This volume describes the construction method for a global accounting framework, referred to as the world accounting matrix (WAM). The WAM allows for the consistent presentation of international trade and finance figures in relation to domestic saving and investment. The book aims to show how a WAM can be used for the analysis of trade and finance in a global context. It also seeks to show how WAM can contribute to the solution of the large statistical problems in national and global macroeconomic data.

The book provides an overview of some of the recent techniques that have been applied to an understanding of the structure of regional and interregional exchange within national economies. The issues range from an evaluation of NAFTA, comparisons of regional economies, structral change over time and issues related to measurement and interpretation. Many of the contributions address the problems using network structures.

This book describes the contrast between the strong economic growth and democratization that have occurred in Africa and its stalling political progress. It presents and discusses fragility as the phenomenon that has caused the state to remain weak and faltering and has led to at least one third of the continent's citizens living in fragile states. Following the examination of the drivers of fragility and the impact of fragility on citizens and neighbouring states, the book discusses capacity building approaches. This part shows how effective states can be built on the African continent, a process that would result in a change from state fragility to state resilience. It is based on lessons learnt from close studies of the nations where the state has been most developed in the region, in Eastern and Southern Africa. The book provides and responds to the most recent and up-to-date information on African development and uses insights of people who have lived and worked in the continent for most of their lives.

This book reconstructs Keynesian macroeconomics so that it is compatible with the neoclassical dynamic microeconomic theory. This theory adopts three postulates: rational expectations, perfect price flexibility, and exclusion of the money in utility function (MIU). Based on the new theoretical finding that the Lucas model (1972) contains multiple equilibria, the author unifies Keynesian and monetarist theories within the same framework. The book applies the above basic theory to international macroeconomics and economic growth theory. New Keynesian theory contains logical inconsistencies: menu costs that have no close relationship with microeconomics and MIU, which implies that the money accumulated as wealth is never spent. These two assumptions do not proximate the real world. In this volume, the author discusses how various segregated theoretical approaches in macroeconomics relate to one another and proposes how to integrate them.

This contributed volume contains fourteen papers based on selected presentations from the European Conference on Game Theory SING11-GTM 2015, held at Saint Petersburg State University in July 2015, and the Networking Games and Management workshop, held at the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Petrozvavodsk, Russia, also in July 2015. These papers cover a wide range of topics in game theory, including recent advances in areas with high potential for future work, as well as new developments on classical results. Some of these include A new approach to journal ranking using methods from social choice theory; A differential game of a duopoly in which two firms are competing for market share in an industry with network externalities; The impact of information propagation in the model of tax audits; A voting model in which the results of previous votes can affect the process of coalition formation in a decision-making body; The Selten-Szidarovsky technique for the analysis of Nash equilibria of games with an aggregative structure; Generalized nucleoli and generalized bargaining sets for games with restricted cooperation; Bayesian networks and games of deterrence; and A new look at the study of solutions for games in partition function form. The maturity and vitality of modern-day game theory are reflected in the new ideas, novel applications, and contributions of young researchers represented in this collection. It will be of interest to anyone doing theoretical research in game theory or working on one its numerous applications.

Ever since the 2007-8 global financial crisis and its aftermath, Hyman Minsky's theory has never been more relevant. Throughout his career, Jan Kregel has called attention to Minsky's contributions to understanding the evolution of financial systems, the development of financial fragility and instability, and designing the financial structure necessary to support the capital development of the economy. Building on Minsky, Kregel developed a framework to analyze how different financial structures develop financial fragility over time. Rather than characterizing financial systems as market-based or bank-based, Kregel argued that it is necessary to distinguish between the risks that are carried on the balance sheets of banks and other financial institutions. This volume, brought together by Felipe C. Rezende, highlights these major contributions from Kregel through a collection of his influential papers from various journals and conferences. Kregel's approach provides a strong theoretical background to understand the making and unfolding of the crisis and helps us to draw policy implications to improve financial stability, and suggest an alternative financial structure for a market economy. In this book, his knowledge is consolidated and the ideas he puts forward offer a path for future developments in economics which will be of great interest to those studying and researching in the fields of economics and finance.

Understanding the process of shaping investor expectations is essential to describe and predict changes in the value of assets on the financial markets, especially stock prices on the capital markets and thus the value of companies listed on them. The main objective of this book is to include the investor expectations in the concept of enterprise value management and measurement of shareholders value creation. It seems that the role of expectations, as a determinant of investment decisions on the capital market, requires a deep insight and highlight the importance of managing the expectations for creating value for shareholders, in particular in the context of the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Creating value for shareholders is to overcome investor expectations for the rate of return on their initial investment. That means that managers must understand how investors build their expectations. According to studies conducted by T. Copeland and A. Dolgoff'a there is a strong and statistically significant relation between the shareholders returns and the two types of variables: changes in expectations for the future earnings and changes in the level of interference of provided information. Almost 50% of the variance of return rates can be explained by these two variables. Studies have also shown that changes in expectations for long-term profits have a significant and immediate impact on the share price. Readers of this book will be able to understand the process of investor expectation formulation, will know how to create value in response to investor expectations and how to consciously shape investor expectations in order to increase company value.

For both public and private managers, the book Optimization Methods for a Stakeholder Society is today's key to answer the problem of a sustainable development world. This world has to take into account the meaning of all stakeholders involved and has to reconcile a number of objectives, such as economic growth, employment and preservation of the ecosystem. Traditional methods, such as cost-benefit, are outmoded as they translate all these objectives into monetary costs, a materialistic approach. On the contrary, objectives have rather to stick to their own units, eventually indicators.
The author is in favor of the use of nonlinear methods in multi-objective optimization. Therefore, several nonlinear approaches are proposed, illustrated with many applications from different fields such as: privatization in the public sector, regional versus national economic policy in a country, location of a seaport, arms procurement, industrialization of a developing country, updating or replacement of old industry, pre- and post-evaluation of projects, performance management, marketing and distribution.

Supplement 8 contains an archival collection of Selig Perlman's eminent history of the labor movement, pertaining to Institutional Economics at the University of Wisconsin. Included are: Notes from students in Perlman's classes in American Labor History, and Capitalism and Socialism; Six previously unpublished chapters written by Perlman for a revision of his "History of Trade Unions"; Correspondence between Perlman and John R. Commons; and several personal documents of Perlman's.

Economists are sometimes praised and often chastised for what happens to the nation and the world economies. But what exactly do economists do to earn either praise or scorn? Author Attiat F. Ott with Sheila Vegari explores the answer to that question in "What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought."

Ott and Vegari outline the discipline of economics through the views and ideas of nine political economists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries. The chronologies of ideas involve a journey through the history of economic thought from Adam Smith's The "Wealth of Nations" to Nobel Laureate James Buchanan's "The Calculus of Consent."

This study reviews some of the arguments offered about economics as a science, presents the concepts of political economy, and discusses the principles of the macro economy as put forth by John Maynard Keynes in "The General Theory." It also covers the idea of the public economy advanced by the classical economists and augmented by the work of Paul Samuelson, Richard Musgrave, Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan. It examines the role of the economist as a teacher, a political economist, and as an adviser to policy makers.

"What Economists Do: A Journey through the History of Economic Thought" provides an intriguing picture of how economics has come of age through a chronology of ideas and principles that shape the world's economies.

This book takes a multi-disciplinary critique of economics' first principles: the fundamental and inter-related structuring assumptions that underlie the neo-classical paradigm. These assumptions, that economic agents are rational, self-interested individuals, continue to influence the teaching of economics, research agendas and policy analyses. The book argues that both the theoretical understanding of the economy and the actual working of real-world market economies diminish the scope for thinking about the relation between ethics, economics, and the economy. It highlights how market economies may "crowd out" ethical behavior and our evaluation of them elides ethical reflection. The book calls for a more pluralistic and richer approach to economic theory, one that allows ample room for ethical considerations. It provides insight into understanding human motivations and human flourishing and how a good economy requires reflection on the ethical relations between the self, world, and time.

Dynamic game theory serves the purpose of including strategic interaction in decision making and is therefore often applied to economic problems. This book presents the state-of-the-art and directions for future research in dynamic game theory related to economics. It was initiated by contributors to the 12th Viennese Workshop on Optimal Control, Dynamic Games and Nonlinear Dynamics and combines a selection of papers from the workshop with invited papers of high quality.

Advances in Austrian Economics connects the Austrian tradition of economics with other research traditions in economics and related areas. Each volume attempts to apply the insights of Austrian economics and related approaches to topics that are of current interest in economics and cognate disciplines. The edited volume approach delivers ideas from multiple contributors in one book, providing a forum for variety and contrasting perspectives among those working in these areas. As such, Advances fills an important niche in the world of Austrian economics. Austrian school economists are the primary audience, but this series will appeal to people working in a variety of positions in economics and related disciplines. Those working in public choice, new institutionalism, cognitive or behavior economics, entrepreneurship, and other areas will find value in the series. Areas of coverage are quite open, as long as there remains a connection to the ideas associated with the Austrian school, broadly interpreted.

This book investigates the ways in which social norms and bounded rationality shape different contracts in the real world. It brings into focus existing research into optimal contracts, draws important lessons from that research, and outlines prospects for future investigation. Bounded rationality has acknowledged effects on the power of incentive provisions, such as deviations from sufficient statistic theorem, the power of optimal incentives, and the effects of optimal contracts in multicultural environments. The introduction of social norms to bounded rationality opens up new avenues of investigation into contracts and mechanism design. This book makes an important contribution to the study of bounded rationality by pulling together many separate strands of research in the area of mechanism design, and providing detailed analysis of the impact of societal values on contracts.

What has gone wrong with economics? Economists now routinely devise highly sophisticated abstract models that score top marks for theoretical rigour but are clearly divorced from observable activities in the current economy. This creates an 'uneconomic economics', where models explain relationships in blackboard rather than real-life markets.

This book has its focus on the dynamics of oligopoly games. Several contributions show how easily the unique Nash equilibria in some most traditional oligopoly models may lose stability, giving way to complex phenomena, such as periodic/chaotic processes, and to multi stability of coexistent attractors. The bifurcations producing these phenomena are studied by means of recently accumulated global methods, based on the use of critical curves. These tools are explained in a separate methodological chapter. The book also contains some historical background of the present theory. In this way the book becomes suitable also as an advanced text for industrial organisation courses. The various models presented in the book focus both classical Cournot types, and Hotelling`s "ice cream vendor" problems, including location choice. The author list comprises some of the most prolific contributors to current dynamic oligopoly modelling.

This volume collects original contributions and research in economic theory and the political economy of unemployment and inflation. These essays, collected in honour of John Cornwall, demonstrate the importance of economic institutions for economic outcomes and share his focus on the need for high-level economic theory to be socially relevant. The book includes an intellectual biography of the honouree by Geoff Harcourt and Mehdi Monadjemi, and a full bibliography of his work.

The leading part of this volume focuses on the role of the state in capitalist society, beginning by showing the welfare state as an historical product of the class structure of English agrarian capitalism. The second chapter indicates how, in European colonies such as in Africa, taxation was an important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops, and relating the process to Marx's 'primitive accumulation of capital'. The following two chapters move to the contemporary period, the first suggesting that change in the relationship between the nation-state and capital is rooted in the contradictory needs of labor versus capital, while the next chapter proposes analyzing capitalist institutions by relying, more than hitherto, on an hermeneutic understanding of institutions.

The following part addresses price and technical choice in capitalism. The first two chapters address price, the initial one suggesting its formation to be the same as the formation of abstract labor, while the second identifying a new category of exchange value and using it to explain how changes in demand act to redistribute value across industries. The following two chapters consider, empirically, the relation between technical choice and profit rates.

The third part addresses economic democracy within socialism, defending both direct democracy and economic calculation in terms of labor time. The concluding part develops an understanding of the class determination of knowledge, including explaining why the science and techniques developed in one class society can be used in others.

Darwinism is fast becoming an orthodoxy of modern thought, a framework within which a wide range of knowledge communities conduct their discourse. Ever since its formation, Darwinian theory has experienced a close, though not always comfortable, association with economics. Evolutionary economists now appear to show little concern for the consistency of knowledge in their embrace of Darwinism. Darwinism and Evolutionary Economics brings together contributions from eminent authors who, building on Darwin's own insights and on developments in evolutionary theory, offer challenging views on how economics can use evolutionary ideas effectively. This collection of critical essays provides a thorough examination of the application of Darwinian theory to economic thought, and will appeal to evolutionary economists and all those with an interest in Darwin, innovation and evolutionary science.

The idea that each country should have one currency is so deeply rooted in people's minds that the possibility of multiple and concurrent currencies seems unthinkable. Monetary systems contribute to problems of high unemployment and social distress during financial and economic crisis, so reforms to increase the responsiveness and flexibility of the monetary system can be part of the solution. This book discusses 'monetary plurality', which is the circulation of several currencies at the same time and space. It addresses how multiple currency circuits work together and transform socio-economic systems, particularly by supporting economies at the local level of regions and cities. The book shows that monetary plurality has been ubiquitous throughout history and persists at present because the existence of several currency circuits facilitates small-scale production and trade in a way that no single currency can accomplish on its own. Monetary plurality can improve resilience, access to livelihoods and economic sustainability. At the same time, it introduces new risks in terms of economic governance, so it needs to be properly understood. The book analyses experiences of monetary plurality in Europe, Japan, and North and South America, written by researchers from East and West and from the global North and South. Replete with case studies, this book will prove a valuable addition to any student or practitioner's bookshelf.

Two hundred years ago, the first Industrial Revolution sparked a dramatic acceleration in the quantity of goods and services available to the average citizen--a trend of steadily increasing real income per capita that continues to this day. Since that time, economists have struggled to develop systematic explanations for what caused the sudden, rapid increase, why the economy keeps growing, and why the rate of growth varies in different time periods and nations. In this book, F. M. Scherer traces the evolution of economic growth theory from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Emphasizing technological change as the most crucial dynamic force for growth, Scherer analyzes early hypotheses that paid little attention to new technologies, follows the emergence of theories that increasingly emphasized technological change, and reviews the current state of economic growth theory. Pointing out a lack of solid microbehavioral foundations to support contemporary "new growth" ideas, Scherer then supplies some foundational "bricks" concerning financial investment and human capital, and concludes by exploring the prospects for sustaining rapid growth into the next century. Copublished with the British-North American Committee

This book provides a critical and theoretically-informed assessment of the nature and types of structural change occurring in the Irish welfare state in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. Its overarching framework for conceptualising and analysing welfare state change and its political, economic and social implications is based around four crucial questions, namely what welfare is for, who delivers welfare, who pays for welfare, and who benefits. Over the course of ten chapters, the authors examine the answers as they relate to social protection, labour market activation, pensions, finance, water, early child education and care, health, housing and corporate welfare. They also innovatively address the impact of crisis on the welfare state in Northern Ireland. The result is to isolate key drivers of structural welfare reform, and assess how globalisation, financialisation, neo-liberalisation, privatisation, marketisation and new public management have deepened and diversified their impact on the post-crisis Irish welfare state. This in-depth analysis will appeal to sociologists, economists, political scientists and welfare state practitioners interested in the Irish welfare state and more generally in the analysis of welfare state change.

Growth Theory in Historical Perspective is a collection of thirteen carefully selected essays by Theo van de Klundert which demonstrate the development of growth theory over the past forty years. The sequence of chapters reveals the shifts in focus which have occurred since the first formal growth models of the 1940s and 1950s. He illustrates how the Keynesian paradigm was replaced by neo-classical models, which in turn have been superseded by theories of endogenous technical progress, the focus of growth theory in the 1990s. The author explains how the theory of economic growth is strongly shaped by ideas developed in the past. To this extent the book provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of growth theory and develops important modern themes such as firm-specific research and development and the relationship between growth and international trade. Moreover, several of the chapters explore themes which, in the author's view, have been unfairly neglected in recent writings on the theory of growth. These include the role of demand factors, vintage models and issues of distribution, which he believes can still contribute to the current thinking on growth theory. By balancing insights from old and new theories of economic growth, this comprehensive book should prove fascinating reading for students, researchers and scholars of growth theory.

This book deals with the important economic problem of uncertainty. The first attempt was to simplify and unify some results usually taught in courses in mathematical economics. The economic interpretation of the results was representations of preferences as sums or integrals and the decomposition of preferences into utilities and probabilities. The book contains all the classical results, but the main justification of the book is that the approach taken in the earlier versions was also the proper approach in generalizing from preferences, which were total preorders to preferences, which were not total or transitive. The same mathematics gives representations which are additive. It also gives decompositions where concepts of utility, probability, and uncertainty appeared. These results are new and give a solution to how uncertainty can be formalized.