Building on the New Economic Foundation and Jubilee 2000's experience of making complex economic issues interesting and attractive to a mass audience, and publishing alternative reports, the Real World Economic Outlook provides an overview and reviews the global economy from a different and radical perspective. This first report looks at globalization and debt deflation.

The advances in transportation and communications have caused and supported the emergence of a global economy. The small economies are especially attractive to multinational companies for siting of production facilities because of lower costs and friendlier governmental attitudes. The emerging international economy has had an impact on third world countries in many ways. In general, international linkages and local economic sovereignty are inversely related. However, participation in the international economy is needed to balance the import/export flow used to improve the conditions in the smaller countries. Although external economic linkages are not risk-free, it appears that a certain amount of foreign involvement is necessary for successful economic development and improvement of conditions for small emerging nations. This work uses the Caribbean nations as a laboratory to show the various aspects of international linkages. This is especially appropriate because of the proximity of these countries to the North American markets.

The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.

Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.

What will joining the EU mean for the new eastern member states and their economies? This text offers a detailed study of the macroeconomic and structural adjustment burden. It envisages a real currency appreciation stemming from price convergence, capital inflows and weak structural change. The widespread belief that an Eastern enlargement of the Union would be overwhelmingly to the detriment of the present EU (budgetary costs, locational decisions, trade deficits) is rejected. The authors discuss the lack of competitiveness of Eastern countries and their need for structural adjustments (in the financial sector, in agriculture, and in manufacturing) in order for them to survive and thrive in their new economic environment.

This important reader brings together published articles from Palgrave's journal The European Journal of Development Research on the development between China and Africa as well as emerging national economies in the BRICs group. Topics include trade relations, investment in sub-Saharan Africa, global politics of development and more.

A comprehensive study of the international coordination of economic policy in a monetary union. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on competition between the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. Similarly, as to policy cooperation, the focus is on cooperation between the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. The key questions are: Does the process of policy competition lead to full employment and price stability? Can these targets be achieved through policy cooperation? And is policy cooperation superior to policy competition? Another important issue is monetary competition / monetary cooperation between Europe and America.

Myron J. Frankman provides an interrelated set of initiatives whose components are consistent with the logic of both the process of globalization and the emerging properties of our time: Sustainability, democratization, equal opportunity, diversity and peace. He brings together the case for global public finance, a single world currency and a planet-wide citizen's income, all within the context of democratic federalism extending from the local to the global.

This book contains a collection of papers by Japanese and German authors dealing with the ongoing globalization process and notable fluctuations in the regional economic development in East Asia. The contributions discuss the stabilizing and destabilizing elements of the globalization process. The authors investigate the different options for economic policy to stabilize an ever more tightly interwoven world economy. In the center of the discussion are developments in East Asia and the European Union.

Government Deficit And Fiscal Reform In Japan presents a theoretical-based comprehensive analysis of economic consequences of government deficits and fiscal reform in Japan. Particular emphasis is directed at developing tools that can be applied to theoretically and empirically clarify essential economic concerns in Japan such as generational incidence of fiscal reform and a growing dependence on government bonds for covering financial deficits. This book evaluates the recent movement of Japanese fiscal reform and government deficit.

The authors first summarize fiscal policy in 1990's. Then, they move on to investigate the macroeconomic impact of government dept and the sustainability problem, and then discuss benefits and costs of public investment. The political aspect of fiscal reconstruction movements in Japan is also examined. Finally, the authors investigate the behavior of central government's control on local governments' debt issuance and its effect on the real activities of local governments. This book points out that the long-run structural fiscal reform is more important than the short-run Keynesian fiscal policy in Japan.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 shook the foundations of the global economy and what began as a localised currency crisis soon engulfed the entire Asian region. What went wrong and how did the Asian economies long considered 'miracles' respond? How did the United States, Japan and other G-7 countries respond to the crisis? What role did the IMF play?. Why did China, which suffers many of the same structural problems responsible for the crisis remain conspicuously insulated from the turmoil raging in its midst?. What explains the remarkable recovery now underway in Asia? In what fundamental ways did the Asian crisis serve as a catalyst to the current thinking about the "new international financial architecture"?. This book provides answers to all the above questions and more, and gives a comprehensive account of how the international economic order operates, examines its strengths and weaknesses, and what needs to be done to fix it. -- .

This study provides an overview of how the Bangladeshi leather value chain is organised and governed. It analyses how the leather processing and leather goods/footwear subsectors are integrated into the global market and to what extent informal arrangements including illicit practices are conducive to global market entry. Power relations are dissected along the value chain, in order to analyse how local producers adapt to upholding competitiveness. The results of the work show the need to devise upgrading strategies which pay heed to the reality of informal dynamics in a global value chain (GVC) to improve the local producers' competitiveness. The GVC perspective was combined with considerations on upgrading, subcontracting, middlemen and informality to adequately analyse the complexity of the transactions in the chain. The data of this study are drawn from empirical field studies in Dhaka, Bangladesh and other sections of the international leather value chain during the time period of 2010 to 2014. A qualitative research approach was complemented with quantitative methods.

The integration of the Central and Eastern European transition countries into the European Union is one of the most exciting economic policy issues of today. The book provides a detailed analysis of the economic effects which EU integration has on accession countries. It shows that these countries have already managed to fully remove the anti-trade bias with the EU that existed before the fall of the iron curtain. Benefits from further integration into the EU could result in particular from the fact that full membership in the European Community will increase the credibility of government policy in accession countries. The study explores in depth how these credibility effects can be quantified. The author develops a novel approach to model the transformation process within a dynamic computable general equilibrium framework. Furthermore, he estimates the potential income and welfare effects of EU integration for Poland, the largest transition country with EU candidate status.

The creation of Monetary Union marked a major step in the evolution of the European Union. Is the EU now taking the next step of deeper integration towards a fully-fledged economic government? The book seeks to answer this question by studying the evolution, execution and performance of new modes of economic policy co-ordination as potential stepping-stones towards more institutionalized forms of economic governance.

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This book explores the Arctic as a rapidly evolving phenomenon in international affairs of a rising number of stakeholders. For decades, Arctic studies used to be an affair of a relatively narrow group of experts from northern countries. This time is over due to a new Chinese Arctic policy, as well as growing regional interests from South Korea, Singapore, India and Japan. Contributors reflect on new roles for the Arctic region: both as a playground for the old school nation state competition and even confrontation, and a new source for international cooperation in energy, logistics and natural sciences. Climate change, political tensions and economic competition make Arctic a hotter venue of international relations. This new Arctic fever, studied through a comparative analysis of different regional agendas, especially with a focus on the US-China-Russia triangle, represents the main subject of our book, which will be of interest to scholars of geopolitics, of climate change, and of 21st century energy economics.

The key arguments and debates about globalization have raised searching questions about the significance of national and regional borders for the competitive strategies of individuals, firms and industries." Global Competitiveness and Innovation" seeks to address these issues by exploring four key topics: The status of economic agents in the emerging global economy; the limits of path dependence and the scope of agent action; the relationship between agents' decision-making and their environments; and agents' learning capacities in a world of information and knowledge creation.

Written by a distinguished group of Third World and American scholars, this book investigates the political, economic, cultural, and religious dynamics of the Third World. Both highly topical and extremely timely, the volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, employing analytical tools drawn from political science, history, economics, and sociology. The papers included serve to facilitate a new understanding of the complex nature of Third World nationalism, explore critical issues facing the Third World such as widespread hunger in Africa and the mounting debt crisis, and offer new perspectives on the role of religion and ethnicity in Third World politics.

In his introduction, Ali sets the context for the papers that follow. He notes that the new nations of the Third World cannot be political and economic equals of the developed nations. Thus, aware of their weaknesses, the overriding concern of Third World leaders is to preserve themselves from foreign encroachment. The 14 subsequent papers define, explain, and analyze the myriad issues and problems that today confront policy-makers in both the Third World and the developed nations, including: the economic impact of OPEC; the political and economic origins of hunger in Africa; the West and Third World Religion; open economics and repressive policies in the Third World; the influences on and effects of U.S. policies towards the Third World. Students of political science as well as policy-makers and diplomats will find "Third World At the CrossroadS" enlightening and provocative reading.

Creating a Eurasian Union offers a detailed analysis of the economies of the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and the proposed Eurasian Union. The authors employ econometric analysis of business cycles and cointegration analysis to prove the fragility of the union's potential economic success. By providing a brief description of the economic integration of the former Soviet republics, this pioneering work analyses the on-going trial and error processes of market integration led by Russia. Vymyatnina and Antonova's distinctive argument is the first consistent analysis of the emerging Eurasian Union. They incorporate both a non-technical summary of the integration process and previous research and analytical comments, as well as a thorough empirical analysis of the real data on the economic development of the participating countries, to caution that the speed of integration might undermine the feasibility of the Eurasian Union.

This text is about transformation in the framework of European integration. The Balkan countries have acquired particular importance since the 1990s due to their domestic destabilisation and have been looking for good examples and ideas to pursue development in ethnically complex and conflicting areas.

EU membership involves political and economic reforms
which influence financial markets in the new member states.
This study empirically explores and quantifies the effects of
EU accession on the risk and return of equity markets in eight
Central and Eastern European markets joining the EU in 2004.
The study also incorporates a review of how the influence of
macroeconomic variables and the level of integration with
global and European markets change as a result of
EU membership.
Based on empirical tests using weekly data over ten years,
this study concludes that EU membership results in a
significant decline in equity market volatility and a
significant increase in risk-adjusted, but not absolute,
equity returns. Furthermore, the study suggests that equity
markets in new EU member states become increasingly
influenced by global rather than local macroeconomic
factors after the EU accession and that the level of integration
with global markets increases.

The essays in this book examine the role of education and the university in economic development. It is the contention of the contributors that knowledge--ideas and skilled and educated people--are increasingly important for economic development. How to promote inclusive development--the process of development that includes every citizen in any country--has become a wide-ranging puzzle.

After framing the problems associated with globally integrated learning processes from the perspective of science and technology policies, the essayists look at the role of the university in the knowledge economy drawing examples from the United States, Japan, and Portugal. They then review the role of innovation in the industrial policies of a variety of countries, look at systems of knowledge creation and diffusion, and conclude with commentary on the roles of public planning and policy in the achievement of sustainable development. This wide-ranging examination of knowledge and development issues will be of value to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with economic growth and development.

Approaches economic sanctions as a form of statecraft in order to study the oft used but not well understood policy from a different perspective. The chapters examine a variety of cases involving the use of economic threats and promises. Their authors come from both academic and policy making fields, as well as different disciplinary backgrounds (political science and economics). They apply different research approaches (case studies, statistical analysis, formal economics) to increase our understanding of the sanction puzzle.

Every year, every Alaskan gets paid. They receive a small dividend financed by returns on a fund created from the state's resource revenues - what the authors have called the 'Alaska model.' This timely book examines how the model can be adapted for use elsewhere, examining issues of implementation and showing that this model can be employed even in resource-poor areas in the industrialized and in the industrializing world.

This text offers detailed analysis and informed comment on the future of emerging economic policies. It is essential reading for all postgraduates and scholars looking for expert discussion and debate on the issues surrounding economic policy.