'It is a serious piece of scholarship. Integrating economic history, economic thought, patent-hoarding, venture capital and the changing global economy, Kingston asks if modern capitalism might be an internally inconsistent system. Like Schumpeter, he is concerned that creative innovation might be stagnating into institutional ossification. It is an interesting argument, well presented, cross-disciplinary and thought-provoking.' - David Reisman, University of Surrey, UK and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Capitalism has been sustained by inherited moral values that are now all but exhausted. A unique combination of a new belief in individualism and a long tradition of property rights had traditionally ensured that self-interested action also produced public benefit. However, these rights, including the laws underwriting economic and financial innovation and parliamentary democracy, were gradually captured and shaped by those who could benefit most from them. This fascinating book shows that the outcome is a reduced ability to generate real wealth combined with exceptional inequality, as well as a worldwide breach of the vital trust between voters and their representatives. Capitalism's injuries are both self-inflicted and fatal. William Kingston uniquely deals with capitalism from a property rights standpoint, providing the first convincing explanation of economic cycles in terms of changes to these rights. The lucid exploration of the historical evolution of property includes a remarkable precursor of modern capitalism in medieval culture and pays particular attention to intellectual property. The book also calls attention to the harm that inaccurate measurement of economic activity can cause, both at the micro-level (auditing of corporations) and macro-level (the Kuznets GDP/GNP system). In conclusion, it argues that the exceptional levels of inequality today have been caused primarily by allowing financiers to escape from the laws that traditionally prevented them from 'generating money from nothing'. Challenging the orthodox thinking, this is an essential book for economists and political scientists in academia, the public sector and industry. It offers an imperative warning that capitalism's next crash is coming sooner rather than later.

This book collects the contributions to a conference of a group of young Polish and German public law scholars on the Constitutional Law of the European Union. The articles present a multi-faceted examination of unity and its realization in the primary and constitutional law of the EU, an analysis of EU constitutional structure in the face of diversity, and the independence of EU law from international common law, among other topics.

This title covers topics that are found in levels one and two of an undergraduate level module where students are studying a programme in the area of economics, finance, accountancy or more broadly management.

For more than 20 years, William Lazonick has been one of the world's leading analysts of the dynamics of industrial development and change in international economic leadership. This impressive volume presents a coherent selection of Professor Lazonick's most important work on industrial development in Britain and the United States.The first part of the book contains articles on the decline of the British economy, including a recent summary of the debates on the British cotton textile industry and international competition. The second part focuses on labour, management and technology in the rise and recent decline of the US economy, and includes an up-to-date summary essay on organizational capabilities in American industry. Professor Lazonick's essays make historical analysis relevant to the present and put economic analysis back in touch with evolving reality. This approach, together with his unique combination of historical, statistical and theoretical methodologies, will ensure that this volume proves invaluable to economists and historians alike.

The approach to many problems in economic analysis has changed drastically with the development and dissemination of new and more efficient computational techniques. Computational Economic Systems: Models, Methods & Econometrics presents a selection of papers illustrating the use of new computational methods and computing techniques to solve economic problems. Part I of the volume consists of papers which focus on modelling economic systems, presenting computational methods to investigate the evolution of behavior of economic agents, techniques to solve complex inventory models on a parallel computer and an original approach for the construction and solution of multicriteria models involving logical conditions. Contributions to Part II concern new computational approaches to economic problems. We find an application of wavelets to outlier detection. New estimation algorithms are presented, one concerning seemingly related regression models, a second one on nonlinear rational expectation models and a third one dealing with switching GARCH estimation. Three contributions contain original approaches for the solution of nonlinear rational expectation models.

This book focuses on building regional resilience by comprehensively improving regional assets. Regional vulnerability depends on the availability of regional assets for the population, as well as the population's ability to access those assets. Such assets include the environment, population size, community, and human capital, as well as traditional physical infrastructure. Identifying and improving these regional assets, which provide resource flows to help cope with regional disruptions-natural disasters, economic crises, or demographic changes- serves to mitigate vulnerability and build resiliency. The book pursues an interdisciplinary approach to investigating regional resilience, bringing together welfare and environmental economics, public administration, risk and disaster management, policy studies, development studies, and landscape architecture. Up-to-date case studies are provided, including recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan, regional development for depopulation areas, and urban policy for smart cities. These studies reflect and share the latest findings on key issues, policymaking and implementation processes, and implications for evaluation methodologies-all of which are indispensable to the building of resilient regions. This book is highly recommended for researchers and practitioners seeking a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to regional and urban development. It provides a valuable reference guide to building resiliency and mitigating vulnerability, both of which are imperative to achieving sustainable regions.

Networks provide the foundation for the functioning of our societies and economies. Their study has had a long tradition in such fields as engineering, operations research, management science and computer science. More recently, the disciplines of finance and economics have come to be rich and fascinating sources of network-based problems and applications. This focused and refereed volume of contributions from leading international scholars provides a wealth of innovations in the study of financial and economic networks. The volume presents entirely new results: the conceptualization of the stock market as a graph, the evolution of financial systems as networks, the incorporation of electronic transactions in international finance (from a network perspective), new formalisms for the study of supply chains (as fluid models and in an network economic framework) and new applications of agent-based computational economics trade networks with intermediaries and worker-employer networks. Finally, trade networks in web-based caching are introduced. Financial applications covered include: portfolio optimization with transaction costs, integrated pension and corporate planning, evolutionary financial networks, international finance and electronic transactions as well as hedging instruments for transportation networks. Innovative approaches to economic networks are developed in the context of supply chain and distribution networks, a variety of trade (including web-based caching) networks and even worker-employer networks. A major addition to this exciting and important subject, Innovations in Financial and Economic Networks will be an invaluable resource for economists and the networks community, as well as researchers and students in computational economics and finance, operations research, management science, applied mathematics and computer science.

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org.
This book examinesthe significance of networks among the firms operative in the contemporary Russian software industry in the St. Petersburg region.It focuses on the kind of resources that are transmitted through the personalnetworks of Russian business managers and directors.

The last two and a half decades witnessed China's epoch-making economic growth and great social changes, which indicates the commence of China's national rejuvenation after a near two-centuries-long stagnant or backward period. In exploring the causal dynamics of China's rejuvenation, Jianrong Huang's book examines the internal and external elements from various sides, in both the comprehensive way and the separate way, thus providing a convincible explanation about the driving force of China's marvellous development.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world financial markets, and institutions have new features, and are working in different environments and conditions. These are increasing the role of the financial sector in the world economy, integration of the financial markets and institutions, liberalization of related laws and regulations, increasing linkages between sub-segments of financial markets, computerizing of financial markets and institutions, and introducing new instruments and innovative derivatives. The majority of the above changes are considered positive developments in the world economy. However, some of the negative aspects are associated along with the above new conditions. One of the most critical changes is the increased linkage, which may lead to the transmission of high price volatility of stocks, currencies, and inflation, from one economy to another, and in turn may lead to financial crises at certain events and conditions similar to those which occured in 1987, 1989 and 1997. The financial crises are not confined to a financial market or a financial institution, or a country or a region. There are at present, no generally accepted arguments or explanations for the financial crises that occurred in the last century. The financial crises moved from one market to another, across geographical locations, as well as across segments of financial systems, including both developed and emerging markets.

The above features and conditions are creating new challenges; there is an urgent need, therefore, to examine various aspects of financial markets related to stability, risk, and activity, in order to find the most relevant environment and market mechanism that maymeet the conditions of stability, liquidity, and efficiency. This volume is devoted to exploring various aspects of this issue.

The process of globalization has had a dramatic impact on the lives of women in developing countries. In the past decade, they have been increasingly drawn into insecure flexible employment working for the world market. This book explores the experiences of women in diverse local contexts within different cultures and faiths, drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It draws out the contradictory and fragmented impact of globalization at the local level on the lives of women in the developing world.

Gunnar Myrdal was a Nobel Memorial Prize Laureate in Economics in 1974. This study examines the manner in which his intellectual style left an impact on the shaping of Sweden's welfare state, on race relations in the United States, and on post-World War Two economic cooperation in Europe.

The financial crisis prompted financial supervisors to take a critical look at their own performance.The "toolkit" available to supervisors is considerably more varied than it was a few years ago. Supervision has become more forward-looking, taking into account also soft controls, such as conduct and culture, corporate governance, and business models of financial institutions.This collection of essays discusses several significant changes in supervision methods and supervisory organisations and examines what methods contribute to good supervision and what can reasonably be expected of supervisors. The authors are experts in the field and most of them are affiliated to organisations responsible for financial supervision.

Challenging the prevailing view of privatization, this book analyzes the state of privatization around the world and offers policy suggestions. It includes original material of an analytical, empirical, and case study nature on the theory and practice of privatization, its relationship with the globalization of capital, its political and ideological underpinnings, its political, social, and economic consequences around the world. Its originality, currency, and critical perspectives make it a unique source for a wide variety of audiences.

The book's opening chapters deal with an extensive theoretical introduction followed by discussions on contracting out, public enterprise reform, and UN-led evaluations of contracting performance. In part two, the book turns to privatization and its flaws in major industrialized nations, including the United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and Australia. Part three analyzes privatization and its effects on policy and administration in Asian and Middle Eastern countries, including Post-revolutionary Iran, India, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, and Arab developing countries. Arguing that privatization is a poor policy with many dangers, the book offers suggestions for serious reform of public enterprise management and for alternatives to privatization.

One of the most troubling developments of the past two decades has been the dramatic rise in inequality among nations and within nations. This book examines the nature of this development in a variety of countries and contexts - China, Russia, Australia, Latin America, Italy - where the rise of inequality has not been studied as intensively as the US or UK. It also presents analyses of some potential causes and consequences of the rise in inequality.

The economic and political transition in Central and Eastern Europe has now entered its second decade. Although the post-communist countries shared many similarities at the outset of the transition, their economic and political experiences have been strongly divergent. Some countries succeeded in stabilizing their economies and are now set on course toward rapid growth, convergence, and accession to the European Union. Others, however, experienced severe and protracted recessions and their prospects for sustained recovery are still doubtful. On the political front, the past decade was marked similarly by important achievements but also grave setbacks. While democracy became firmly embedded in a number of post-communist countries, other transition countries reverted to authoritarian rule and/or experienced breakdowns of law and order, inter-ethnic conflicts, or even outright civil wars.
Political Economy of Transition and Development collects the proceedings of an international conference that brought the leading thinkers in this field to the Center for European Integration Studies of the University of Bonn in May, 2002. The contributions analyze the various interactions between institutions, policy choices, economic developments, and political outcomes in transition and developing countries. The first five chapters give a relatively broad assessment of the various reform paths and outcomes in the transition and developing countries. The remaining eight chapters proceed to analyze important aspects of transition such as voting behavior, political-regime choice, corruption, social capital, growth and inequality, and EU enlargement. The resulting volume thus combines a bird's eyeperspective with a relatively narrow focus on selected key issues pertaining to the ongoing transition process in Central and Eastern Europe.

Currency Crises in Emerging Markets, prepared by Warsaw-based Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), discusses various aspects of currency crises in emerging-market economies: The definitions and theoretical models of currency crises, the causes, management and propagation (contagion effect) of crises, their economic, social and policy consequences, the role of international financial institutions, and crisis prevention. In addition, five case studies of currency crises in Central and Eastern Europe are presented.

Transition and Growth in Post-Communist Countries documents the first ten years of economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe. It examines economic growth, stabilization policies and the reformation of social safety nets in the formerly communist countries. The analysis is presented by prominent architects of the economic transition who have been directly involved in both designing and implementing the programme of economic reforms. Using theoretical and empirical analyses the volume concludes that the countries which have successfully implemented major programmes of macroeconomic stabilization and institutional restructuring have experienced a much faster growth of national income and wealth than the non-reformers. This authoritative volume will be compelling reading to those interested in emerging market economies, the economics of transition, and international political economy. Researchers, lecturers and students of international macroeconomics and international political relations will also find the book useful.

The author captures the evolution of Indian industrial capitalism by extending the 'models of capitalism' and 'regulation framework'. Using principally the auto industry and anchoring the analysis to the expansion of markets, he demonstrates that the Indian state and businesses have been important institutions for creating markets. He acknowledges significant market growth, but also underscores several contradictions arising from such capitalist development. There is a wealth of data, which scholars, policymakers, and businesses will find very useful.

Lack of coordination of fiscal and monetary policies, disregard for the high degree of inflation persistency, unstable relations and bilateral causality between money supply and inflation, all imply an inappropriateness of money-based stabilizations for the transition economy of postcommunist Russia conducted under the auspices of the IMF. As a representative of the West, the IMF pretended to aid Russians through stabilisation. The IMF promised loans while the Russian government promised reforms. This turned out to be a pseudo lending for pseudo reforms with disastrous consequences for the Russian economy as explored and scrutinized in this volume.

The analysis in this book reflects various aspects of financial sector transformation in selected Central European countries that are expected to join the EU in 2004. The authors are Central European financial experts who provide, among other things, a detailed overview of the following main topics: Banking Regulation and Supervision; Concentration and Efficiency of the Banking Sectors; Financial (banking) crises in selected Central European countries; and Monetary and Exchange Rate Development. The results of the research done by these authors reflect an interesting fact: that there exist important differences in the financial sector development even in the relatively homogeneous group of selected Central European countries, namely the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

This book offers historical and comparative analyses of changes in agrarian society forced by the globalization of capitalism, and the implications of these changes for human welfare globally. The book gives special attention to recent economic development and urbanization in the People s Republic of China which have had a major impact on contemporary transformations globally. Case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in turn place these transformations in a comparative global perspective. The contributors include distinguished scholars from the UN, PRC, India, Zimbabwe, and Latin America who are also active in policy issues."