Since 2008, Emerging Europe has been in the grip of a severe economic and financial crisis. The region is now gradually recovering but the speed and sustainability of this recovery and the prospects for economic reconvergence with the rest of the EU are still uncertain. Against this background, policy makers, high-level practitioners and experts from central banks, international institutions and academia identify the main reasons for the crisis and the main challenges for the recovery process. Essays highlight the significant cross-country differences within Emerging Europe, focusing on the region's growth model as well as the pros and cons of financial integration and the challenges to financial stability. Particular focus is placed on the prospects and challenges for economic recovery in the Western Balkans and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The 2007-09 financial crisis and economic downturn inflicted considerable hardship on the U.S. population. This book argues that the financial crisis and ensuing recession reflected not just a malfunctioning of the financial system -- but also inequalities and insecurities in access to livelihoods that favor well-off groups and leave ordinary people shouldering undue burdens of downside risk. This book, a collection of original papers by leading social economists and scholars in related fields, examines social, distributional, and ethical dimensions of the downturn. It should be of broad interest to the social-science and economic-policy communities.

The global financial crisis of 2007-09, and the Great Recession that it engendered, were both a challenge and an opportunity for Asia. The region not only remained unharmed by the global financial crisis initially but also recovered the fastest. In addition, it was also the principal driver of the global recovery.

This book analyzes the impact of the global financial crisis and the Great Recession on the Asian economy. Chapters look at the most significant issues related to the Asian economy during the crisis, how it coped with them and how it eventually emerged from them. Dilip K. Das discusses how the Asian economy, particularly the emerging-market economies, spearheaded the recovery of the global economy from the global financial crisis and recession, and goes on to look at how this is of historical significance.

Written in a clear, comprehensive and critical manner, this book covers the contemporary academic and policy debates on Asia 's role in the world economy. As such, it is an essential read for students, researchers and public policy professionals interested in Asian Economics as well as studies in the International Political Economy.

Recent US economic history is rife with examples of cities and regions that have experienced significant decline. Many of those localities began to slide after decades, even generations, of feeling immune to economic disaster. Boeing and Kodak, the steel industry in Pittsburg, and the automotive industry in Detroit all expected to make it golden into the distant future. Tapping into the available body of knowledge as well as- through nearly 70 interviews-the experiences of those who lived and worked in those times in cities around the United States-to identify the most effective strategies, Reinventing Local and Regional Economies delineates the dos and don'ts to observe in order to sustain economic vitality in any community. Written by Dr. Gerald Gordon, president and chief executive officer of the Economic Development Authority in Fairfax County, Virginia, the book explores lessons learned and examines the messages communities must be mindful of in order to ensure future economic stability. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience, Gordon identifies a set of foundational lessons that, while they are not guarantees of success, certainly portend failure if ignored by local planners. Each chapter explores a different prerequisite and then applies it to several case studies of the reinvention of local and regional economies. Each of these basic components of economic growth will then be examined against the backgrounds of the many communities studied, thus permitting comparisons and contrasts to be drawn. A comparative analysis of results from one community to another across a wide range of case studies, this book puts into clear context the observations about what works not only in one locale but in communities with common features facing common issues and getting similar results. Using case studies and real world examples of successes and failures, Dr. Gordon provides the tools to develop a proactive strategy that positions your community for surviving and thriving regardless of external stresses and adverse economic conditions that may be out of your control.

The European economy is emerging from its deepest recession since the 1930s. This volume, which brings together economic analysis from the European Commission services, explains how swift policy response avoided a financial meltdown; but turning the ongoing recovery into sustained growth requires action on five challenges: boosting potential output, enhancing labour market flexibility, preparing fiscal consolidation, facilitating intra-EU adjustment, and unwinding global imbalances. Europe also needs an improved co-ordinated crisis-management framework to help it respond to any similar situations that may arise in the future. Economic Crisis in Europe shows that the beginnings of such a crisis-management framework are emerging, building on existing institutions and legislation and complemented by new initiatives. Naturally, initial EU policy efforts, such as fiscal stimulus, focused on crisis control and mitigation. But first steps have also been taken to redesign financial regulation and supervision with crisis prevention in mind. The design of crisis resolution policies is now becoming a main task. While any premature withdrawal of policy stimulus should be avoided, exit strategies should be ready for implementation, embedded in a broader policy framework that also includes growth-enhancing structural reforms.

The current global financial crisis has raised awareness of the impact the world of finance has on the economy and the future of democracy. Following the crisis, this book aims at a deep understanding of the human psycho-social dynamics beneath the surface of the financial industry, its markets and institutions. It seeks to understand why the seemingly rational world of economic behavior, with its calculated models and predictions, at times goes horribly wrong.

This book uses the discipline of socio-analysis to explore the meaning of money, markets and the broad financial world that so strongly affects our daily lives. Socio-analysis contributes to an awareness and understanding of underlying unconscious desires, fantasies and illusions that bring about the irrational inflation of faith and trust in the world of money, finance and capital(ism). The insight that the financial crisis OCywas essentially psychological in originOCO (Robert Shiller) and that the world of finance is broadly shaped if not determined by irrational often unconscious factors is not yet broadly shared. This book appears to be one of the first, if not the first contribution that explicitly focuses on what is beneath the surface of money, finance and capital. It invites the reader to explore the financial world in depth.

The aim of this book is to provide businesses, organizational consultants, students, researchers and interested persons more broadly with a detailed exploration of the psycho-social dynamics of the financial industry as it exists currently within the capitalist system. The contributors to this book come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK, and USA."

The recent financial and economic crisis has spurred a lot of interest among scholars and public audience. Strangely enough, the impact of the crisis on innovation has been largely underestimated. This books can be regarded as a complementary reading for those interested in the effect of the crisis with a particular focus on Europe.

This volume investigates the policies and politics of extreme austerity, setting the crisis in Greece in its global context. Featuring multidisciplinary contributions and an exclusive interview with former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, this is the first comprehensive account of the economic crisis at the heart of Europe.

Once in a while the world astonishes itself. Anxious incredulity replaces intellectual torpor and a puzzled public strains its antennae in every possible direction, desperately seeking explanations for the causes and nature of what just hit it. 2008 was such a moment. Not only did the financial system collapse, and send the real economy into a tailspin, but it also revealed the great gulf separating economics from a very real capitalism. Modern Political Economics has a single aim: To help readers make sense of how 2008 came about and what the post-2008 world has in store. The book is divided into two parts. The first part delves into every major economic theory, from Aristotle to the present, with a determination to discover clues of what went wrong in 2008. The main finding is that all economic theory is inherently flawed. Any system of ideas whose purpose is to describe capitalism in mathematical or engineering terms leads to inevitable logical inconsistency; an inherent error that stands between us and a decent grasp of capitalist reality. The only scientific truth about capitalism is its radical indeterminacy, a condition which makes it impossible to use science's tools (e.g. calculus and statistics) to second-guess it. The second part casts an attentive eye on the post-war era; on the breeding ground of the Crash of 2008. It distinguishes between two major post-war phases: The Global Plan (1947-1971) and the Global Minotaur (1971-2008). This dynamic new book delves into every major economic theory and maps out meticulously the trajectory that global capitalism followed from post-war almost centrally planned stability, to designed disintegration in the 1970s, to an intentional magnification of unsustainable imbalances in the 1980s and, finally, to the most spectacular privatisation of money in the 1990s and beyond. Modern Political Economics is essential reading for Economics students and anyone seeking a better understanding of the 2008 economic crash.

In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.

Written during an ongoing period of global economic crisis, The Welfare State as a Crisis Manager examines the practice and potential of using social policy to cope with crises. Through an in-depth analysis of social policy reactions in the wake of international economic shocks in four different welfare states, over a 40-year period, the book reveals the ways in which expansion and retrenchment are shaped by domestic politics and existing welfare state institutions. Moreover, the study addresses the kind of policy change triggered by economic crisis. In contrast to conventional wisdom and previous scholarship, reactions tend to be characterised by incrementalism and 'crisis routines' rather than fundamental deviations from earlier policy patterns. For the first time, the study of domestic political dynamics following crisis is systematically embedded in the transnational policy debate, linking the Comparative Welfare State literature with scholarship on Global Social Policy.

The Great Depression had a devastating effect on much of the world's developed economies. (For example, at its nadir, around one-quarter of the US workforce was unemployed. And, in Britain, exports virtually halved by 1933 as international trade collapsed.) The political and cultural consequences of the Great Depression were equally far-reaching. The ongoing search fully to comprehend the worldwide economic collapse in the 1930s remains a dizzying intellectual challenge (the Holy Grail of macroeconomics' according to Ben Bernanke). Moreover, the current global economic and financial tumult has prompted many economists -- as well as scholars from related disciplines -- to explore the Great Depression anew in the hope of gaining knowledge on how best to survive the latest desperately serious and sustained global economic slump. As research in and around the Great Depression flourishes as never before this new addition to Routledge's Critical Concepts in Economics series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject's vast literature and the continuing explosion in scholarly output. Edited by two leading scholars in the field, this new Routledge Major Work is a five-volume collection of classic and cutting-edge contributions. With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, The Great Depression is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued as a vital research tool.

Originally published in 1988, this book compiles a collection of works investigating the impact of recession on women's employment. The authors argue that the most important explanation of differences in women's experience between the countries is the form of labour market regulation and organisation. They point out that current changes in these forms of regulation, and not displacement of female labour, pose the main threat to any gains that women have made in the labour market in the post- World War II period.

Few events have posed as many challenges for retirement and retirement policy as the crisis of the late 2000s. At the end of the last decade, the United States experienced the Great Recession-a combination of unprecedented wealth losses and historically high unemployment increases that marked the longest economic recession since the Great Depression. These adverse economic shocks coincided with the burgeoning entry into retirement by the baby boomer generation, those born in the United States between 1946 and 1964. The confluence of these trends meant that retirees may have faced greater economic insecurity than at any point since World War II. This book brings together a number of influential researchers whose work is focused on economic policies and their impacts on retirement income security. They come from both academic and policy backgrounds. Specifically, half of the eight contributors are academics, while the other four come from think tanks in Washington, DC. This book is thus intended to combine research and policy. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Aging and Social Policy.

The global financial crisis that struck Europe has profoundly affected its political, economic and regulatory landscape. This Research Handbook provides an inter-disciplinary view of State interventions in the banking sector, their control under State aid rules since the financial crisis of 2008 and the progressive emergence of a pan-European regulation of banks in distress. Assessing the policy of bank rescues over the past nine years provides a striking summary of European successes and failures and of the continuing tension between integration and fragmentation forces at play within the EU and its single market. This Research Handbook offers insights from law and economics - on the extent to which the EU/EEA State aid regime is able to address adequately the concerns of financial regulation without losing sight of its primary purpose. The contributors include academics, specialists in financial regulation, lawyers, economists and regulators, who have all followed or been directly involved in cases relating to the financial crisis. The Research Handbook on State Aid in the Banking Sector will appeal to advanced students and academics in law and economics, particularly those with an interest in financial institutions, governance and banking. Contributors include: C. Botelho Moniz, G. Bruzzone, M. Cassella, A. Champsaur, F. Coupe, F. de Cecco, J.-S. Duprey, S. Frisch, C. Froitzheim, P. Gouveia e Melo, J. Gray, V. Iftinchi, B. Joosen, I. Kokkoris, F.-C. Laprevote, S. Micossi, L. Nascimento Ferreira, P. Nicolaides, V. Power, C. Quigley, N. Robins, S. Shamsi, P. Solomon, D.S. Tynes

The book argues that a successful monetary and banking reform requires: a rollback of monetary nationalism and return to monetary internationalism; trust in the banking system with its basic functions restored; a balance between competition and solidarity in order to assure political and social acceptance of globalization.

The U.S. economy lost the first decade of the twenty-first century to an ill-conceived boom and subsequent bust. It is in danger of losing another decade to the stagnation of an incomplete recovery. How did this happen? Read this lucid explanation of the origins and long-term effects of the recent financial crisis, drawn in historical and comparative perspective by two leading political economists.

By 2008 the United States had become the biggest international borrower in world history, with more than two-thirds of its $6 trillion federal debt in foreign hands. The proportion of foreign loans to the size of the economy put the United States in league with Mexico, Indonesia, and other third-world debtor nations. The massive inflow of foreign funds financed the booms in housing prices and consumer spending that fueled the economy until the collapse of late 2008. This was the most serious international economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Menzie Chinn and Jeffry Frieden explain the political and economic roots of this crisis as well as its long-term effects. They explore the political strategies behind the Bush administration s policy of funding massive deficits with foreign borrowing. They show that the crisis was foreseen by many and was avoidable through appropriate policy measures. They examine the continuing impact of our huge debt on the continuing slow recovery from the recession. Lost Decades will long be regarded as the standard account of the crisis and its aftermath."

The financial crisis of 2007-9 prompted many to ask how financial systems from America and Iceland to Russia and Hungary could have been so misgoverned that their near collapse plunged the entire world into recession. Randall Germain assess what needs to be done, and by whom, to avoid a repetition of what he calls the 'great freeze'.

When we start with the wrong question, no matter how good an answer we get, it won't give us the results we want. Rather than joining the throngs who are asking, "When will this economic crisis be over? "Jim Wallis says the right question to ask is "How will this crisis change us?

"

The worst thing we can do now, Wallis tells us, is to go back to normal. Normal is what got us into this situation. We need a new normal, and this economic crisis is an invitation to discover what that means. Some of the principles Wallis unpacks for our new normal are . . .

- Spending money we don't have for things we don't need is a bad foundation for an economy or a family.

- It's time to stop keeping up with the Joneses and start making sure the Joneses are okay.

- The values of commercials and billboards are not the things we want to teach our children.

- Care for the poor is not just a moral duty but is critical for the common good.

- A healthy society is a balanced society in which markets, the government, and our communities all play a role.

- The operating principle of God's economy says that there "is "enough if we "share "it.

- And much, much more . . .

In the pages of this book, Wallis provides us with a moral compass for this new economy--one that will guide us on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street.

Embracing a New Economy

Getting back to "the way things were" is not an option. It is time we take our economic uncertainty and use it to find some moral clarity. Too often we have been ruled by the maxims that greed is good, it's all about me, and I want it now. Those can be challenged only with some of our oldest and best values--enough is enough, we are in it together, and thinking not just for tomorrow but for future generations.

Jim Wallis shows that the solution to our problems will be found only as individuals, families, friends, churches, mosques, synagogues, and entire communities wrestle with the question of values "together."

This book focuses on the construction of the economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and its institutions. It reviews the faltering economic performance of the EMU countries before and after the onset of the financial crisis. It exposes the shortcomings and design faults of the EMU project on fiscal and monetary policies under the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and now the 'fiscal compact'. It critically examines the labour market agenda of the EMU and argues for avoidance of the neo-liberal employment policies being advocated. It proposes an alternative policy agenda for a sustainable currency union, and asks whether a currency union can be sustained without de facto political union.

This book is a collection of research papers that contribute to the understanding of ongoing developments in financial institutions and markets both in the United States and globally.

This interdisciplinary volume probes the economic and political impact of both, the 2008-09 financial-economic crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis in Europe. Basing their analysis on a well-researched depiction of the origins and scope of the crisis, leading experts from Europe and North America critically examine its potentially destabilizing political effects. These include questions on the capacity of the European Union to respond swiftly and effectively, challenges to key EU policy commitments (such as climate change and anti-protectionist trade policies), and the manner in which potentially discontent electorates hold their leaders to account. This volume is unique in devoting special attention to the post-communist states, both those that have joined the European Union as well as Russia, and suggests that a global crisis of this type does not respect traditional political or economic boundaries, but rather that it has effects at the regional, national and supranational level. By extending the geographic scope, the authors address important questions about why some countries have suffered more that others and what the crisis will mean for the future shape of Europe.

Euro Crash diagnoses the three fatal design flaws in EMU as constructed by the Maastricht Treaty and analyses future likely monetary scenarios for Europe, demonstrating how the best of these would be the creation of a new narrow monetary union between France and Germany founded on strict monetarist principle and without a European Central Bank.

This new book from MOCOMILA, the Monetary Law Committee of the ILA, is a unique collaboration of the top academic and practitioner monetary and financial lawyers from around the world. It examines current legal issues of international monetary and financial law in the light of the current global financial crisis and consequent reforms of international and domestic financial architecture. The book deals with post-crisis financial regulation and supervision, including that of rating agencies and sovereign wealth funds, and financial crisis resolution with an analysis of bank rescue operations.
Covering matters of current interest such as central banks, international payments, money laundering, and sovereign debt, this book is for banking and financial practitioners, in-house lawyers, central banks and international financial institutions as well as academics in the field of international and financial law.

"When Money Dies" is the classic history of what happens when a nation's currency depreciates beyond recovery. In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany's finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake.

Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, "quantitative easing," that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country's deficit--necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax or blindness to expenditure--it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.