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.

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.

Important and celebrated economist Leland Yeager is one of the architects of the 'Virginia School' of political economy that has produced two Nobel laureates (James Buchanan and Ronald Coase) and the Public Choice movement. A number of top class contributors have here been brought together to produce a festschrift in Yeager's honor - edited by Roger Koppl, and including the aforementioned Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, David Colander, Deirdre McCloskey and Roger Garrison.

As the twenty-first century begins, significant changes are occurring in the way that services and goods are produced and consumed. One of the key drivers of this change is information and communications technology (ICT). It has transformed the role of space and time in patterns of economic development, in the rise of globalisation and in the scale and structure of organisations. ICT has therefore accelerated the process of continual change and evolution that is the hallmark of both the capitalist economy and of organisations.
A student-friendly account is given of the diversity of theoretical perspectives for understanding the evolving economic geography of advanced capitalist economies. A series of detailed firm and employees' case-studies from Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific, are used to inform the theoretical case-studies. These also highlight and examine the significance of the increased blurring of the distinction between services and manufacturing functions in the production and consumption process.

Despite the dynamic development of the discipline of economics, the ways in which economics is taught and how it defines its basic principles have hardly changed, resulting in economics being criticised for its inability to provide relevant insights on global challenges. In response, this book defines new principles of economics and seeks to establish economics as the science of markets. A New Principles of Economics provides an alternative conceptual framework for the study of economics, integrating recent developments and research in both economics and neighbouring social sciences. Adopting the structure of a standard principles text, it separates the study of markets as mechanisms and markets in their wider contexts. In doing so, a number of new perspectives are introduced, including approaching the economy as part and parcel of the Earth system; directly connecting the analysis of production with an analysis of technology and thermodynamic principles; explicitly treating markets as forms of social networks mediated by the institution of money; and reinstating the central role of distribution in political economy analysis. Drawing on the latest theories and research on the economy, and including both the natural and social sciences, this text provides a holistic introduction suitable for postgraduates and other advanced students.

There are many textbooks for business students that provide a systematic, introductory development of the economics of financial markets. However, there are as yet no introductory textbooks aimed at more easily daunted undergraduate liberal arts students. Introduction to the Economics of Financial Markets fills this gap by providing an extremely accessible introductory exposition of how economists analyze both how, and how well, financial markets organize the intertemporal allocation of scarce resources. The central theme is that the function of a system of financial markets is to enable consumers, investors, and managers of firms to effect mutually beneficial intertemporal exchanges. James Bradfield uses the standard concept of economic efficiency (Pareto Optimality) to assess the efficacy of the financial markets. He presents an intuitive, and introductory, understanding of the primary theoretical and empirical models that economists use to analyze financial markets, and then uses these models to discuss implications for public policy. Students who use this text will acquire an understanding of the economics of financial markets that will enable them to read, with some sophistication, articles in the public press about financial markets and about public policy toward those markets. The book is addressed to undergraduate students in the liberal arts, but will also be useful for undergraduate and beginning graduate students in programs of business administration who want an understanding of how economists assess financial markets against the criteria of allocative and informational efficiency.

Now in its third edition, Cost-Benefit Analysis has been updated, offering readers the perfect introduction to project, programme and policy appraisal using basic tools of financial and economic analysis. The key economic questions of any social cost-benefit analysis are: do the benefits of the project or policy exceed the costs, no matter how widely costs and benefits are spread, and irrespective of whether or not project impacts, such as environmental effects, are reflected in market prices? And which group or groups of individuals receive the benefits and which bear the costs? This book addresses these questions with an emphasis on putting the theory presented in the book into practice. This third edition has several attractive features: Readers are encouraged to develop their own skills by applying the tools and techniques of cost-benefit analysis to case studies and examples, including an analysis of a project which is developed throughout the book. The book emphasizes the use of spreadsheets which are invaluable in providing a framework for the cost-benefit analysis. A dedicated chapter provides guidance for writing up a report which summarises the analysis which has been undertaken. New pedagogical features, including Technical Notes and Examples, have been added as an aid to readers throughout the text. An appendix provides 14 additional case studies which can be developed in class or as assignment projects. Additional material for instructors and students is provided through Support Material maintained by Routledge. This updated edition is an ideal text for a course on cost-benefit analysis where the emphasis is on practical application of principles and equipping students to conduct appraisals. It is also a useful handbook for professionals looking for a logical framework in which to undertake their cost-benefit analysis work.

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 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.

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.

Using statistical analysis, this volume, originally published in 1925, examines the sociological aspects of the business cycle. It discusses which areas of social activity are influenced by the business cycle and measures the relative degree of this influence in each of the areas which are covered. Bringing together the work of economists and criminologists, this volume discusses topics such as births, deaths, poverty, crime, emigration and marriage in relation to business cycles.

This book presents several pieces of empirical work which disentangle why the standard measure of productivity growth used in macroeconomics turn out to be procyclical for American manufacturing industries. Procyclical productivity is an essential feature of business cycles because of its important implications for macroeconomic modelling. The author explains why traditional Keynesian theories of the business cycle do not explain satisfactorily why productivity is procyclical, and argues that the force of technology for generating economic cycles is much more important than that of the management or mismanagement of monetary or fiscal policies. This book is aimed at those working in empirical macroeconomics but also industrial economics.

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, policymakers as well as academicians have been seeking to fathom why subsequent recoveries remain tenuous. Other outstanding issues that they have been trying to understand include: why do some economies grow faster than others? How should the exchange rate volatility be understood and what factors make an economy more likely to fall into an exchange rate crisis? What policies need to be taken during tranquil periods, and how should they be changed once the crisis is triggered? As a partial effort to meet such interests, this book provides insights into these issues. This book examines growth and convergence (Part I), exchange rate volatility and the Asian crisis (Part II), and the global crisis (Part III). In addition, the book also draws lessons from South Korea's experiences - a country which has undergone three different crises and brisk recoveries (Part IV). The book also includes some practical and policy-oriented analysis. This is a truly comprehensive book bringing together varied topics and diversity under one common theme - economic growth and crisis.

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.

The substantial prosperity that characterizes market economies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is relatively recent in human history. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, economic progress was so slow that people would not have been able to recognize it in their lifetimes, whereas today, economic progress is so much a part of people's lives that they take it for granted. In this new volume, Randall G. Holcombe argues that economic analysis, as it developed through the twentieth century, relies heavily on concepts of economic equilibrium, and is not descriptive of the dynamic real-world economy that is characterized by economic progress. Even in dynamic settings, economic models focus on income growth, leaving out the entrepreneurial forces that generate economic progress, resulting in the introduction of new goods and services and new production processes. Economic analysis focuses on the forces that lead to an economic equilibrium, not the forces that produce prosperity. This characterization of economic analysis describes a substantial component of economics as it has developed over the past century. However, there are also economists who have analyzed the factors that lead to an entrepreneurial and innovative economy, generating progress rather than equilibrium. This volume does not question the value of past research, but argues that, looking ahead, economics should build on its past to focus on factors that create an entrepreneurial and innovative economy that is characterized by progress and prosperity. This would make economic analysis more consistent with the remarkable progress and prosperity that characterizes the modern economy. This volume lays out a framework for economic analysis that consistently incorporates the real-world factors that produce prosperity.

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.

This book offers extensive and quality research on and original insights into China's internal regional dynamics. It provides a focused analysis of the internal dynamics and regional economic diversity of China covering the eastern, central and western regions through case study, data analysis and review of state-initiated policy measures. The book also identifies and analyses existing and potential challenges facing China's regions in their pursuit of sustainable development. Different regions in China have attempted to achieve fast economic growth and move up the industrial value chain through industrial restructuring and upgrading, inter-regional industrial transfer, urbanization or seeking central government's endorsement of new regional policies. The book examines the difference and similarities among local government policies to boost regional industrial and economic growth and assesses their implications and effectiveness. The author had conducted detailed studies in this field in order to bridge the existing research gap and the book will help to give rise to useful and illuminating discussion.

At the time in which this book was first published in 1992, there was a major concern with the macro-economic implications of fiscal imbalance. As the European economies moved closer to monetary union, and Germany grappled with the fiscal pressures of unification, deficits in the United States exceeded $300 billion. In this volume the authors address this issue, using both historical case-studies and cross-national comparisons. This book will be of interest to students of economics.

This book explains how three major mechanisms of globalization international trade, international migration, and the activities of multinational companies have altered working conditions and labor rights around the world during the late 20th century. Drawing on analyses of a database on international labor conditions assembled for this project and a growing research literature on globalization and labor conditions, the book finds that trade, migration, and multinational companies are associated with improvements in world labor conditions.

This EMEA adaptation of Thomas Nechyba's popular text presents a European, Middle East and African perspective, whilst also being fully updated. This exciting new edition follows Professor Nechyba's five primary goals for any microeconomics course by presenting the subject as a way of looking at the world, showing students how and why the world works, how to think more clearly and develop conceptual thinking skills, and by providing a flexible learning style and a roadmap for further study. Each chapter follows the A and B structure developed by Professor Nechyba, allowing students to explore an intuitive approach in Part A and then focus on how the intuitive approach can be represented mathematically in Part B. This edition is also available as a MindTap with additional assessments, a Graph Builder and video graph presentations. It is also available with Aplia, a comprehensive online learning assessment tool with autograded randomised questions to test students' understanding.

Privacy, Due process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology engages with the rapidly developing computational aspects of our world including data mining, behavioural advertising, iGovernment, profiling for intelligence, customer relationship management, smart search engines, personalized news feeds, and so on in order to consider their implications for the assumptions on which our legal framework has been built. The contributions to this volume focus on the issue of privacy, which is often equated with data privacy and data security, location privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, unobservability, and unlinkability. Here, however, the extent to which predictive and other types of data analytics operate in ways that may or may not violate privacy is rigorously taken up, both technologically and legally, in order to open up new possibilities for considering, and contesting, how we are increasingly being correlated and categorizedin relationship with due process - the right to contest how the profiling systems are categorizing and deciding about us.

Summarizing the facts about the prevailing sizes of industrial firms or plants and the patterns of industrial location in Britain and America, this book also interprets the facts in basic terms such as technical requirements and consumer habits. Examining investment and human resource management, the contrasts and (unexpected) similarities in the industrial structure and government of the two countries are analysed. The book includes new research into the real seat of power in the British joint stock company and compares the results with the realities of the American corporation.

Covering issues as pertinent today as when the book was first published, The Logic of Industrial Organization discusses key themes in industrial relations, manufacturing, employment and investment and education for business administration. The book contains chapters on the following: The Structure of Industry; The Efficiency of Large-Scale Operation; Planned and Free Consumption; Forecasting and Market Research; Competition; Rationalization and Nationalization; Investment and Employment; Incentives to Work and Mobility; Stimulus to Enterprise and Administration.

This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.

This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.