LEAN is the most widespread management philosophy of our time and is currently present in every industry, yet the concept is still vaguely defined and widely misunderstood.

This is Lean - Resolving the efficiency paradox has been translated from Swedish to English, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, French and Chinese and has sold over 160.000 copies since its launch in 2012. By using clear, concise language and insightful examples, the book has brought greater clarification to the essence of lean and revolutionized top-executives and employees understanding of what lean actually is.

The book also introduces the idea of the efficiency paradox, which claims that organisations' understanding of "true efficiency" is incorrect. It suggests that when organisations focus too much on utilising resources efficiently - the traditional and most common form of efficiency - it tends to lead to an increase in the amount of work there is to do. Consequently, the more organisations try to be efficient (being busy), the more inefficient they will actually become (taking care of non-value adding but necessary work).

This is Lean addresses how to resolve this paradox.

The Business Environment provides a flexible and comprehensive learning experience for modern PESTLE-driven courses by using a two-tier approach. The book offers an accessible introduction to the business environment model, taking into account curriculum and blended learning developments. For those new to business and business economics it introduces the key concepts, theory and examples (covering marketing, human resource management, operations management, finance), whilst also maintaining the depth and rigour needed for both undergraduate and postgraduate level study. The accompanying CourseMate offers a host of practical material mapped specifically to each chapter, and provides the overall product with unrivalled depth and coverage for the levels targeted.

Exam Board: Edexcel Level: AS and A level Subject: Economics First teaching: September 2015 First exams: June 2017 This Student Book + ActiveBook covers both the AS and A level courses for the Edexcel Economics 2015 specification. Written by Alain Anderton, it takes you through the essential content of the course and supports the development of quantitative skills, synopticity, evaluative and analytical skills, helping you to develop conceptual understanding of each topic. It also provides assessment support for both AS and A level with sample answers, practice questions and guidance to help you tackle the exam questions. This latest edition of the Student Book comes with 3 years' access to ActiveBook - an online digital version of the textbook. You can personalise your ActiveBook with notes, highlights and links to wider reading - perfect for supporting your coursework and revision activities.

Marketing: A Global Perspective is the much-anticipated EMEA edition of Grondslagen van de Marketing, the market leader in the Netherlands for over 25 years. In this bestseller, Dr Bronis Verhage strikes the right balance between marketing theory and practice. The text features perspectives from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the wider world, embedded in a global context, offering a cutting-edge review of new priorities in marketing, as illustrated by a diverse selection of analyses of world-class companies' customer-focused strategies. This attractively-illustrated, full-colour edition includes a range of case vignettes assessing small and medium-sized enterprises and large global corporations such as L'Oreal, Philips and Google, encompassing the entire field of marketing, including services marketing, B2B and green marketing.

This exercise book is comprised of questions covering topics in Differential and Integral Calculus, Matrix Algebra and Linear Programming. The aim of the work is to develop student competency in using mathematical techniques as a “toolbox” for the solution of problems relevant to Economics, Business and Finance.

The book provides an introductory revision chapter of basic mathematical principles followed by chapters of multiple-choice questions each covering a particular section of the work.

In addition to multiple-choice questions, there are extension tutorials requiring written responses and sample tests covering each section of the work. Answers are provided to each question at the back of the book together with a formula sheet for easy reference.

This innovative book explores how the design of financial education programmes could benefit from the findings of behavioural economics and finance and cognitive sciences. It covers the social, cultural and technological determinants of financial education, the role of the banking system in promoting financial literacy, and how governments and regulatory authorities are dealing with financial education and risk literacy programmes in schools. Featuring contributions from authors with diverse methodological and ideological backgrounds, Financial Education and Risk Literacy offers a rich and multifaceted debate. Chapters explore theory and empirical evidence, utilising investigations of programmes deployed and the outcomes of experiments. This book also complements the emerging literature by studying how individuals perceive and process information when making financial decisions. Economics students and scholars, in particular those studying behavioural economics, will appreciate the forward-looking agenda of this book. Its insights into how policymakers can benefit from a behavioural approach will also help regulators in the financial education sector.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. This Advanced Introduction presents a focused narrative about political decision-making based on the work that has defined public choice as a discipline. Randall G. Holcombe emphasizes the theoretical foundations of Public Choice, examining the way that voter preferences are aggregated through democratic decision-making, the way that political exchange leads to the production of public policy, and the way that the constitutional framework within which political activity takes place is designed. He provides a concise discussion of the main models of Public Choice in an engaging manner, giving readers a foundation for understanding the theoretical and empirical work in the field. Each chapter ends with a Notes section that discusses the research on which the chapter is based, with an emphasis on the pioneering work that has shaped the development of Public Choice. Undergraduate and graduate level students in economics, political science and public administration will find this introduction an essential resource for understanding political decision making. Instructors in those fields will find this book a useful and affordable text and an indispensable resource for teaching Public Choice.

A fresh, revealing, and myth-busting guide to the ins and outs of inflation from two leading political economists.

Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. What's more, tariffs and trade wars threaten to accelerate inflation again. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis.

Leading political economists Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli reveal why inflation really happens, challenge how we think about it, and argue for fresh approaches to combat it. With accessible and engaging commentary, and a good dose of humor, Blyth and Fraccaroli bring the complexities of economic policy and inflation indices down to earth.

Policymakers around the world may have pulled off a so-called "soft landing," but Inflation warns they must update their thinking. Now tariffs, climate shocks, demographic change, geopolitical tensions, and politicians promising to upend the global order are all combining to create a more inflationary future, making a new paradigm for understanding inflation urgently necessary. Astute, timely, and engaging, Inflation is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our economy and politics.

With a GDP that just reached $2.6 trillion, India is poised to become the world's third largest economy in less than a decade. In doing so, it will have moved one step closer to reclaiming its pre-industrial glory when it accounted for one-sixth of the global output and ranked second in economic size. This rapid movement in the absolute size of the economy will be insufficient, however, to bring prosperity to India's vast population. Today, 44% of the country's workforce remains in agriculture and another 42% in small enterprises with fewer than twenty workers. Labor productivity of both sets of workers remains low and they live overwhelmingly on subsistence-level incomes. In New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory, Arvind Panagariya outlines a concise strategy to transform India from a primarily rural and agricultural economy to an urban and industrial economy with well-paid jobs for those with limited skills. Panagariya argues that the creation of good jobs requires the emergence of medium and large enterprises in industry and services, especially labor-intensive sectors such as apparel, footwear, and other light manufactures. He explains that India needs policies conducive to the growth of firms from small to medium, medium to large, and large to larger still. Such policies include greater outward orientation; more flexible land, labor, and capital markets; concerted effort to improve the quality of higher education; faster urbanization; and improved governance at all levels. Written by a preeminent authority on the Indian economy, New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory provides a data-driven and persuasive roadmap for India to eliminate abject poverty, accelerate economic growth, and return to its historically prominent position in the global economy.

Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are becoming poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the 'mistakes' of such elites, this title contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.

From the pen of highly esteemed trade scholar Alan Sykes, this book presents a rigorous introduction to the law and economics of modern international trade agreements. With a bottom-up approach that requires neither a background in international trade law nor significant economics training, Sykes sets out to map and explain the complex dynamics of international trade agreements and institutions, synthesising legal analysis and cutting-edge economic research in order to present the reader with a sophisticated, holistic view of the field. Against the backdrop of the current impasse in both negotiation and dispute settlement at the World Trade Organisation, the book charts a clear path from the historical origins of trade law and the international system, to the current state of play, including unpacking the major areas of controversy. It exposits the economic theory of trade agreements, discusses the role of international trade law in domestic legal systems and analyzes the role of self-enforcement and formal dispute resolution mechanisms. It provides lucid and detailed analysis of the restrictions, exceptions, obligations and special measures that constitute the core building blocks of international trade rules, including the distinct features of international trade in services. With an international outlook, the book also addresses the role of China in the world trading system, looking at such issues as the credibility of market access commitments, China's industrial policies, “forced technology transfer� and currency manipulation. Providing an eloquent, thorough and technically astute overview of international trade agreements, this title will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of international trade across the disciplines of law, economics and political science.

This cutting-edge book unpacks the relationship between culture and consumer behavior to present the state-of-the-art in cross-cultural consumer research. Examining how culture shapes what consumers seek, evaluate and choose to purchase, Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior explains why and how cultural values such as individualism, indulgence, or uncertainty avoidance influence consumers’ buying behavior. With a balanced approach, the book explores not only how cultural differences between countries shape our decisions but also outlines the basic concepts of cross-cultural consumer research, the measurement of cultural values proposed in the Hofstede, Schwartz and GLOBE models, and the psychological foundations of culture-specific consumer behavior. Based on these conceptual foundations, the authors explain how cultural values shape consumers’ buying processes, from information searches through post-purchase behavior. This book will be valuable to researchers and students of international business, global marketing, and consumer behavior. Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior will also be relevant for marketing practitioners and international marketing agencies.

Challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism.

BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance.

The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg’s pioneering work inspires most of the volume’s contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance.

While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers.