While research evaluation has achieved particular significance in the United Kingdom, there is growing interest and activity in this area among Scandanavian countries. Funded by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, this book is a product of the increasing recognition of the importance of evaluations. The principal aim of "Economics of Sweden" is to locate Swedish economic research in an international setting and from there, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Swedish economics. Throughout, an effort has been made to relate to recent work on evaluation by developing a theoretical foundation for assessing the future of Swedish economic research. The authors have achieved this by maintaining close two-way contact with the profession and by combining different empirical methods. This has taken the form of continuous interaction with the economics profession in seminars and on site visits to various economics departments. Although the study is focused on Sweden the analysis should also be relevant to several other countries, particularly the other Nordic countries, Canada, Australia and Israel.

In contemporary shopping sites new modes of subjectivity, inter-personal relationships and models of social totality are being "tried on", "taken off" and "displayed" in much the same way that one might shop for clothes. These are not the modernist spaces of goal-directed individuals and utopian projects. Rather it is a space of carnivalesque inversions of the present order of things. The multiple masks of the postmodern person "who wears many hats" in different groups and surroundings form a veritable "dramatis personae". In such masks of the individual and the social world may be found a new spatialization and new intuitive perceptions of time and space. This representation of contemporary social life grows out of the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Maffesoli, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin. It is an attempt to take seriously the idea that we live in a postmodern consumer culture and to follow through the implications and possibilities of this idea. Cases are drawn from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore to illustrate the new intersections between people, mass culture and consumption.

This volume provides a careful account of the leading propositions about the welfare gains associated with international trade and investment under differing institutional arrangements and policy choices. It concentrates on exploring two propositions which are valid for economies of any size; the first being the assertion of the gainfulness of free trade for a single free-trading country, and a second, more general proposition about the welfare economics of customs unions. Both the logic and implementability of these propositions are assessed, as is their relevance to the formation of commercial policy.
Murray c. Kemp is Research Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He has also taught at McGill University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Henry Y. Wan, Jr. is Research Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He has also taught at the National Taiwan University, University of California at Davis, USA and Fudan University, PRC.

Baumol's Cost Disease is the inevitable escalation of the real costs that occur in labour-intensive industries like the arts, health care and education. The labour costs in these industries tend to increase at the same rate as other industries, but their scope for utilizing labour-saving technical progress is either small or non-existent.The book opens with an introduction by Ruth Towse in which there is an overview of William Baumol's work. In this discussion Ruth Towse examines Baumol's work in the context of the development of the economics of the arts. The volume is then divided into parts and begins by introducing William Baumol's work through several autobiographical essays. This is followed by some of his early contributions to cultural economics and the cost disease. William Baumol's leading macroeconomic work on the 'unbalanced growth model' is also included and the debate about it at its inception. In parts three and four some of the more empirical papers on the arts are presented as well as essays on policy implications for the arts. Following this are chapters on the theatre and publishing as well as historical studies of the arts and the implications of the cost disease for libraries, health care and education. This book contains William Baumol's contribution to cultural economics and spans over 30 years of writing on the subject, much of which is not widely available. It provides a real insight into the development of Baumol's analysis and his perception of the problems of the arts and other labour-intensive sectors.

The papers in this volume were presented in Budapest at the 20th Colloquium of the SociA(c)tA(c) Universitaire EuropA(c)enne de Recherches FinanciA]res (SUERF), arranged in association with the Robert Triffin-SzirAk Foundation. Each paper deals with a different aspect of the characteristics of and trends in corporate governance. The three main topics are: Corporate governance of financial institutions; Corporate governance as exerted by financial institutions; Financial instutions as participants in the transfer of corporate governance. A/LISTA The structure of financial markets and institutions has a significant impact on the ways in which the power to manage corporate resources is allocated. The relative roles of different types of owners and the legal framework within which they operate are currently in a state of flux throughout Europe. Financial integration in the European Union, the transition to open market economies in Central and Eastern Europe and privatization, have a profound effect on the behaviour and influence of different enterprises. This collection of papers demonstrates the range of aspects of corporate governance in a world characterized by rapid technological, political and institutional change which is currently concerning researchers and practitioners. The authors come from a wide number of countries and disciplines, and include people from leading banks and corporations, public officials and academics, providing different perspectives on corporate governance, financial markets and global convergence in eastern and western Europe. Their contributions will be of considerable interest to academics in the fields of finance and banking, monetary economics andmacro-economics, and also to professionals in banks, securities houses, corporate treasuries, pension funds, consultancies, law firms, central banks and regulatory bodies.

This collection of essays presents insight and methodology that are highly relevant for readers today as they consider the future of the world they live in. Experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, people have realized how fragile the current economy is and the necessity for reconstructing the socio-economic system. That system, which was considered the default for so long, was succeeded by the analytical framework of economics and regional science. The contents of this book are diversified, as are the achievements of Prof. Yasuhiro Sakai, to whom this volume is dedicated, and cover a wide area from mathematical and experimental economics to conventional and emerging fields of regional science. Some are timeless topics that have had new life breathed into them. Part I deals with, among other areas, risk management with uncertain events; the effectiveness and impacts of regulation and friction related to trading; the stability of strategic behavior and market equilibrium; and sustainable regional development and urban planning from the long-term perspective. Part II also presents a diversity of subjects, including input-output analysis and computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling for internal as well as external structure and network linkage, such as a value chain; openness and creativity as related to competition among cities and regions; dispersion versus concentration; and inequality versus equality.

This carefully edited selection of Robert Eisner's essays ties together his authoritative contributions to economic analysis and macroeconomic policy issues, particularly business, investment and tax policy. He offers a trenchant analysis of the fundamental issues of employment, investment and economic welfare in an advanced market economy, offering a challenge to the conventional wisdom on macroeconomic theory and policy.Professor Eisner first examines the determinants of business investment and criticizes neoclassical theories on investment. He goes on to assess the role of tax incentives in investment and finds that tax policy is a flawed way of attempting to encourage investment. He also analyses national income accounting and offers some alternative measurements for calculating national product. Professor Eisner then examines the implications of war for the economy and explores the macroeconomic consequences of disarmament including its possible effects on unemployment. Lastly, he addresses the conflict between economic policy and principle; particularly concerning the environment, insurance and the theory of choice, academic freedom and the elderly.

This book looks at East Asia's monetary and financial integration from both Asian and European perspectives. It analyzes the Euro area's framework for monetary policy implementation, introduced in 1999. It reviews the efforts to foster regional monetary and financial integration and relates them to Europe's own evolution. It highlights successes and failures in both cases and offers a careful assessment of the state of play. A central theme of the volume is that the East Asian reliance on markets is not enough to promote the kind of deep integration that Europe has achieved and that provides protection against exchange rate turbulence. The implications of the recent global crisis are also examined.
Written by two of the foremost monetary experts on Asia and Europe, this book will be an invaluable aid to students and academics interested in the relevance of the European experience to the debates about monetary integration in East Asia.

Societies, whether traditional or modern, experience tension between spontaneity (individual freedom) and control (regulation). Consequently, economies as a subsystem of society experience it too. More specifically, they experience a tension between economic individualism and economic collectivism, which in modern economies revolves around the role of the state in the economy. Since the collapse of communism, this tension has manifested itself not as a tension between market capitalism and command socialism but as a tension between the free market and the interventionist variants of market capitalism. Although currently economic and political liberalization is in evidence worldwide, not only in post-communist societies, its outcome remains uncertain. Liberal democracy in the sense of democratic politics and free-market economics has not triumphed hitherto, and also its future is far from assured. The end of history is not in sight.

This book deals with analysis of international finance and trade using a global macroeconomic model focused on Africa. Historical, econometric, as well as general and partial equilibrium analyses are creatively used both to explore finance and trade related issues in Africa, and to model the pattern that emerges from such exploration. The model developed is used for analysis of external shocks and domestic policy responses.

The United Nations is in a time of major crisis in the history of the organization. The product of many leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, this work examines whether out of the crisis of mulitlateralism engulfing the organization in the late 1980s there could arise a renewed and strengthened global body. Pursuing the theme of the dynamics of international cooperation, thirteen authors look at three principal issue-areas: the principal UN organs, leading economic subjects, and leading social subjects. Two distinguished American scholars provide concluding commentaries. Running throughout the book is an emphasis on the economic dimension to international politics.

This book discusses the economic interaction and interdependence that has arisen amongst nations in the contemporary world economy, the nature and significance of the pattern of trade balances that have resulted from them and the question of what, if anything, should be done by national governments about that pattern. The need for international coordination of economic policies is also investigated.

Presented to Margaret Hall by her friends and associates who have known her at Oxford University, this book addresses some of the major issues associated with competition in theory and practice. The main feature of the book is a piece on privatization by a Nobel prize winner in economics. Among other essays, Paul Samuelson considers the theoretical underpinning of privatizing state assets. Mary Gregory ponders on the possibility of co-operation rather than competition between employer and worker and whether incomes policies are likely to feature on a medium-term political agenda.

Growth patterns have changed radically over the last two decades, to which capital and the labour markets appear to have failed to adapt. Unemployment in Europe has been growing, almost without remission, to levels unseen since the Great Depression. These facts are somewhat at odds with the development of growth theory which has mainly been orientated towards an equilibrium full employment framework. The main message of equilibrium theory of fluctuations was precisely that the policy maker is impotent. Now, with the universal acceptance of endogenous growth theory, the common concensus proposition would be `we are all neo-classical for the short run and Keynesian for the long run' (investment being too important for growth to be left entirely in private hands).

Nowhere is the historic global transformation creating a new international context more striking than in East and South Asia. Leading specialists here discuss key economic and political changes within the region, and the impact of the Asian economic miracle on global politics and international relations. Prospects for growth, democracy and security are investigated in depth as well as their implications for other powers in the post cold-war world.

The original theory of capital cost and capital structure put forward by Nobel Prize Winners Modigliani and Miller has since been modified by many authors, and this book discusses some of them. The book's authors have created general theory of capital cost and capital structure - the Brusov-Filatova-Orekhova (BFO) theory, which generalizes the Modigliani-Miller theory to encompass companies of an arbitrary age (and arbitrary lifetime). Despite the availability of this more general theory, the classical Modigliani-Miller theory is still widely used in practice. In this book, the authors for the first time generalize it for cases of practical relevance: for the case of variable profit; for the case of advance tax-on-profit payments and interest on debt payments; for the case of several tax-on-profit and interest on debt payments per period; and for the combination of all three effects. These generalizations lead to valuable theoretical results as well as significantly widen of practical application this theory in practice and increase of the quality of finance management of the company. As well, the book investigates the applications of said results in corporate finance, investments, taxation and ratings, where employing a generalized Modigliani-Miller theory can be very fruitful.

This book analyses the new strategic decisions of the European Central Bank. Contributors from different fields examine especially the sustainability strategy of the ECB: What role can the European Central Bank play in fighting climate change?  ECB President Christine Lagarde has repeatedly confirmed that the central bank wants to play a role in coping with climate change. What will this role be? What instruments does the ECB have to make a difference in challenges such as the defossilization of the economy and transport, biodiversity, the energy transition, resource consumption and other sustainability areas? Is it entitled or obliged to go beyond the classic mandate of maintaining price stability? The volume includes contributions from academics and practitioners from the financial sector, civil society and institutions involved at European level.

This volume discusses major macroeconomic policies and issues from theoretical and practical perspective focusing on the link between theory of macroeconomic management policy and its practice in the last few decades. The topics selected here are of persistent interest for those interested in economic policy - theorists and policists.

The distinguished contributors in this volume provide a variety of essays, which are written in honor of Emmanuel Drandakis. These essays fall into four uniform areas of economics: economic growth, general equilibrium, labor economics and game theory and applications.The editors focus on a select set of issues that stand high on the agenda of academic research. They provide fresh insights and approaches to the analysis of these issues, and thus open up wider avenues for our understanding of the dilemmas posed for theory and policy. Readers are offered new empirical evidence on such thorny social problems as, for example, unemployment, the intergenerational transmission of human capital and the response of wages to price and endowment changes. These contributions, in conjunction with the realisation that the papers are written by some of the most distinguished economists in the respective areas, make the volume an attractive addition for all who are interested in the contemporary research and teaching of economics.

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have been widely used for various economic simulations, such as, trade liberalization, environmental problems, and regulatory and tax reforms. CGE models are powerful but tend to be large-scale and, therefore, often difficult to learn. This book provides a comprehensive A-to-Z guide for CGE models. Focusing on its practical application, readers can learn from the simplest CGE models, and proceed, in a step-by-step manner, to database construction, programming for computation, and developing more elaborated CGE models, which can be applied empirically to actual simulation purposes. Particular emphasis is placed on computer programs of CGE models. Readers can obtain knowledge and skills from which they can develop and operate their own CGE models, and apply them to their research. This book is essential reading for all interested in computational economics, advanced macroeconomics, international trade, regional development, development economics.