. This material is in the domain of applied welfare analysis with public finance. Because the theory presented is sufficiently general, it should be of interest to macroeconomists studying aggregate inventories or savings and to those in operations research studying inventory and pricing policies of large firms.

This book critically assesses how the rise of the collaborative economy in the European Union Digital Single Market is disrupting consolidated legal acquisitions, such as classical internal market categories, as well as the applicability of consumer protection, data protection, and labour and competition law. It argues that the collaborative economy will, sooner or later, require some sort of regulatory intervention from the European Union. This regulatory intervention, far from stifling innovation, will benefit online platforms, service providers and users by providing them with a clearer and more predictable environment in which to conduct their business. Although primarily intended for academics, this book also appeals to a wider readership, including, but not limited to, national and international regulators, private firms and lobbies as well as online platforms, consumer associations and trade unions.

This book addresses core questions about the nature and structure of contemporary capitalism and the social dynamics and countervailing forces that shape modern life. From a robust and self-consciously sociological framework, it analyzes and interrogates such issues as the nature of the social, the power of the sacred, the nature of authority, the problem of representation, reification, alienation, utopia, and collective resistance. Historical materialism reveals that the scope of productive functions is broader than the crude realism of economism. Marx's critical theory of the commodity and his analysis of the capitalist regime of accumulation remain as vital as ever and serve as a guiding light for the continued exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of critical inquiry and praxis.

This book gathers together invited presentations from the 12th International Congress on Logistics and SCM Systems (ICLS2017) held in Beijing, China, August 20-23, 2017. The focus of the ICLS2017 was environmental sustainability in logistics and supply chains, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. It addressed a variety of themes in the domains of green logistics and supply chain management (SCM), including green logistics and environmental impact, green SCM and business performance, green operations and optimization, supply chain sustainability, carbon management in logistics, and green SCM and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The editors selected high-quality presentations from the highly successful symposium, and invited the presenters to prepare full chapters for this book in order to disseminate their findings and promote further research collaborations. This timely book sheds new light on the theories and practices associated with greening logistics and SCM in Asia.

Consistency and Viability of Islamic Economics Systems and the Transition Process has the crucial intention of stimulating interest in Islamic economics by studying the Islamic Republic of Iran using the analytical framework of consistency and viability. This text develops an original analytic framework to understand the relationship between the economic, political, and ideological structures, the external environment, and the process of reform that gives rise to certain economic systems by establishing consistency. Consistency, however, is not enough; a consistent economic system must be flexible and have the internal mechanisms to be able to adapt to changes in social reality, thus making possible its survival over time. In other words, the economic system is viable when it is able to encourage increases in labor productivity and there is popular support. The collapse of centrally administered socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union resulted in what was commonly referred to as the transition problem.

This book analyses the revival of the French economy at the end of the twentieth century and shows how large firms took the lead in that process becoming the drivers of economic adjustment. Hancké provides the reader with a critique of neo-institutionalist perspectives on firms. By demonstrating how large firms in France changed their institutional environment to fit their own needs, he offers an important new perspective on the political economy of industrial and economic change.

In the four volumes of The Development Trajectory of Eastern Societies and the Theories and Practices of Socialism, the author re-examines the Marx and Engel's theories on the development trajectory of Eastern societies by integrating theoretical analysis of Marxist theories and a historical investigation of socialist revolution and construction around the world. This volume discusses the desire of the Russian commune to "leap over the Caudine Forks of capitalism," which means to avoid the torments of the capitalist system, according to Marx and Engels' theories. The author argues that it is essential to use the logic intrinsic in Marx and Engels' own works rather than those of subsequent disciples such as Lenin as well as other leaders in the Soviet Union or within China's contemporary socialism. Readers who study Marxism, Marxist philosophy, philosophical history, and the history of philosophy will find this volume interesting.

Reframing central categories in Western critical thought, this book investigates the relationship between capitalism and coloniality in society and education, and reconceptualizes emancipatory theory and pedagogy in response. De Lissovoy exposes a logic of violation at the heart of capitalist accumulation and argues that we need to attend to ontological and epistemological orders of domination within which subjectivity takes shape. Systematically bridging the theoretical traditions of Marxism, Latin American decolonial thought, and critical pedagogy, De Lissovoy shows how a new critical imaginary can reorder curriculum in schools and other educational spaces, organize a form of learning beyond the capitalist imperatives of imposition and exploitation, and reconstruct pedagogical relationships in the mode of a decolonial and democratic commons.

'Jha is the right scholar and economist to take readers through the development of the Indian economy. Readers will be in good hands.' -Edmund Phelps, Columbia University, USA, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics 'This is perhaps the best and most scholarly contribution to understanding the Indian Economy and Society. Its rich historical perspective and a profound understanding of how India has evolved into a major economic power set standards of scholarship and analytical rigour that will be hard to surpass". -Raghav Gaiha, University of Manchester, UK 'Linking of economy and society is increasingly recognised as essential for addressing policy challenges by the current phase of globalisation. As such this study should be valuable not just for those studying India, but also for those interested in global developments.' -Mukul Asher, National University of Singapore, Singapore 'This book is a tour-de-force review of the fundamental topics on the Indian political economy and society that are relevant for any committed social scientist to be aware of.' -Sumit K. Majumdar, University of Texas at Dallas, USA This two-volume work provides an account of how India has been meeting its myriad of economic, political and social challenges and how things are expected to evolve in the future. Despite enormous challenges at the time of independence, India chose to address them within a secular, liberal, democratic framework, which guaranteed several fundamental rights. Challenges included intense mass poverty and hunger, very poor literacy and educational abilities of the population, the task of uniting a country with scores of languages and ethnicities ruled by different entities for decades and persistent threats of external aggression, to name just a few. Over time, incomes and opportunities have expanded enormously and India has regained her self-confidence as a nation. In this first volume, Jha presents a long view of the performance of the Indian economy and discusses key aspects of India's population, land and labor. In addition, the Indian Constitution and basic structure of governance are analysed within the context of major economic and political developments in independent India.

In 1985, General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev led the Soviet Union through a series of revolutionary reforms, such as Perestroika ('Restructuring') and Glasnost ('Openness'). Yet many of these changes failed, resulting in the collapse of centrally administered socialism throughout the country and most of Eastern Europe. Consistency and Viability of Socialist Economics Systems establishes a new and enlightening approach to understanding complex socialist economies. This book presents an original analytical framework to better map out the relationship between the economic, political, ideological structures, and the external environment, as well as the reform process that gives rise to certain economic systems.

This book examines the main causes of financial instability and highlights that, with the exception of wars and pandemics, the financial system is the source of the crisis, not just a means of spreading it, as most mainstream experts believe. Based on the following findings, the innovative sections of this book provide academics and policymakers with important and practical knowledge: because negative shifts in the financial system precede recessions, financial indicators can predict the onset of a crisis much earlier than real variables; the proposed recession forecasting model can predict the emergence of the crisis a month in advance. When the economy's sensitivity to the financial system is reduced, there will be only modest negative economic growth and no true recessions.

Analyzing the key problems facing the transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe, this book describes the legacy of the central planners and the need for radical reforms. It documents the outstanding successes and failures, and demonstrates how some countries have graduated from "transition" to "integration" through membership in the European Union. The study concludes by indicating how the EU could help the poor performers through inclusion in a continent-wide integrated economic area. The book appeals to students in economics, comparative politics and area studies.

The social market economy has served as a fundamental pillar of post-war Germany. Today, it is associated with the European welfare state. Initially, it meant the opposite. Rebuilding Germany examines the 1948 West German economic reforms that dismantled the Nazi command economy and ushered in the fabled 'European Miracle' of the 1950s. Van Hook evaluates the US role in German reconstruction, the problematic relationship of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, the West German 'economic miracle', and the extent to which the social market economy represented a departure from the German past. In a nuanced and fresh account, Van Hook evaluates the American role in West German recovery and the debates about economic policy within West Germany, to show that Germans themselves had surprising room to shape their economic and industrial system.

Stellar group of trans-disciplinary experts Addresses major questions for the future of social science research Topical coverage of issues such as artificial intelligence, political polarization and global financial systems

Stellar group of trans-disciplinary experts Addresses major questions for the future of social science research Topical coverage of issues such as artificial intelligence, political polarization and global financial systems

This volume contains country experiences explained by policy makers and studies by leading experts on causes and consequences of capital flows as well as policies to control these flows. It addresses portfolio flow issues central to open economies, especially emerging markets.

This book investigates why Austrian economists fail to apply the spontaneous order framework to cooperative relationships - such as a dynamic and evolving public sector - that might complement a thriving market. In direct response to Israel Kirzner's The Driving Force of the Market, Nell challenges traditional Austrian economics by proposing "democratic process theory" as a parallel to market process theory, highlighting the possibilities for an economic organization that harnesses the power of transparent and effective democracy. Keeping in mind the central problems experienced in socialist and capitalist countries due to self-interested political and economic actors, The Driving Force of the Collective highlights the public sector advantages of allowing culture and institutions to evolve endogenously as a spontaneous public sector order.

Emerging markets have long posed a challenge for finance. Standard models are often ill suited to deal with the specific circumstances arising in these markets. However, the interest in emerging markets has provided impetus for the adaptation of current models to new circumstances and the development of new models. During recent years, much new research has been devoted to emerging markets. This important collection presents key articles in this literature. Topics include: the properties of emerging market equity returns; diversification benefits; market integration and segmentation of emerging markets; the financial and real effects of the financial liberalization process that many countries embarked upon; the late nineties crises and the debate regarding contagion; and microstructure in emerging markets. The collection will be of interest to academics in international finance, international economics and development economics and to practitioners and policymakers alike.

An award-winning journalist's investigation into Amazon's true impact on inequality. The market value of Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars. In 2020, its annual revenue increased by over 100 billion dollars. As the company insinuates itself ever further into our lives, Alec MacGillis investigates how it is reshaping society. With empathy and breadth, he tells the stories of those who've thrived and struggled in this rapidly changing environment, and shows how Amazon has even become a force in Washington, DC. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, and its remaking of our world with every click.