This landmark study of economic history since World War II systematically explores why postwar trade and payments have evolved as they have, the prospects for their future evolution, and the range of policy adjustments likely to be required. Through a rigorous examination and analysis of historical records, the author makes two significant and unique contributions to the scholarship on the subject. First, he reveals the existence of distinct cycles in world trade and payments, beginning in 1959. While scholars have recognized postwar business cycles, none have identified--until now--trade and payments cycles which seem to run parallel. Second, Cohen utilizes newly researched data to explore the much-heralded J-curve and its relevance in relating exchange rates to trade balances, and he identifies several important factors which have slowed the maturation of the J-curve effect on U.S. balances.

The study is divided into four parts and begins by looking at the forces that have shaped the postwar trade and payments order. Cohen then turns to an investigation of the period of advance in the trade and payments order from 1945-1967, describing three distinct stages that reflect the emergence, the establishment, and the peak of this period. Section three begins with an analysis of the structure and causes of the four postwar trade and payments cycles and includes an examination of the differences among them. Subsequent chapters address the different cycles themselves, reviewing the history of each and evaluating the growing challenges to the postwar trade and payments order. In the concluding section, Cohen explores why the J-curve in the U.S. has been so weak during the current cycle and assesses the likely consequences of the failure of existing policies to reduce external imbalances. Finally, the author offers a set of recommendations to reduce such imbalances through a new Cycle of Adjustment. Students of economic history, policy makers, and investors will find in Cohen's work significant new insights into economic processes and the probable future economic terrain.

Input-Output Analysis contains new contributions to inter-industry economics by a set of internationally respected authors. The first part sketches the current state-of-the-art and explores the frontiers for traditional topics in input-output analysis such as inter-industry linkages, feedback effects, and the composition of economic changes. The second part crosses the borders of traditional input-output analysis, covering issues that change the visualization of economic structures, the application of generalized cost functions, and the adoption of alternative modeling frameworks.

This anthology concerns the economic and demographic changes that have occurred in northeastern Ohio since 1960, but specifically during the 1970s and 1980s when that region's major industries (rubber, steel, automobiles) experienced severe decline. Sixteen chapters reflect on the reasons for industrial restructuring, the implications for population growth and future employment and investment opportunities, and the role of local, state, and national governments in undertaking policies that generate economic activity. Three themes dominate: the centrality of employment in regional development; the relation between economic development and product cycles (and thus the need to introduce new economic activities to the region); and the regional, national, and international constraints on local economic-development initiatives. "Choice"

Much has been written concerning the erosion of the industrial base in this particular region and other areas of the country. Drawing heavily upon contributions from nationally recognized experts on urban and regional development as well as input from nanacademic sources, the present volume uses Northeastern Ohio as a case study of older industrial areas suffering from economic repression. Among the topics discussed are the limits of traditional development, fiscal implications of industrial restructuring, and urban adaptibility. Particular cities are also examined in order to pinpoint development problems and to offer alternative paths to local progress.

This book examines various facets of the development process such as aid, poverty, caste networks, corruption, and judicial activism. It explores the efficiency of and distributional issues related to agriculture, and the roles of macro models and financial markets, with a special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity traps and experimental markets. The importance of finite changes in trade and development, as well as that of information technology and issues related to energy and ecosystems, including sustainability and vulnerability, are analyzed. The book presents papers that were commissioned for the Silver Jubilee celebrations at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR). The individual contributions address related development problems, ensuring a homogeneous reading experience and providing a thorough synthesis and understanding of the authors' research areas. The reader will be introduced to various aspects of development thought by leading and contemporary researchers. As such, the book represents an important addition to the literature on economic thought by leading scholars, and will be of great value to graduate students and researchers in the fields of development studies, political economy and economics in general.

The rebirth of competition and the extensive "exit" that has resulted are among the most important developments in Central Europe since the demise of Communism. This text examines why, how, and to what extent enterprises have reduced their size or left the market altogether during the first years of the transition from socialism to capitalism in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

The world economy is at a cross road: it can either widen and deepen international integration, within and between different areas, or be tempted by neo-protectionism. Which road should the international economy take? Which way will it take? The need to reform the present international monetary system has been almost continuously discussed since the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in August 1971, and even earlier, and it has found renewed interest since the Mexican financial crisis in early 1995. Despite the successful completion of the Uruguay Round in December 1993, many international trade problems remain: many sectors were not included in the agreement, antidumping action and safeguards are still possible, and many trade problems of developing and former communist countries have not been fully addressed. This book analyses this situation by first focusing on the problem of international financial stability and the relationship between national economic policies. It then focuses on the European monetary union within the context of the international monetary system. Finally, the development of international trade is examined within an endogenous growth framework.

The reforms initiated in 1991 have transformed India's economy and capital market. The book offers a comprehensive evaluation of developments in both sectors from an investor's viewpoint. The potential growth of India's stockmarket is examined as the country progresses with its economic liberalisation. The insights offered into investing in India can be profitably applied by seasoned investors as well as by non-professionals. This exclusive analysis of the Indian market will be of interest to students and policy makers as much as to anyone interested in investing in one of the major markets to have emerged from its seclusion and opened itself up to global investors.

Providing an empirical look at the Jamaican economy, this careful study examines the impact of the (International Monetary Fund) approach to economic management in the 1980s and compares it to the non-IMF policies of the 1970s. Opening with an overview of the structure of Jamaica's economy, the book discusses the results of the economic policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Demonstrating that Jamaica's income is among the most unequally distributed in the world, the author explores how the policies of various governments affected income distribution, focusing on whether non-IMF policies had a different effect than IMF policies. He concludes with a discussion of how inflation and fiscal policies influence particularly vulnerable groups, which include children, the elderly, and much of the labor force.

This book studies the impact of different sources of external finance on growth and development in different country contexts. An important finding of the study is that 'success' or 'failure' in the productive use of external and domestic financial resources cannot be explained on the basis of single factors such as external shocks or 'bad' versus 'sound' policies. Rather, they are outcomes of complex interactions between changes in exogenous factors (such as fluctuations in external finance and trade shocks), existing economic structures and the responses to shocks by domestic public and private sector agents. This finding also implies that there are no recipes in economic policy-making which are generally applicable; the 'best' policy has to be designed specifically for each country.

Unemployment is growing. Crime is on the increase. The currency has fallen. The initial euphoria following South Africa's transition to democracy is waning as people become disillusioned with the state of the economy and government's lack of delivery on polices and promises. Where does South Africa go from here? It is not all doom and gloom and there is hope for the future. Anthony Ginsberg offers solutions to the fundamental problem of rising unemployment, crime, homelessness and poverty, all excerbated by high taxes, draconian tariffs and stagnant foreign investment. He encourages us to become informed and aware before we criticise. This book is aimed at everyone interested in contributing to South Africa' s future as a prosperous nation in the benefit of all her citizens.

This report examines the causes of low productivity growth in Kazakhstan by combining an analysis of firm-level data and multiple policy drivers. It is the first work to analyze the micro-foundations of the total factor productivity in Kazakhstan and elaborating specific recommendations for boosting aggregate productivity growth.

There are many proposals for stimulating economic growth and lowering unemployment, and though they sometimes make full employment a goal, none of them except the plan highlighted in this well-researched book can make it a promise. John Pierson's Economic Performance Insurance (EPI) plan is the fruit of his lifelong campaign to tackle the New Deal's unsolved problem - involuntary unemployment. EPI avoids the pitfall of relying too heavily on government as the employer of last resort by guaranteeing a continuously adequate market for the products of private enterprise. The budget costs that may be incurred from insuring such a guarantee would be offset by the budget savings resulting from the drastic reduction in the burdensome social costs of welfare, drugs, and crime, which are directly linked to the problem of unemployment. Pierson cogently argues that EPI, or some similar plan, is not only desirable but necessary in the coming century. Eliminating unemployment is the key to tackling a host of other pressing issues, such as welfare reform, poverty, job discrimination, disarmament, and balancing our aid-and-trade relationship with Third World countries. EPI is not a utopian scheme but an eminently practical solution which, with political leadership and vision, could be enacted almost immediately.

Since World War II, America's economic landscape has undergone a profound transformation. The effects of this change can be seen in the decline of the traditional industrial heartland and the emergence of new high tech industrial complexes in California, Texas, Boston, and Florida. The Rise ofthe Gunbelt demonstrates that this economic restructuring is a direct result of the rise of the military industrial complex (MIC) and a wholly new industry based on defense spending and Pentagon contacts. Chronicling the dramatic growth of this vast complex, the authors analyze the roles played by the shift from land and sea warfare to aerial combat in World War II, the Cold War, the birth of aerospace and the consequent radical transformation of the airplane industry, and labor and major defense corporations such as Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas. Exploring the reasons for the shifts in defense spending--including the role of lobbyists and the Department of Defense in awarding contracts--and the effects on regional and national economic development, this comprehensive study reveals the complexities of the MIC.

The Marxist theory of capitalist growth and transformation has often been shrouded in obscurity, either by endless recapitulation of Marx's texts or by excessive use of mathematical formalism. This short book presents an integrated and rigorous view of capitalist development - technical change, class relations, trends in the profit rate and share, cyclical and long-term crisis - in a form that is accessible to serious readers with or without prior training in economics or familiarity with Marxist thought.

After the transition to free economy, governments of the former Soviet republics realized that in spite of becoming a part of the shaky international economic order, their individual economic success can be assured by rational national economic policies that in addition to the fundamental law of supply and demand govern the economic mechanism sensitive to both external and internal phenomena. Originally published in Russian and now translated in English, this book by Dr. A. Ashimov and his colleagues offers a novel theory providing a numerically-justifiable approach to the solution of major economy control problems that are faced by virtually every government in the world. First, they developed and validated numerous mathematical models describing complex interactions between economic and social factors thus enabling the decision makers to foresee the outcomes of their decisions. Second, on the basis of these models the authors formulated the appropriate control problems that could be interpreted as achieving the transition to the desirable economic regimes and maintaining these regimes in spite of initial conditions and both external and internal perturbations. It should be noted that due to the inherent uncertainty introduced by the use of statistical models, the nonlinearity of the underlying phenomena and the intention to obtain the optimal solutions, the solution process becomes quite intricate and calls for the application of the most sophisticated techniques offered in advanced control theory. The authors utilized the most instrumental statistical model validation techniques; they established sufficient conditions for the existence of optimal solutions of the relevant control problems; and they skillfully combined the applications of the phase space formalism, system stability analysis, and the methods of functional analysis. Finally, they developed algorithms resulting in the optimal problem solutions, thus offering economic policy makers a dependable decision support tool. Macroeconomic Analysis and Economic Policy Based on Parametric Control offers a novel, highly mathematical approach to the solution of very realistic economy control problems. It presents a good example of the application of mathematical modeling, advanced control theory, and model-based decision making that could be adopted by researchers and graduate students specializing in economics, control, and relevant areas of research, addressing their own research problems.

A collective effort by American and North African scholars, this volume provides a comprehensive analysis of recent economic, social, and political events in North Africa. It shows how the Maghrebi states and societies are currently at a very important junction as they try to adjust to different ways of doing things in new regional and international orders. Using a political economy approach, the book focuses on a series of issues raised by the interaction between economic crisis and reform on the one hand, and political change or stagnation on the other. The author and his contributors provide a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of particular value to scholars and researchers of the Arab world in general and North Africa in particular.

This book examines the numerous aspects of exchange rates and the dynamics of macroeconomics, focusing on the PPP puzzle, volatility, levels, with an exploration of the real exchange rate misalignment of the Central European countries single equation approach, an examination of the real equilibrium exchange rate in China, exchange rate dynamics and pass-through effects in Russia and Hungary, and structural shocks on economies.

This book traces the growth of capitalism in South East Asia between 1870 and 1941, a crucial element in understanding contemporary economic and political developments in the region. It focuses on three questions. Why was indigenous capitalism so weak in colonial South East Asia? What were the institutional weaknesses in an otherwise dominant Chinese capitalist class, and why did it fail to transform itself into a modern industrial elite? What was the impact of western colonialism and Japanese economic penetration on South East Asia's prospects for achieving sustainable economic growth?

This book presents a theoretically-based comprehensive analysis of macroeconomic consequences of fiscal policy using a popular economic model: the overlapping generations growth model. A wide range of essential public finance issues is analyzed, including the effects of tax reform on dynamic efficiency, positive and normative effects of public spending, considerations of taxes on fixed assets and monetary holdings, and sustainability of deficits. A unique approach is applied in the study of public finance: one expected to generate substantial interest among current graduate students and active researchers.

On an unprecedented scale, nations at all income levels and across the political spectrum have initiated privatization programs over the past twenty years. In the course of this privatization movement, microeconomic efficiency arguments have become the standard justification for the divestment of public assets. This book presents an alternate view and argues that short-term macroeconomic considerations are often the true motive behind privatization programs. Why Do Government Divest? The Macroeconomics of Privatization is a comprehensive treatment of the macroeconomic issues of privatization. In addition to reviewing topics in economic growth and efficiency, this book explores the fiscal, monetary, balance-of-payments, and employment aspects of privatization. Several diverse case studies illustrate how the pursuit of such short-term political objectives can reduce the benefits of privatization.

The primary objective of this book is to advance the state of the art in specifying and ?tting to data structural multi-sector dynamic macroeconomic models, and empirically implementing them. The fundamental construct upon which we build is the Ramsey model. A most attractive feature of this model is the insights it provides into the dynamics of an economy in tr- sition to long-run equilibrium. With some exceptions, Ramsey models are highly aggregated - typically single sector models. However, interest often lies in understanding the forces of e- nomic growth across multiple sectors of an economy and on how policy impacts likely play out over time. Such analyses call for moredisaggregatedmodelsthatcanbe?ttocountryorregional data.Thisbookshowshowto: (i)extendthebasicmodeltom- tiple sectors, (ii) how to adapt the basic model to account for policy instruments, and (iii) 't the model to data, and obtain equilibrium values both forward and backward in time from the data points to which the model is initially 't

"Managing the World Economy," while recognizing how much has been achieved since the start of the Industrial Revolution, challenges the view that much better results could not have been attained. It argues that faster economic growth and much better use of the available human talent could have been in the past, and should be in the future, achievable targets. The reasons for the performance of the world economy over the past 200 years being well below the achievable optimum stem mainly from misconceptions about macroeconomic policy, which the book sets out to explain and correct.

Investment in Latin America is continuously developing in complex patterns due to the region's increasing role in the global economy. The Handbook of Research on Economic Growth and Technological Change in Latin America helps readers to better understand the importance of Latin America in today's global economy. The book discusses the developments of investments involving Latin American Multinational Corporations ("Multilatinas") within the region. This investment is having profound influences on the state of business, government, and technological development in Latin America, which are all explored in this reference publication for use by researchers, scholar-practitioners, business executives, students, and academicians.

The International Papers in Political Economy (IPPE) series explores the latest developments in political economy. This eighth volume focuses on the financial crisis currently gripping the eurozone, examining the root causes and outcomes and the uncertain future of the euro. The volume provides an overview of the crisis and its possible solutions, with a sharp focus on debt sustainability. Individual countries are also analysed in great depth, with four more detailed studies of the economic climate in Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Greece, exploring the implications of the crisis for economic policies of these countries.