The city of gold is in a death spiral.

Award-winning journalist, inner-city activist, and municipal civil servant Nickolaus Bauer takes a deep dive into how Africa’s economic hub has reached the brink of collapse and what it will take to rescue Joburg.

For local and international readers interested in tracking the collapse and possible resurrection of one of Africa’s greatest cities.

The updated third edition of A Guide to Project Management has been extensively updated to reflect changes in the processes and procedures of project management, global trends and international standards, and the expansion of the Project Management Body of Knowledge.

It also includes a new chapter on Project Management and Development Studies. There are extensive self-assessment questions, group activities, exercises, and guidelines for the completion of a summative assignment/portfolio of evidence based on SAQA Unit Standards and chapter outcomes.

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios.

Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected.

A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

Big Data and Smart Service Systems presents the theories and applications regarding Big Data and smart service systems, data acquisition, smart cities, business decision-making support, and smart service design. The rapid development of computer and Internet technologies has led the world to the era of Big Data. Big Data technologies are widely used, which has brought unprecedented impacts on traditional industries and lifestyle. More and more governments, business sectors, and institutions begin to realize data is becoming the most valuable asset and its analysis is becoming the core competitiveness.

In the first decade of the 21st century, five rising powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) formed an exclusive and informal international club, the BRICS. Although neither revolutionaries nor extreme revisionists, the BRICS perceive an ongoing global power shift and contest the West's pretensions to permanent stewardship of the existing economic order. Together they have exercised collective financial statecraft, employing their expanding financial and monetary capabilities for the purpose of achieving larger foreign policy goals. This volume examines the forms and strategies of such collective financial statecraft, and the motivations of each individual government for collaborating through the BRICS club. Their cooperative financial statecraft takes various forms, ranging from pressure for "inside reforms" of either multilateral institutions or global markets, to "outside options" exercised through creating new multilateral institutions or jointly pushing for new realities in international financial markets. To the surprise of many observers, the joint actions of the BRICS are largely successful. Although each member has its unique rationale for collaboration, the largest member, China, controls resources that permit it the greatest influence in intra-club decision-making. The BRICS cooperate due to both common aversions (for example, resentment over being perennial junior partners in global economic and financial governance and resistance to infringements on their autonomy due to U.S. dollar dominance and financial power) and common interests (such as obtaining greater voice in international institutions, as the IMF). The group seeks reforms, influence, and enhanced leadership roles within the liberal capitalist global system. Where blocked, they experiment with parallel multilateral institutions in which they are the dominant rule-makers. The future of the BRICS depends not only on their bargaining power and adjustment to market players, but also on their ability to overcome domestic impediments to sustainable economic growth, the basis for their international influence.

Prior to 1979, China had a bifurcated and geographically-dispersed industrial structure made up of a relatively small number of large-scale, state-owned enterprises in various industries alongside numerous small-scale, energy-intensive and polluting enterprises. Economic reforms beginning in 1979 led to the rapid expansion of these small-scale manufacturing enterprises in numerous energy-intensive industries such as aluminum, cement, iron and steel, and pulp and paper. Subsequently, the government adopted a new industrial development strategy labeled "grasp the large, let go the small." The aims of this new policy were to close many of the unprofitable, small-scale manufacturing plants in these (and other) industries, create a small number of large enterprises that could compete with OECD multinationals, entice these larger enterprises to engage in high-speed technological catch-up, and save energy. China's Technological Catch-Up Strategy traces the impact of this new industrial development strategy on technological catch-up, energy use, and CO2 emissions. In doing so, the authors explore several detailed, enterprise-level case studies of technological catch-up; develop industry-wide estimates of energy and CO2 savings from specific catch-up interventions; and present detailed econometric work on the determinants of energy intensity. The authors conclude that China's strategy has contributred to substantial energy and CO2 savings, but it has not led to either a peaking of or a decline in CO2 emissions in these industries. More work is needed to cap and reduce China's CO2 emissions.

The United Africa Company (UAC), formed in 1929 by the fusion of the Niger Company and the African and Eastern Corporation, was by far the largest single commercial organization in West and Equatorial Africa, and thus central to modern African economic history. This is the first detailed account to be published and one which fills a serious gap in the literature. It was not commissioned by the company (now reabsorbed into Unilever) but the author had full access to all confidential material in the UAC and Unilever archives and complete freedom in what he wrote. The book is not intended to be primarily a company history but uses the UAC as a focal point for detailed study of how the role of foreign merchant capital changed in response to economic and political developments in Black Africa during this critical half century.