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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This volume examines the regional and global contexts of the political economy of illegal narcotics operations in the Caribbean. It assesses some of the political economy connections and discusses measures adopted to contend with the region's illegal drug challenge.

This book calls upon us to rethink and reboot the European Union. The authors dissect the EU's many vulnerabilities: how some Member States are backsliding on the rule of law, freedom of the press, and control of corruption - and how globalization's 'discontents' are threatening the liberal international order. It examines the need for a common immigration policy; the need to rethink the unsustainable debt overhang of some Eurozone countries; and the need to use education to foster a European identity. Given the sum total of these vulnerabilities, the book argues, the EU may not survive beyond 2025 in its present form - that is, unless decisive action is taken. In turn, the book puts forward a number of workable solutions: a European economic model to secure full employment; a stronger European Court of Human Rights to counter systemic violations; a points-based immigration policy; clear exit options for the Eurozone; and an Open Education Area with a common second language. These solutions may reduce the number of EU countries, but would increase cohesion and overall survivability.

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.

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.

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.

This book examines empirical and theoretical research on economic inequality from the perspective of dynamic models. By using advanced mathematical tools, it reveals fundamental market dynamics and underlines the role of subsistence constraints and competition in economic distribution.

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.

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.

Maritime Piracy and its Control develops an economic approach to the problem of modern-day maritime piracy with the goal of assessing the effectiveness of remedies aimed at reducing the incidence of piracy.

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.

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.

This book explores the historical roots of rapid economic growth in South Asia, with reference to politics, markets, resources, and the world economy. Roy posits that, after an initial slow period of growth between 1950 and the 1980s, the region has been growing rapidly and fast catching up with the world on average levels of living. Why did this turnaround happen? Does it matter? Is it sustainable? The author answers these questions by drawing connections, comparisons, and parallels between the five large countries in the region: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It shows why, despite differences in political experience between these countries, similarities in resources and markets could produce similar trajectories. Home to a fifth of the world's population, South Asia's transformation has the power to change the world. Most accounts of the process focus on individual nations, but by breaking out of that mould, Roy takes on the region as a whole, and delivers a radical new interpretation of why the economy of South Asia is changing so fast.

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.

This book addresses three big economic challenges from a dynamic perspective: European integration, economic growth, and global climate change. In the light of the recent crises of the European Union (EU), the first part of the book deals with challenges to the real, monetary and fiscal integration of the EU and required institutional adjustments. The second part of the book addresses fundamental challenges of advanced market economies like economic growth and changes of technologies. The final part focuses on the global challenge of climate change from an economic perspective and discusses policy strategies for a successful mitigation of climate change.

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."

This book sets the experiences of former communist countries as they head towards capitalism against the 'varieties of capitalism' paradigm, and provides a framework for comparing transformation processes, demonstrating how differing heritages of communist and pre-communist pasts are leading to different kinds of capitalist economies.

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 is devoted to analyzing contemporary capitalism both in Japan and in the world economy by using the theoretical framework of the French regulation theory and by revisiting the theory of civil society in postwar Japan. The Japanese theory of civil society proposed unique thinking about "freedom and equality" and "human rights" in the postwar era but could not help to come up with effective concepts for an economic analysis of that capitalism of the period. On the other hand, the regulation theory born in the 1970s is well known by its definition of postwar capitalism as Fordism, based on the elaboration of a new conceptual framework, but it soon proved unable to directly explain Japan's experience by that central concept of Fordism. Inspired by consideration of Japanese civil society and also by the regulationist framework, the author has forged new analytical concepts such as "companyism" to understand Japanese capitalism including the recent "lost decades", and he elaborates more carefully the concepts of "growth regime" and "institutional change" to grasp the dynamics of the world economy including today's neoliberal trend. The original benefits of the book consist in 1) reviving a Japanese theory of civil society in the postwar period, 2) applying the regulation theory to the analysis of contemporary Japan, and 3) offering theoretical reflections on the conception of the world economy. Consequently, the author pays special attention to the relationship between the political and the economic as well as regulationist tools and the theory of civil society's perspective. The principal message of the book is that capitalism or the market economy must be supported by a sound civil society.

How is it that the modest pace of change which typified the French economy a century ago gave way after 1945 to a new, revived capitalism and a superior economic performance? Mairi Maclean argues that the new French capitalism of the 21st century is the product of an ideological struggle in which the forces of modernization triumphed over the old guard of French nationalism.

The Russian transformation crisis is analyzed and put into the context of national policy failures and international shocks. The study also has a focus on structural change and foreign direct investment - including an econometric perspective. Basic problems of economic opening-up, macroeconomic policy and aspects of political economy are also discussed. The role of institutional reforms, membership in international organizations and supply-side policies are emphasized.