In recent years, the potential role of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in fostering socio-economic development has received increasing attention in the international economic community. However, no previous works have dealt with the technological capabilities of these enterprises. Here, A. S. Bhalla and a distinguished group of contributors fill this gap by presenting a sustained analysis of the technology issues and options facing small and medium enterprises in both urban and rural settings. The work is organized around three major issues: the policies and programs that affect small and medium enterprises; the innovation potential of these businesses; and the institutions and infrastructure most conducive to their success in developing and advanced economies.

Following Bhalla's introduction, Part One looks at the macro- and microeconomic policy environment necessary to stimulate the innovative capacity and potential of SMEs. The contributors show that existing policy measures are invariably geared toward large enterprises and discuss whether removal of these policy biases is enough to promote SME growth or whether more interventionist approaches are needed. Part Two focuses on the capacity of SMEs to design and manufacture equipment or products--adapting technology to suit their particular requirements. The contributors challenge the accepted views in this area, demonstrating that even microenterprises have the capacity for product and process innovations. In Part Three, the contributors examine the success of the business incubation process in fostering technological innovation, the traditional forms of support offered to SMEs in developing economies, and the linkages between SMEs and research institutions. In each section, individual chapters examine the operation of SMEs in a variety of settings in both advanced and developing countries. Must reading for policymakers and students of international economics, "Small and Medium Enterprises" is a catalyst for informed action in this vital segment of economic activity.

The deflationary Japanese economy is a spurious observation and a precarious political propaganda, which tacitly connects with the fanatic diagnosis urging an inflation-prompting macroeconomic policy. This book provides an overview of the prolonged stagnation of the current Japanese economy. It also examines the politico-economic implications concerning the precarious conversion of Japanese monetary policy and focuses on the vulnerability of the price-sustaining policy concerning the public debt. The book also analyzes and suggests against the acceleration of inflation under the current Japanese foreign exchange system and also suggests that the surge of foreign direct investment towards East Asia is the acute cause of Japanese economy stagnation. The book concludes that to rebuild the economic potential of the Japanese economy, education and fostering the youths are the keys. This book will definitely interest those who are keen to learn more about the relationship between Bank of Japan and the Japanese political parties.

This 13-volume collection originally published between 1929 and 1982 contains a selection of titles from the fields of economics and political science. Many individual titles focus on Britain and include topics such as democracy; environmental planning; foreign policy; legislation; microeconomics; national income; and the welfare state. The earliest title looks at the nature of nationality, and two further titles look at politics in France. This set will be an insight for those interested in the history of either field.

The encouragement of the birth and growth of high technology small firms is a major goal of both national and regional government planning agencies. However, while there is broad agreement on the increasing value of this type of small firm to future industrial expansion beyond the year 2000, there is little hard evidence on which to base measures to encourage the rate of new firm formation and subsequent growth. This book aids policy prescription by providing a detailed study of regional variations in the management of innovation in high technology small firms. The empirical research considers all the major management factors that are inputs to the innovation process through a time-series study of innovation in British and American high technology small firms. In conclusion, results of this study form the basis of a radical new policy approach to the promotion of growth in high technology small firms.

After five years of debates, consultations and negotiations, the European institutions reached an agreement in 2013 on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the 2014-2020 period. The outcome has major implications for the EU's budget and farmers' incomes, but also for Europe's environment, its contribution to global climate change and to food security in the EU and in the world. It was decided to spend more than EURO400 billion during the rest of the decade on the CAP. The official claims are that the new CAP will take better account of society's expectations and lead to far-reaching changes by making subsidies fairer and 'greener' and making the CAP more efficient. It is also asserted that the CAP will play a key part in achieving the overall objective of promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. However, there is significant scepticism about these claims and disappointment with the outcome of the decision-making, the first in which the European Parliament was involved under the co-decision procedure. In contrast to earlier reforms where more substantive changes were made to the CAP, the factors that induced the policy discussions in 2008-13 and those that influenced the decision-making did not reinforce each other. On the contrary, they sometimes counteracted one another, yielding an 'imperfect storm' as it were, resulting in more status quo and fewer changes. This book discusses the outcome of the decision-making and the factors that influenced the policy choices and decisions. It brings together contributions from leading academics from various disciplines and policy-makers, and key participants in the process from the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Most volumes in the environmental economics literature consider the environment to be a public good and hence write out a role for the private sector in a source of supply. Yet there is ample evidence of the private sector being involved, driven both by profit and altruism. This book provides the necessary conceptual base for the inclusion of the private sector in the environmental protection supply equation and deliver an extensive set of examples in a wide range of contexts. In an economic climate where governments are attempting to reduce expenditures, the increased role for the private sector will be readily embraced by policy makers.The aim of the book is to establish the principles of markets in the provision of environmental protection and to provide an extensive experience-based set of contexts in which the private sector has acted to enhance the supply of environmental goods and services. These contexts include both pure-private sector initiatives in terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems and public-private sector 'joint initiatives' such as payment for environmental services (PES) schemes.

Examining the role of the public sector in small-business debt-capital formation, this book describes current approaches, conceptually and pragmatically, and evaluates their advantages and disadvantages from a variety of perspectives. It also suggests a model for improving our approach to small business capital formation in the United States. Financing small business creation and expansion has always been difficult. Private debt capital providers tend to avoid small business because the latter are preceived to be too risky. Yet because of the importance of small businesses to national economic growth, stability, and innovation, ensuring that these businesses can obtain and effectively use appropriate levels of debt capital is vital to national well-being. How, and to what extent, should the public sector intervene in the debt capital markets to ensure that sufficient capital flows to small businesses? This book is an attempt to answer that question.

A typical consumer underestimates the benefits of future energy savings and underinvests in energy efficiency, relative to a description of the socially optimal level of energy efficiency. To alleviate this energy-efficiency gap problem, various programs have been implemented. In recent years, many governments have started providing consumers with subsidies on the purchases of eco-friendly products such as hybrid cars and energy efficient appliances. This book conducts a comprehensive analysis of the environmental subsidy programs conducted in Japan and examines their impacts on consumer product selection, consumer product use, and environmental outcome. The book also proposes recommendations for future environmental and industrial policies. The book's empirical findings will be of interest to those who are researching on and policymakers of environmental and industrial policies.

This volume gathers together key new contributions on the subject of the relationship, both empirical and theoretical, between economic oscillations, growth and structural change. Employing a sophisticated level of mathematical modelling, the collection contains articles from, amongst others, William Baumol, Katsuhito Iwai and William Brock.

Microcredit has been seen in recent decades as having great potential for aiding development in poor developing countries, with Bangladesh being one of the countries which has pioneered microcredit and implemented it most widely. This book, based on extensive original research, explores how microcredit works in practice, and assesses its effectiveness. It discusses how microcredit, usually channelled through women, is often passed to the men of the family, a practice disapproved of by some, but regarded as acceptable by borrowers who have a communal approach to debt, rather than viewing debt as something held by single individuals. The book demonstrates how the rules around microcredit are often seem as irksome by the borrowers, how lenders often charge high rates of interest and work primarily to preserve their institutions, thereby going against the spirit of the microcredit movement, and how borrowers often end up on a downward spiral, deeper and deeper in debt. Overall, the book argues that although microcredit does much good, it also has many drawbacks.

Internalization theory, despite criticism of its empirical deficiency, has dominated the industrial organization approach to the multinational enterprise and its foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions. Liu improves the empirical foundations of internalization theory, through the elaboration of the FDI signaling framework, which holds that a firm's direct foreign investment influences the perceptions of less-informed market participants. The signaling concept is derived from the premise that a firm's intangible assets in know-how cannot be correctly priced in a market with asymmetric information, and this motivates the firm's decision to undertake FDI. If the premise is correct, the firm's decision is based on inside information, and the firm's action reveals that information to the market. The firm's FDI internalization is evidence of management's confidence in its intangible assets, and its action may further influence market perceptions. The hypotheses generated along this line of analysis are subjected to investigation, and the evidence supports the FDI signaling proposition. Moreover, the study represents an indirect test of internalization theory. As a result, internalization is transformed from a untested theory to an empirical result.

High-growth and innovative firms are the drivers of tomorrow's jobs and our future prosperity. Supporting these firms, including how they can access finance, should be one of the highest policy priorities of European governments. By seeking to provide deeper pools of capital across the EU for firms and reducing dependence on bank financing, the EU's proposed Capital Markets Union initiative can make a significant contribution to this agenda. This publication focuses on how the Capital Markets Union might lead to tangible gains in investment and jobs growth. It is based on a micro analysis of the challenges faced by growth and innovative firms in six large member states. The report proposes a bottom-up policy agenda to complement the EU's approach, focused on improving the tax, legal and business support environment for investors and firms.

Primary commodities - food, raw materials, fuels and base metals - continue to be a substantial proportion of the exports of many developing countries and account for over 40 per cent of world trade. The determinants of primary commodity prices, and the terms on which they are traded for manufactured goods, are topics of considerable importance for development economists.The Economics of Primary Commodities brings together in one volume important new work by a group of leading scholars on the economic analysis of primary commodity markets. Their detailed coverage of major recent developments in the field include discussion of modelling and policy issues. Topics addressed include excess co-movement of commodity prices, the stabilization of earnings in volatile commodity markets, a macroeconomic framework for trade terms between north and south, and the influence of economic policy on commodity markets. The essays should provide the reader with an overview of the current 'state-of-the-art' and a useful platform on which future research might be based. This book will be welcomed by academic researchers, practitioners and postgraduate students concerned with the economics of trade, economic development and international economics.

Carl Menger, Friedrich Wieser and Eugen Bohm-Bawerk are acknowledged as pioneers in the development of neoclassical economics, as well as being recognized as the founders of the Austrian School of Economics. Neoclassical Microeconomic Theory examines their contribution and compares it with the other branches of neoclassical economics that emerged between the 1870's and 1930's. The author begins by exploring the initial stimulus provided by Carl Menger's work, and then demonstrates how the views of Menger, Weiser and Bohm-Bawerk complement one another and the tensions exhibited between them: the scope and method of economics; theories of choice; price theory; competition; entrepreneurship; and capital formation and distribution.

This text chronicles a change in epistolary persuasion in the 1230's, crystallized at the imperial chancery of Frederick II, Emperor from 1220-1250. There, traditional appeals, premised on authority and harmony, were challenged by letters in which historical circumstances functioned as an integral part of the strategy of persuasion. Based on the close reading of "Artes Dictandi", as well as a series of letters issued from the papal and imperial chanceries, this book explores the theory and practice of medieval letter-writing. Letters are evaluated as verbal acts intended to persuade, with the public as the ultimate arbiter of success. The author argues that the form, proportion and style of letters were contoured by ideology.

This book makes an original contribution to our knowledge of the world's major defence industries. Experts from a wide range of different countries - from the major economies of North America and Western Europe to developing economies and some unique cases such as China, India, Singapore, South Africa and North Korea - describe and analyse the structure, conduct and performance of the defence industry in that country. Each chapter opens with statistics on a key nation's defence spending, its spending on defence R&D and on procurement over the period 1980 to 2017, allowing for an analysis of industry changes following the end of the Cold War. After the facts of each industry, the authors describe and analyse the structure, conduct and performance of the industry. The analysis of 'structure' includes discussions of entry conditions, domestic monopoly/oligopoly structures and opportunities for competition. The section on 'conduct' analyses price/non-price competition, including private and state funded R&D, and 'performance' incorporates profitability, imports and exports together with spin-offs and technical progress. The conclusion explores the future prospects for each nation's defence industry. Do defence industries have a future? What might the future defence firm and industry look like in 50 years' time? This volume is a vital resource and reference for anyone interested in defence economics, industrial economics, international relations, strategic studies and public procurement.

Contemporary studies on social structure and the world political economy tend to be concerned primarily with present conditions and what these promise--or threaten for the future of the planet. The authors of this volume have taken a less fashionable stance, looking instead to the recent past and the pivotal historical moments that have formed the world we live in. Consisting of fourteen essays contributed by an international group of specialists, Rethinking the Nineteenth Century examines the social formations of that period and integrates them into a modern theoretical framework. The broad issues of class and state formation, imperialism and nationalism, and ascent and decline in the world system are the central focus of the book.

This book seeks to explain the global financial crisis and its wider economic, political, and social repercussions, arguing that the 2007-9 meltdown was in fact a systemic crisis of the capitalist system. The volume makes these points through the exploration of several key questions: What kind of institutional political economy is appropriate to explain crisis periods and failures of crisis-management? Are different varieties of capitalism more or less crisis-prone, and can the global financial crisis can be attributed to one variety more than others? What is the interaction between the labour market and the financialization process? The book argues that each variety of capitalism has its own specific crisis tendencies, and that the uneven global character of the crisis is related to the current forms of integration of the world market. More specifically, the 2007-09 economic crisis is rooted in the uneven income distribution and inequality caused by the current financial-led model of growth. The book explains how the introduction of more flexibility in the labour markets and financial deregulation affected everything from wages to job security to trade union influence. Uneven income distribution and inequality weakened aggregate demand and brought about structural deficiencies in aggregate demand and supply. It is argued that the process of financialization has profoundly changed how capitalist economies operate. The volume posits that financial globalization has given rise to growing international imbalances, which have allowed two growth models to emerge: a debt-led consumption growth model and an export-led growth model. Both should be understood as reactions to the lack of effective demand due to the polarization of income distribution.

This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley's work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley's contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.

Traditional game theory requires at least two individuals. This book extends game theory to the inner workings of a single person. Using game theory to analyse single individuals makes sense if one thinks of individuals as consisting of two or more relatively autonomous partitions that might have conflicting motives. This is not to say that individuals are literally made up from multiple selves; it only suffices that we adopt a portrayal of the individual as a multilayered entity or of a dual nature, in a manner similar to Adam Smith's depiction of an "impartial spectator" existing within the individual, The notion that individuals may be considered as collections of distinct partitions or "sub-selves" has been challenging writers from diverse fields for many centuries. This book breaks new ground in combining psychological with evolutionary game theory, making for a highly promising way towards a better understanding of the individual and the development of their behaviour, along with the individual's own perceptions on it.

Industrial production and consumption patterns rely heavily on the intensive use of both renewable and non-renewable resources and the consequences for the environment can be serious. Following a long period of time where the profit incentives of firms have prevailed over preservation of the environment and the world's natural resources, a new consensus has emerged concerning the need to regulate firm behaviour, aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the economic system in the long run. This book offers an exhaustive overview of current economic debate about these topics, taking modern oligopoly theory as a benchmark. The first part of the book covers static models dealing with incentives for green research and development, Pigovian taxation, cartels, environmental quality and international trade, as well as the role of corporate social responsibility, public firms and consumer environmental awareness as endogenous regulatory instruments. Then, the author moves on to examine the role of time while drawing from optimal control and differential game theory. This opens the way to the discussion of fair discount rates to ensure the welfare of future generations, as well as the long run sustainability of production and consumption patterns.

**Please note this is an unedited paperback reprint of the hardback, originally published in 2003** The British system of universal development control celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1997. Remarkably, the system has survived more or less intact but the experience of the 1980s has left large questions unanswered about the relevance and effectiveness of the system. This book traces the history of the development control system in Britain from early modern times to the present day.

This is a major study of economic policy making in Britain between the wars. It provided the first full-length analysis of the early development of fiscal policy as a tool of modern economic management. The central question addressed is how Keynesian fiscal policies came to be adopted by the British government, with particular attention paid to the role of the Treasury and to that of Keynes himself. Drawing extensively on unpublished documents hitherto untapped by economists or historians, Roger Middleton challenges the widely held view of official economic thinking as an ill-informed group of people holding 'the Treasury view' in opposition to Keynes's prescriptions for deficient demand and mass unemployment. Instead he argues that acceptance of Keynesian economics during the Second World War resulted from political and administrative factors as much as a conversion to Keynesian theory. He investigates the form and impact of fiscal policy during the 1930s and, through a constant employment budget analysis, shows convincingly that at times of rising unemployment governments ignore at their peril the effects of automatic stabilizers upon budgetary stability. Historians and economists welcomed this fresh perspective on a debate of historical as well as contemporary importance. Towards the Managed Economy is essential reading for all those interested in the rise and fall of Keynesian demand management. This classic text was first published in 1985.

This volume explores the well-documented phenomena of memory distortion in a variety of settings, as well as how it can be ameliorated or prevented altogether. The editors have recruited some of the very best researchers in the applied cognitive field to address these issues. These authors examine distortion from several angles: fuzzy trace theory, face identification, memory deficits with age, collaborative influences on distortion, sociocultural influences on memory, retention of procedural and declarative information, and ignorance of medical and other information. The final chapter addresses the issue of cognitive technology, in general. Because of the surge of interest in applied cognitive psychology and in the memory distortion issue in particular, this book will be valuable to many applied and basic researchers.