The major industrialized countries are undergoing a significant demographic transition associated with low fertility rates combined with reduced mortality rates. A major consequence of the current transition is that populations are expected to age substantially over the next forty years. This innovative book studies the effects of population ageing with the associated factor of immigration, on social expenditure and public finance. The authors begin by providing an introduction to some of the main issues concerning population ageing and migration. This is followed by a discussion of the demographic and economic aspects of the transition towards an older population which is taking place in the major industrialized countries. Within this framework the impacts of ageing on government budgets and the labour market are analysed. The book then turns to a discussion of some of the economic, social and demographic issues related to immigration. Particular emphasis is placed on the Australian economy, which provides an interesting case study in view of its high immigration levels, particularly over the last fifty years. The authors project population structure and social expenditure patterns under a variety of assumptions concerning the number and composition of immigrants. The quantitative techniques developed to produce these projections can be applied without modification to any other country. Population Ageing, Migration and Social Expenditure will be of use to academics and students with an interest in public finance, public policy and population studies.

It was a part of the wisdom of mainstream economics that in the early stages of development inequality would rise but as growth persisted, it would, eventually, decline. Early evidence seemed to suggest that this pattern would be borne out. But, as time passed and growth persisted, inequality continued to grow, casting doubt on the received wisdom. The aim of this two-volume book is to analyze the current state of global and regional inequality, dissect the phenomenal increase in inequality that we have seen occur in recent times, and better understand the complex relationship between inequality and development. The political instability and conflict that we see around the world, arguably, has connection to economic deprivation of large segments of society and the perception of marginalization. This two-volume work acquires a special significance in the light of these developments.

This volume collects a selection of refereed papers of the more than one hundred presented at the InternationalConference MAF 2008 - Mathematicaland Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance. The conference was organised by the Department of Applied Mathematics and theDepartment ofStatisticsoftheUniversityCa'Foscari Venice(Italy), withthec- laborationofthe Department ofEconomics and StatisticalSciences ofthe University ofSalerno(Italy).Itwas heldinVenice, fromMarch 26to28,2008, attheprestigious CavalliFranchettipalace, alongGrand Canal, oftheIstitutoVenetodiScienze, Lettere ed Arti. This conference was the ?rst international edition of a biennial national series begunin2004, whichwas bornof thebrilliantbeliefofthe colleagues -and friends- oftheDepartmentofEconomicsandStatisticalSciences oftheUniversityofSalerno: the idea following which the cooperation between mathematicians and statisticians in working in actuarial sciences, in insurance and in ?nance can improve research on these topics. The proof of this consists in the wide participation in these events. In particular, with reference to the 2008 internationaledition: - More than 150 attendants, both academicians and practitioners; - More than 100 accepted communications, organised in 26 parallel sessions, from authors coming from about twenty countries (namely: Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, USA); - two plenary guest-organised sessions; and - aprestigiouskeynotelecturedeliveredbyProfessorWolfgangHa ]rdleoftheH- boldt Universityof Berlin (Germany)

This book explores the debate on the policies required to overcome the crises of 2008 and 2011, in which the focus on short-term measures has overshadowed the need to analyze the low growth rate in the European Union, and especially the Eurozone, as the basis for interventions that will counteract the tendency toward stagnation. Factors that lie at the root of the low growth are examined in depth, covering, for example, the impact of the demographic trend toward an aging population in Europe, consequences of inequality for growth, challenges posed by technological change, competition from emerging countries, and difficulties in improving European governance. In addition, potential actions to foster innovation and avoid long-term stagnation, such as new measures to open up markets, stimulate competition in services, and promote green growth, are discussed. The book comprises a selection of contributions presented at the XXVII Villa Mondragone International Economic Seminar, which brought together renowned economists and representatives of a broad range of countries and leading international institutions. It will appeal to all who are interested in the latest thinking on stagnation/growth, inequality, governance, competitiveness, and innovation in Europe.

Egypt experienced an economic shift from a managed economic strategy to one of market-oriented resource allocation starting in the 1970s, and in 1987 signed a stabilization program agreement with the International Monetary Fund. This is an overview of these structural changes experienced by the Egyptian economy in the 70s and 80s. The main tool to assess the effectiveness of the policies and to evaluate growth prospects under different policy scenarios is an integrated macroeconomic-energy demand-input/output model. Four different policy scenarios are explored.

Labour: A Heterodox Approach provides a theoretical reconstruction of the labour and job market by examining it in a rich historical context. It explores the fundamental implications of the theories of consumption and growth and aims at solving the difficulties raised by the dominant economic theories (neoclassical, Keynesian, supply side) by taking into account the dimension of the historical conflict of the labour market and the public intervention that results from it, such as the construction of a specific legal framework that is to say, labour law. The work focuses on providing a description of conflict and intervention, the market's leading characteristics, and demonstrates that they can be interpreted by introducing two major remedial hypotheses in economic fundamentals. It also contributes to solving several theoretical controversies and highlights the two main perspectives on the economic regulation of the labour market.

As the shock of the 2008 European financial crisis begins to subside, it is time for scholars to step back and analyze the crisis's causes and effects from a multidisciplinary vantage point. Europe in Crisis examines the current state of the European economy, society, and polity, both on the theoretical and political levels, by placing special emphasis on its current crisis. With important contributions from heterodox economists and radical social and political scientists, this innovative new edited collection seeks to evaluate past efforts and policies (mainly since World War II), criticize the failed neoclassical/neoliberal perspectives, and offer alternative strategies and policies to Europe's socioeconomic impasse and misery.

This book studies the sustainability and optimality of public debt under different scenarios: the closed economy, the small open economy, and a two-country setting. Sustainability refers to the existence and the stability of the long-run equilibrium. Optimality relates to the path of public debt that maximizes discounted utility. The analysis is conducted within the framework of the Solow model, the overlapping generations model and the infinite horizon model. The government can follow different strategies, it either fixes the deficit ratio or the tax rate. As a result, a fixed deficit ratio generally can be sustained. By contrast, a fixed tax rate generally cannot be sustained. Depending on the chosen fiscal strategy, there exists either an optimal deficit ratio or an optimal tax rate that maximizes the sum of consumption and government purchases per capita.

This book examines the objectives of public debt management and the re-emerging issue of separating monetary policy formulation from fiscal and debt management. The recent Great Recession has resulted in a rethink of the objectives and working of macroeconomics, and in many countries, including India, has led to the scope of fiscal operations being expanded and debt-to-GDP ratios increasing significantly. Consequently, debt management has encountered considerable difficulties, and the need for coordination between monetary and debt management has assumed greater significance. The book discusses the important issue of the independence of central banks and the need for coordination between debt managers, monetary authorities and finance ministries if debt operations are separated from monetary management.

This text addresses the understanding and alleviation of poverty, inequality, and inequity using a unique and broad mix of concepts, measurement methods, statistical tools, software, and practical exercises. Most of the book's measurement and statistical tools have been programmed in DAD, a well established and widely available free software program that has been tailored especially for income distribution analysis and is used by scholars, researchers, and analysts in nearly 100 countries worldwide. It requires basic understanding of calculus and statistics. There are examples and exercises using real data.

This book provides an account of the principal phases in the development of the English banking system, and goes on to analyse the financial structure of the economy of the UK. The book focuses in detail on the regulatory and supervisory aspects of the UK banking system, and the interactions between the structural aspects of the banking and supervisory system.

The collection considers several aspects of the transformation of the former state socialist countries: social and economic outcomes; forces in the transformation process; problems of consolidation of the new regimes; and alternative scenarios. Comparisons are made between the successful central European countries now members of the European Union with those of the former Soviet Union. The impact of the collapse of the USSR and the course of transformation is considered on China, Cuba, and North Korean. The book also contemplates the alternative types of society that might replace state socialism, particularly state capitalism and market socialism.

This book is the outcome of the international symposium on 'Economic Integration in Asia and India' held in Tokyo, Japan, on Decemeber 8, 2005.
In the flow of globalization in the world economies, the regional economic integrations which have been progressing institutionally in the EU and Americas are now substantially under way among countries in Asia, including Japan, Korea, China and the ASEAN countries. India has also taken steps on the passage towards economic integration. India's full-scale participation in the Asian market will affect other East Asian countries, which in turn will also have manifold influences on India. This book aims to trigger a wider examination of Asian economic integration.

Collecting Nobel Laureate William S. Vickrey's articles on macroeconomic theory and policy written towards the end of his career, this volume demonstrates his enduring commitment to full employment and price stability, and his rejection of conventional macroeconomic theorizing. William Vickrey never lost hope that sensible macroeconomic policy could be understood and implemented, a faith inspired by his humanistic vision of a better world for all and his belief that common sense would ultimately prevail. Advocating sensible economic policies, this collection will offer much of value to heterodox and orthodox economists, graduate economics students and also policymakers.

Alfred Marshall has traditionally been listed alongside pioneering 'neoclassical' economists. In this volume, Neil Hart challenges this view, illuminating the ambiguities within Marshall's work, and exploring his reconciliation of two modes of thinking, equilibrium economics and evolutionary economics.

This book examines alternative economic policies for the European Union in the aftermath of the rejection of the European Constitution. The subject range includes macroeconomic policy and the European Constitution, EU financial integration, the reform of European regional policy, assessment and alternative proposals on European structural policies and labour market policies in the European Union.

Financial markets are not predictable, let alone controllable. The one thing traders and investors can control is their trading tactics, where some can have higher probability of profitability than others. This book explains, by using phase analysis, why some of the indicators, and trading tactics would work better than others, and why some indicators and trading tactics would perform poorly. Emphasis is placed on Awesome Oscillator and Accelerator Oscillator, which are based on Simple Moving Average, a popular tool employed by traders. They are then compared to Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD) and MACD Histogram (MACDH), which are based on exponential moving averages. By varying the parameters of MACD and MACDH, one can change the phase or time delay, and possibly make a larger profit. This book is for practitioners, and includes all MATLAB programs used in the book.

A comparison of British and German industries' reaction to the opportunities and threats offered by the Single European Market (SEM) is presented here. The book outlines the effect that the SEM was expected to have on the two countries and contrasts this with actual progress, based on published data and a detailed study of four industries: retailing, pharmaceuticals, insurance and machine tools. It shows that while indeed the single European market has had an impact, many measures have had a far weaker effect than expected. The existence of other barriers not tackled by the SEM programme - weakened measures, poor implementation, global business trends and the recent recession - helped to reduce the impact of the SEM. Nevertheless it stands out as one of the most striking influences on British and German industries for many years. Germany, with its geographical advantage, longer-term approach and stronger manufacturing, seems the better placed to benefit overall. But the less regulated and, in some respects, more flexible UK economy may have competitive advantages as the pressures increase. It is no accident that it has been chosen so frequently as the best site within the EC for investment by firms from non-EC countries.

Analyzing the Gross National Product (GNP) and other national economic statistics is one way to look at the financial well being of a country. Another more revealing and more interesting way is to analyze the variety and amount of goods and services consumed by citizens, businesses, and the various levels of government. The "Handbook" presents a systematic and statistical portrait of consumption and wealth, allowing readers to better understand America's economic, political, and cultural landscape. This handbook focuses on the latest statistical information available on U.S. spending habits by exploring a wide range of economic, demographic, and geographic variables.

Economic Behavior and Distributional Choice brings together, for the first time, Harold M. Hochman's key papers on income redistribution and policy in one accessible volume.The introduction describes the genesis and development of a new direction in thinking, and the papers that follow cover the evolutions of an idea: the alliance between distribution policy and distributional preference as developed through public choice theory. This fine collection illustrates Harold M. Hochman's major contributions to the discussion of the relationship between distributional preference, income transfer policy and economic justice, including the concept of Pareto Optimal Distribution. These contributions have significantly advanced our understanding of the ways in which economic analysis can inform income distribution policy. This pathbreaking selection of writings, including a set of innovative papers on fiscal design, urban policy and addictive behavior, will be of great interest to academics, students and researchers concerned with macroeconomics and economic behavior.

This book studies the strategic interactions between monetary and fiscal policies in the world economy. The world economy consists of two regions, say Europe and America. The policy makers are the central banks and the governments. The policy targets are low inflation, low unemployment, and low structural deficits. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are regional shocks and common shocks. This book develops a series of basic, intermediate, and more advanced models. Here the focus is on the Nash equilibrium. The key questions are: Given a shock, can policy interactions reduce the existing loss? And to what extent can they do so? Another topical issue is policy cooperation. To illustrate all of this there are a lot of numerical examples. The present book is part of a larger research project on European Monetary Union, see the references given at the back of the book. Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association, at the International Conference on Macroeconomic Analysis, at the International Institute of Public Finance, and at the International Atlantic Economic Conference. Other parts were presented at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, at the Gottingen Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg, at the Research Seminar on Economics in Kassel, and at the Passau Workshop on International Economics."

This book was prompted by the current, lingering financial crisis, which has its basis in the disorderly financial practices of the United States. These practices have resulted in an accumulated debt which now requires the United States to run financial policies at artificially low interest rates. In principle, these low interest rates should flood the markets with ready money. Since the spread for banks is very thin, however, and they must carefully discriminate between available risks and finance only those propositions with no risk, credit is not abundantly available. With staggering foreign debt and a myriad of other perils looming, this great nation is at peril for sure. In the tradition of the Heilbronn Symposium, the authors look at historical cases as a means of understanding the current situation and informing possible solutions to a problem that continues to affect the global economy. The volume analyzes cases such as Prussia, Greece, Italy, Estonia, and the European Union. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of economic history as well as policy makers who may benefit from an historical understanding of the economic challenges their countries currently face.

This book arose from our conviction that the NNS-DSGE approach to the analysis of aggregate market outcomes is fundamentally flawed. The practice of overcoming the SMD result by recurring to a fictitious RA leads to insurmountable methodological problems and lies at the root of DSGE models failure to satisfactorily explain real world features, like exchange rate and banking crises, bubbles and herding in financial markets, swings in the sentiment of consumers and entrepreneurs, asymmetries and persistence in aggregate variables, and so on. At odds with this view, our critique rests on the premise that any modern macroeconomy should be modeled instead as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting individuals, acting adaptively and autonomously according to simple and empirically validated rules of thumb. We call our proposed approach Bottom-up Adaptive Macroeconomics (BAM). The reason why we claim that the contents of this book can be inscribed in the realm of macroeconomics is threefold: i) We are looking for a framework that helps us to think coherently about the interrelationships among two or more markets. In what follows, in particular, three markets will be considered: the markets for goods, labor and loanable funds. In this respect, real time matters: what happens in one market depends on what has happened, on what is happening, or on what will happen in other markets. This implies that intertemporal coordination issues cannot be ignored. ii) Eventually, it s all about prices and quantities. However, we are mostly interested in aggregate prices and quantities, that is indexes built from the dispersed outcomes of the decentralized transactions of a large population of heterogeneous individuals. Each individual acts purposefully, but she knows anything about the levels of prices and quantities which clear markets in the aggregate. iii) In the hope of being allowed to purport scientific claims, BAM relies on the assumption that individual purposeful behaviours aggregates into regularities. Macro behaviour, however, can depart radically from what the individual units are trying to accomplish. It is in this sense that aggregate outcomes emerge from individual actions and interactions.