The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of socio-economic systems globally and exposed the risks that natural capital degradation imposes on human health, economy, and society. This book studies the environmental challenges faced by developing economies in a post-COVID-19 world. Exploring diverse case studies from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the volume discusses the impact that economic development and, recently, COVID-19 has had on the environment, ecology, and economy of these regions. It analyses nature conservation policies aimed at minimizing ecological damage arising from economic development and discusses the policy objectives of sustainable development. It also highlights the significant role that environmental economics networks have played in capacity building, framing of policies using ecological economics tools, and developing a local leadership trained in addressing local sustainability issues. An important contribution to the study of environmental economics of the Global South, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of economics, environment, development studies, development economics, environmental policies, and South Asia studies. It will also be useful for policymakers and NGOs working in this field.

Die lenkende Vergabe von StaatsauftrAgen in der EuropAischen Union ist Thema dieses Werkes. Nach einer Betrachtung der Praktiken der Mitgliedsstaaten werden die einschlAgigen EG-Richtlinien analysiert. Dabei zeigt sich, daA die Harmonisierung der Auftragsvergabe durch die Vergaberichtlinien in diesem Bereich nicht abschlieAend ist. Aus diesem Grunde wird auf den EG-Vertrag zurA1/4ckgegriffen. Dieser verbietet zwar eine direkte oder indirekte AnknA1/4pfung an die StaatsangehArigkeit des Teilnehmers, lAAt aber nichtdiskriminierende Vergabepraktiken ohne handelsbeschrAnkende Wirkungen grundsAtzlich zu. Insgesamt erscheinen regionalpolitische SekundArzwecke als unzulAssig, wAhrend es bei anderen sehr auf die rechtstechnische Vorgehensweise ankommt. Die Formulierung transparenter Kriterien fA1/4r ein konkretes Vergabeverfahren ist der Bezugnahme auf einheimisch verbreitete Standards rechtlich vorzuziehen.

This book provides a much-needed accessible and non-technical account of a highly topical issue - European Monetary Union. It is a coherent and authoritative statement of the view of the Commission of the European Communities by its chief economist. The book has already been written about in the Financial Times, and it should attract much media attention on publication.

A group of internationally recognised experts examine the recent trends of cross-border movements of people, goods and economic activity at fifteen major borders in the Greater Mekong Sub-region with the aim of predicting the long terms future for this region. In the after math of the IndoChina war this region has been in the process of liberalising cross-border movements, the book illustrates that cross-border movements of goods and people have shown upward trend. The activities categorized into manufacturing industries located at border areas, border trade activities like warehouses and transhipment, and casino and tourism also prosper. However, the authors forecast that border trade activities and manufacturing industries at border areas can decline in the long run when tariff is liberalized and when labor forces move to metropolises in searching for better wages, respectively. However, they suggest that such development can continue in the mid-run with some political intentions of the governments to develop border areas.

This book is about realistic solutions for the threat of zero-interest rates and excessive liquidity. Central banks do not print growth. The financial crisis was much more than the result of an excess of risk. The same policies that created each subsequent bust are the ones that have been implemented in recent years. This book is about realistic solutions for the threat of zero-interest rates and excessive liquidity. The United States needs to take the first step, defending sound money and a balanced budget, recovering the middle-class by focusing on increasing disposable income. The rest will follow. Our future should not be low growth and high debt. Cheap money becomes very expensive in the long run. There is an escape from the central bank trap.

This is the third volume of the series of International Papers in Political Economy (IPPE). The theme of this volume is the political economy of a number of Latin American countries in the aftermath of the introduction of liberalization policies in this part of the world. In particular, the book concentrates on recent economic performance. The book assesses notions of neoliberalism, democracy and economic policy in Latin America, examines the economic policies of the first period of President Lula da Silva in Brazil, appraises Chile's experience between neo-liberalism and equitable growth, considers of the possibility of Argentina in the late twentieth century and early Twenty-First being a case of disruptive international financial integration, and assesses recent political economy in Venezuela, examining the extent to which political stability matters in the case of Ecuador.

This book is the one of the first to address aid effectiveness as a political and comparative economics question. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition of its republics to market structures and more representative forms of government, the European Commission has recognized the necessity of a closer economic cooperation with Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the three largest economies of the former Soviet Union. This book suggests that the foreign aid of the European Union provided a set of reform incentives to post-Soviet planners. It created the grounds for the institutional and social transformation of the bureaucracy at both central and regional levels by integrating it into the aid allocation process. In Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the observed subordination of NGOs to the developmental priorities of the bureaucracy occurred at the expense of diversity and political openness. Nevertheless, this reality led to the emergence of transnational sovereignty partnerships that reduced poverty for the general population and motivated both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs to cooperate. Empirical models alone are not sufficient to delineate all the aspects of principal-agent relationships in post-Soviet bureaucracies. This is why formal modeling and analysis of qualitative data are extremely useful. Evaluation reports indicate the problems and challenges faced by aid bureaucrats and suggest that the weakly institutionalized environments of Ukraine and Central Asia/Kazakhstan are less conducive to aid effectiveness than the heavily bureaucratized environment of Russia. The proposed incentives system for the allocation of foreign aid links EU foreign policy with bureaucratic decision-making and reflects the choice sets of the donor and the recipient. Multilevel definitions of aid effectiveness are provided in the course of the book chapters.

This book provides novel insights into how Chinese provinces have developed into major sources of China's outbound investments. Focusing on the Yangtze River Delta region, the book compares two provinces with highest outbound investment in China, Jiangsu and Zhejiang and traces how locality-unique conditions contribute to the economic internationalization of Chinese provinces. Through its in-depth exploration of these case studies, the book reveals how the deficiency of enterprises' investment capacity heavily depends on the unique political, economic, formal and informal institutions of each province. The findings presented in this book also offer conclusions relevant to the study of the internationalization process of emerging economies engaging in outward investment, such as India and Brazil. Featuring insights from interviews with scholars, managers and government officials this will be an invaluable resource for scholars, students and professionals interested in International Economics, International Political Economy, Chinese Studies and Asian Studies.

This book demonstrates how rethinking and adapting basic employment services into labor intermediation services can help address the many labor market disconnections of developing country economies. It addresses how scarce resources required to escape poverty - good jobs, schools, and training - more often go to the privileged and well-connected than to those who need them most. With jobs now at the top of development debates, this is a rare book on how to practically adapt one key labor market policy to very different developing and emerging country markets. It shows through examples how developing countries can build in stages from basic employment services to diverse labor intermediation services - opening up job listings, stimulating public-private partnerships, and making job connections for those who don't have a "cousin Vinny who knows a guy". This book is for policy practitioners, development organizations, and academics who are ready to think differently about one of the policies that needs to change so that developing economies can better meet the employment and higher skill challenges of the global age.

The global economy is entering an era of protracted stagnation, similar to what Japan has experienced for over a decade.That is the message of this brilliant and controversial summary of our current economic predicament from an internationally respected consultant and commentator on financial markets, who predicted the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The author challenges the assumption that growth can be perpetual and questions the ability of political leaders to enact the tough structural changes needed. He is particularly critical of the "easy money" approach to dealing with the great recession of 2008, citing the dangers of excessive debt and deep-seated fundamental imbalances. The fallout of these poor policies, he argues, will affect not only the business sector, but also the lifestyles and prosperity of average citizens and future generations. The author concludes with a thought experiment illustrating the large-scale changes that will be necessary to restore economic, financial, and social sustainability. This experiment has already been tried in Iceland, which went bankrupt in the wake of the 2008 crisis, and now, after a painful adjustment, is on the road to recovery. Written for the lay reader and peppered with witty anecdotes, this immensely readable book clearly explains the missteps that created the current dilemma, why a recovery has proved elusive, and the difficult remedies that must eventually be applied to ensure a stable future.

Public finance is an inclusive field of study based on different disciplines. This book brings together studies in different fields of public finance, taking into account the problems experienced on a global scale. The inclusiveness of public finance has brought together eighteen different studies in this book, including theoretical, methodological and empirical studies about various taxation problems such as COVID-19 and fiscal policies about healthcare system, financial incentives and biomass energy worldwide, effect of tax wedge on inflation, and the evaluation of the problems in international tax law; also digitalization and cryptocurrencies and the social effects of taxation. The authors of chapters present some new models and policy suggestions in their studies.

Focusing on Chile and Colombia during the 1950s and 1960s, Kofas examines the impact of IMF, World Bank, and U.S. foreign policy on the economies and social and political institutions of Latin America. Far from fostering democracy and social justice, foreign loans and aid were major impediments to these ideals. Symptomatic of systematic underdevelopment, cyclical Third World foreign borrowing and debt crises have been responsible for maintaining the debtor nations integrated into the global market economy, perpetuating their dependency, and maintaining low living standards. Comparing Colombia and Chile, the book examines the complex factors of domestic and international forces that account for structural underdevelopment in the Third World.

A study on the historical antecedents of globalism and its impact on the Third World, this book analyzes the interplay between IMF, World Bank, and U.S. foreign policy in shaping the economies of the Third World through loans that are the catalyst to global integration. Through its in-depth look at a complex topic, this book will prove provocative and valuable reading to students of globalization, inter-American relations, international finance, Latin American History, and U.S. diplomatic history.

Social franchising represents a third generation form of franchising development, after trade-name and business-format franchising. At the intersection of social enterprise and micro finance literatures, this book reviews a variety of social franchising formats across a number of developing countries.

The book provides in-depth insight into the financial systems in European Economic Area countries, accentuating the role of crises in shaping the condition and development of the financial arena. The authors outline their predictions for the future of financial systems, focusing on the structural changes and legacy of the COVID-19 crisis and global financial interlinkages. The book adopts both theoretical and practical approaches to explore the key issues and as such, will appeal to academics and students of financial economics and international finance, as well as policymakers and financial regulators.

How has globalization through trade and foreign investment affected labour markets, wages, profits, and inequality? This fundamentally important question is addressed deeply in this volume, with methods ranging from microeconomic theory to econometric studies using detailed firm-level and household data. The primary objective of the volume, a compendium of important research performed by Ann Harrison and co-authors, is to study and understand whether and how workers, in both the United States and major developing and emerging countries, have fared in the recent era of massive globalization. There are plenty of anecdotes about such questions, but this volume develops testable hypotheses, collects essential data, and uses frontier techniques to provide the best and most systematic evidence available. Chapters range widely over standard and current trade theories, frontier thinking about the nature and effects of multinational enterprises and offshoring, and the critical roles of credit markets, international innovation and technology diffusion in driving employment, wage changes, and inequality. The volume also covers critical institutional matters, such as how globalization influences activism in securing labour rights. The analysis in the book is essential for understanding the complex and deep relationships among trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, technical change, and the fortunes of workers in increasingly globalized markets.

The experience of many developing countries with the use of large inflows of commercial bank loans and offical development assistance in the 1970s and 1980s has manifested the continuous external vulnerability of their economies. This study provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the international aspects of development finance, credit-rationing rules set by bank mangers and donor governments, together with uncoordinated macroeconomic policies in the industrialized world, which tend to create unstable and inadequate external financing conditions for the developing world. This study not only makes clear that a global framework is needed to assess the contribution of external financial resources for development, it provides one as well.

Focusing on the interconnection of tariff structure, international trade and welfare evaluation, the book investigates the characteristics of tariff structures of China and the U.S. in recent years and measures the impact of the Sino-U.S. trade friction that started in 2018. The first part of the book discusses levels and evolution trends of tariff systems of China and the U.S. from 2000 to 2014 and makes a comparison between the two countries' tariff structures. The second part centers on the Sino-U.S. trade friction in 2018, analyzing its development, overall impact on welfare, and relevant impact mechanisms. The author draws on the quantitative analysis method currently prevailing in the field of international trade, taking global value chains, intermediate goods, and variable markup into consideration. In contrast to the research conclusion applying standard trade theory, the result indicates that either unilateral imposition of additional tariffs or bilateral tariff friction will give rise to the deteriorated welfare level of both countries. The book will appeal to academics and policy makers interested in international trade, China-U.S. relation and the trade friction.

In contemporary global capitalism, the most powerful corporations are innovation or intellectual monopolies. The book's unique perspective focuses on how private ownership and control of knowledge and data have become a major source of rent and power. The author explains how at the one pole, these corporations concentrate income, property and power in the United States, China, and in a handful of intellectual monopolies, particularly from digital and pharmaceutical industries, while at the other pole developing countries are left further behind. The book includes detailed empirical mappings of how intellectual monopolies develop and transform knowledge from universities and open-source collaborations into intangible assets. The result is a strategy that combines undermining the commons through privatization with harvesting from the same commons. The book ends with provoking reflections to tilt the scale against intellectual monopoly capitalism and arguing that desired changes require democratic mobilization of workers and citizens at large. This book represents one of the first attempts to capture the contours of an emerging new era where old perspectives lead us astray, and the old policy toolbox is hopelessly inadequate. This is true for the idea that the best, or only, way to promote innovation is to transform knowledge into private property. It is also true for anti-trust policies focusing exclusively on consumer prices. The formation of global infrastructures that lead to natural monopolies calls for public rather than private ownership. Scholars and professionals from the social sciences and humanities (in particular economics, sociology, political science, geography, educational science and science and technology studies) will enjoy a clear and all-embracing depiction of innovation dynamics in contemporary capitalism, with a particular focus on asymmetries between actors, regions and topics. In fact, its topical issue broadens the book's scope to those curious about how innovation networks shape our world.

This book discusses the Belt and Road Initiative at the provincial level in China. It analyses the evolution of the role of local governments in Chinese foreign policy since the opening of China's economy in 1978, showing how the provinces initially competed with each other, and how the central government was forced to react, developing more centralised policies. Unlike other books on the Belt and Road Initiative, which focus on the international aspects of the initiative, this book demonstrates the importance of the Belt and Road in reinforcing China's unitary status and for managing and coordinating development at the local level as well as centre-province relations and province to province relations inside China.

This distinctive textbook combines comprehensive coverage of the key policy areas of the European Union with analysis of individual countries, including the recent accession countries and Turkey. Part I analyzes the economic bases for the rise of the European Union from its origins in the post-World War II recovery to its historic enlargement in 2004. Part II takes up the different nation-state perspectives on the EU's economic policies by looking in turn at all European countries, whether members of the EU or not. The book is unique in providing both an EU perspective and European nation-state perspective on the major policy issues which have arisen since the end of World War II, as well as putting the economic analysis into an historical narrative which emphasizes the responses of policy-makers to external shocks such as the Cold War, the oil shocks, German reunification, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The book examines the industrial growth of sanctioned nations in terms of their ability to foster trade partnerships with countries that choose to evade or not comply with sanctions. When those "black knight" nations find strong local market competitive advantages in the absence of firms from sender nations, incentives develop to support local political status quos. For those reasons, the political resilience of rogue and repressive regimes is analyzed in terms of their economic incentives to remain repressive. The resilience is based on the fact that the local politicians are also the local businessmen. Through the growth of international production networks, their business opportunities augment and the rents associated with that growth also increase. As business opportunities grow in the absence of competition, so does the amount of rent extraction and protection. Rent protecting leads to strengthening economic and political leadership, because the wealth is used for creating further rents by providing economic benefits to the regime supporters. Economic Sanctions vs. Soft Power shows how the system of self-enforcing economic rents builds political rents and lowers opportunities for the development of viable political oppositions.

This volume engages with the roots, dimensions, and implications of foreign currency domination in states with a national currency. Referred to as unofficial dollarization in literature, this is a worldwide phenomenon among developing countries and has a long history. This monograph provides a political economic analysis of dollarization in Georgia and is structured around three themes: the genesis of dollarization (1991-2003), the persistence of dollarization (2003-12) and the politicization of dollarization (2012-19). The case of Georgia is especially representative of the post-socialist transition states, but also has wider applicability. A high level of dollarization is a significant barrier to economic growth, macroeconomic and political stability, functional monetary policy, as well as social welfare. The Covid-19 crisis and the increasing debt of developing countries in foreign currency exacerbate dollarization-related vulnerabilities for these economies. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students in global/comparative political economy, development economics or transition economies, researchers in monetary sovereignty, central banking, exchange rate policies, currency hierarchy, money, financialization, and policy makers in dollarized countries and global institutions.

This book analyses the methods used to assess financial sustainability as defined by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). Recently, there have been calls to consider sustainability as a fundamental guiding principle in public management. The financial and economic crisis has spurred a demand for greater financial sustainability in public administrations. Although the concept of sustainability has been traditionally associated with three dimensions (environmental, social and economic), this book is focuses on the metrics used to evaluate financial sustainability and explores the concept of financial health. It will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of financial sustainability.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the policies and institutions used by the EU to create a single market. Through a historical overview, sectoral case studies, and an assessment of recent policy initiatives, the author provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of European economic integration.

The role of franchising on industry evolution is explored in this book both in terms of the emergence of franchising and its impact on industry structure. Examining literature and statistical information the first section provides an overview of franchising. The Role of Franchising on Industry Evolution then focuses on two core elements; the emergence or franchising and the contextual drivers prompting its adoption, and the impact of franchising on industry-level structural changes. Through two industry case studies, the author demonstrates how franchising has the ability to fundamentally transform an industry's structure from one of fragmentation to one of consolidation.