The prevailing aspiration of business is performance, while that of society is progress. Capitalism, both the paradigm and practice, sits at the intersection of these dual aspirations, and the essays in this volume explore its fraught status there. Contributions to this volume address questions such as (i) what's the problem with capitalism?; (ii) is the problem just with the practice or with the very paradigm?; (iii) what is progress and who is responsible for it?; (iv) what evolution is required at the individual, system, and paradigm level so that enterprises and the executives who lead them may better integrate performance with progress?; and (v) whither consumers, employees, and investors in this evolution? The book offers perspectives from two distinct intellectual domains-social science and philosophy. Scholars in social science (including economics, management, and sociology) tend to study performance. Ideas of progress, on the other hand, tend to fall more under the purview of philosophers (in particular social and political philosophers). Further, to obtain an insider's view on practice and possibilities, the volume includes essays from a handful of thoughtful business leaders. Research should consider not just how to make sustainability profitable, but also how to make profitability and the modern economic system sustainable. If we are to better comprehend why the world is in protest, to reflect on progress or dilemmas of trust, we must appreciate the tenuous assumptions of modern microeconomics and markets, and hear from modern philosophers about the basis and limits of rationality.

This work deals primarily with social costs of transformation to a market economy in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. The transformation provisions have negatively affected the well-being of the population. They brought about unemployment, a phenomenon which did not exist in the previous, communist system, increased income inequities, reduced social programmes and expanded poverty. All these phenomena are examined in this book. In addition, the book discusses the strategy of transformation, privatization and the economic performance of the three countries.

A provocative and timely look at the current state of global economics, particularly how the state-owned companies of Russia, China, Latin America, and other emerging markets are influencing how people work, how they consume, and how they prosper. The global economy is changing: experts are noting slow growth in the advanced economies, greater volatility in international markets, and the emergence of state-owned companies in the competitive marketplace. This forward-looking reference explores the role that state capitalism plays within the political structures of countries throughout the world. The text begins with an introduction to state capitalism, moves into an in-depth examination of several countries and regions, and concludes with a discussion on the future of state capitalism in the next decade. Coauthors Scott B. MacDonald and Jonathan Lemco examine the challenges that state-owned companies face in the global economy, including a weak legal and commercial infrastructure, a conflict of interest between politics and business, and massive corruption in local and regional governments. A close review of the perils of state capitalism based on meritocracy devolving into crony capitalism invites debate on the longevity of this economic system versus a free market economy. Considers the factors that will impede future economic growth in China, Russia, Argentina, and Venezuela Defines the role of the state in the economy and the accompanying political system Features chapters on the economic outlook of Egypt, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Latin America Discusses the future of capitalism in the 21st century Includes a look at alternative economic scenarios in the year 2025

Is globalization forcing "non-coordinated market economies," such as Chile, Mexico, Spain, and Portugal, to converge on an Anglo-American model? What explains national differences in social and economic policies? While theories of comparative economic advantage have dominated discussions of international trade, this book seeks to build on the hypotheses generated by the recent literature on "varieties of capitalism" to demonstrate the impact that institutions have on the national economic policy patterns of these countries.

This is the only in-depth study of social policies in Southeast Asia. It compares social security, health and education policies in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. After describing the policies and assessing their adequacy and equity implications, it examines the forces that have shaped them. It concludes that social programs (except for primary education) in the region are both inadequate and inequitable. It argues that the reason for this is political rather than cultural or socio-economic.

This rich collection brings together distinguished authiors who analyze phases of capitalist development. The contributors represent a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives. They offer powerful analyses of the post-war boom, economic crisis, and globalization within the context of the study of capitalist development.

Informed by in-depth case studies focusing on a wide spectrum of micro and macro post-socialist realities, this book demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of informality and suggests that it is a widely diffused phenomenon, used at all levels of a society and by both winners and losers of post-socialist transition.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg Finance, mobile and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype? A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion'. Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era. Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualised through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

Games and Decision Making, Second Edition, is a unique blend of decision theory and game theory. From classical optimization to modern game theory, authors Charalambos D. Aliprantis and Subir K. Chakrabarti show the importance of mathematical knowledge in understanding and analyzing issues in decision making. Through an imaginative selection of topics, Aliprantis and Chakrabarti treat decision and game theory as part of one body of knowledge. They move from problems involving the individual decision-maker to progressively more complex problems such as sequential rationality, auctions, and bargaining. By building each chapter on material presented earlier, the authors offer a self-contained and comprehensive treatment of these topics. Successfully class-tested in an advanced undergraduate course at the Krannert School of Management and in a graduate course in economics at Indiana University, Games and Decision Making, Second Edition, is an essential text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of decision theory and game theory. The book is accessible to students who have a good basic understanding of elementary calculus and probability theory. New to this Edition * Chapter 2 includes new sections on two-person games, best-response strategies, mixed strategies, and incomplete information * Chapter 4 has been expanded to provide new material on behavior strategies and applications * The chapter on auctions (5) includes a new section on revenue equivalence * Offers two new chapters, on repeated games (7) and existence results (9) * New applications have been added to all the chapters

Capital is pushing into motion ever larger global material flows. In doing so it has come to depend on massive expenditures of energy, putting to work fossil fuels and the machines they animate to transform the world, accumulate power and grow the economy. The ecological relations and crises of today's societies are driven by the processes of extraction of the elements that come together as a throughput of material and energy flows controlled by capital and shaped by its imperative of valorization. In A Social Ecology of Capital, Eric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century. Drawing on ecological economics and critical political economy, the book analyses how the social structures of accumulation, production, consumption and waste determine and regulate the material flow and the accumulation of material artifacts. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, the book highlights the contradictions humanity now faces.

At a time of rising global economic precarity and social inequality, the field of economic anthropology offers solutions through the study of local and contextualized economic practices. This book is made up of an exciting collection of succinct essays authored by leading scholars primarily from the field of economic anthropology, but also featuring contributions from sociology and history. The chapters engage with debates at the cutting edge of research on the topics of Eurasia, the anthropology of postsocialism and the embeddedness of economic practices.

As more companies shift their operations between countries to take advantage of lower costs and greater profit, the global market continues to change rapidly, resulting in global hypercompetition that can be detrimental to a business. Firms must remain updated with the latest research as they navigate cultural differences, communication challenges, and inconsistent standards in order to thrive. The Handbook of Research on Global Industry Transitions and Opportunities is an essential, comprehensive reference book that explores the current global business environment and the challenges that have arisen due to contemporary globalization and the resulting global hypercompetition. With a broad scope, the book covers the implications of industry transitions from small and medium-sized companies to multinational businesses and large enterprises and discusses opportunities for both born global and born-again global firms. Featuring topics that deal with innovation, digitalization, disruptive technologies, and international collaboration, this is an ideal source for executives, managers, entrepreneurs, global businesses and businesses looking to transition to the global market, academicians, researchers, and students.

There has been little analysis of the constitutional framework for management of the UK economy, either in constitutional law or regulatory studies. This is in contrast to many other countries where the concept of an 'economic constitution' is well established, as it is in the law of the European Union. Given the extensive role of the state in attempting to resolve recent financial crises in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, it is particularly important to develop such an analysis. This book sets out different meanings of an economic constitution, and applies them to key areas of economic management, including taxation and public borrowing, the management of public spending, (including the Spending Review), monetary policy, financial services regulation, industrial policy (including state shareholdings) and government contracting. It analyses the key institutions involved such as the Treasury and the Bank of England, also including a number of less well-known bodies such as the Office for Budget Responsibility. There is also coverage of the international context in which these institutions operate especially the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. It thus provides an account of the public law applying to economic management in the UK. This book also adopts a critical approach, assessing the degree to which there is coherence in the arrangements for economic management, the degree to which economic policy-making is constrained by constitutional norms, and the degree to which economic management is subject to deliberation and accountability through Parliament, the courts and other institutions.

This book introduces embodied innovations into the circle of already recognised causes of economic crises. The author shows how issues of investment, accumulation and structural change associated with embodied innovations can be used to monitor potential crisis. The author argues that crises are predictable and manageable in depth.

Smith, Burke, Marx, Durkheim, Polanyi and Hayek--all sought to situate market exchange and property-based acquisitiveness in the broader context of human interaction and social values. This book explores that framework of interdependence and ethics that embeds the capitalist market economy in an ongoing whole of which the calculative present-day is but a part. It argues that the stability of conservatism anchors the dynamism of entrepreneurship in a matrix of patterns and habits without which orderly free enterprise would be at risk of degenerating into the Hobbesian war of each against all.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media. Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) - or both. Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of 'chokepoint capitalism', with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct 'anti-competitive flywheels' designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's being heisted away - before it's too late.

This book provides a unique study of the differences in economic behaviour according to the phases of the economic cycle in the countries of the European Union. It presents a comprehensive analysis of asymmetry in the EU over the last forty years, and shows that the problems in the global financial crisis were readily predictable.
The authors use empirical research and panel data to show how much economic behaviour changes between the up and down phases of the business cycle, and the difficulties this creates for monetary, fiscal and labour market policies. The volume demonstrates how prescient the asymmetric design of the Stability and Growth Pact was in trying to offset countries understandable optimism in fiscal policy, and the consequent tendency not to manage debt successfully. It also reveals the inherent problems for managing unemployment in an asymmetric labour market.

This book aims to theoretically and empirically enrich the GVC accounting framework with statistical physics and complex network theory from the perspective of econophysics, thus adding up to the existing theories. Besides, it also aims at capturing the essences of network models such as topological complexity, hierarchy, transmissibility, interaction, and causality and reflecting the objective interrelations among economies or between economies and economic systems on the GVC, so as to reveal the inherent evolution of the cross-regional and even global economic systems.

This book gives a scientific and systematic approach to trading in emerging stock markets. As professional traders do not trade purely on the basis of the economic fundamentals, but also take into account market movements generated by other factors (noise trading), knowledge of technical analysis is important to anyone who would like to participate successfully in the stock market. Second, the existence of a skew towards reliance on fundamental analysis at longer horizons suggests that models based on economic considerations will be more important on the long run. Third, the existence of a skew towards reliance on technical analysis at shorter horizons suggests that models based on short term considerations (noise) will be more important in the short term. The present book gives a base for practitioners as well as students to learn the tricks of the trade through examples and case studies.

This book uses facts and data to prove that socialist public sectors are still in a predominant position in China. Based on previous research and studies, a set of methods for measuring the structure of public or non-public owned economy is offered in this book. As is remarked by the authors, China's basic economic system, namely the system with the public sector remaining dominant and diverse sectors of the economy developing side by side, represents an efficient approach towards mutual benefit, common prosperity and peaceful co-existence.

Understand how to protect your critical information infrastructure (CII). Billions of people use the services of critical infrastructure providers, such as ambulances, hospitals, and electricity and transport networks. This number is increasing rapidly, yet there appears to be little protection for many of these services. IT solutions have allowed organisations to increase their efficiency in order to be competitive. However, do we even know or realise what happens when IT solutions are not working - when they simply don't function at all or not in the way we expect? This book aims to teach the IT framework from within, allowing you to reduce dependence on IT systems and put in place the necessary processes and procedures to help protect your CII. Lessons Learned: Critical Information Infrastructure Protection is aimed at people who organise the protection of critical infrastructure, such as chief executive officers, business managers, risk managers, IT managers, information security managers, business continuity managers and civil servants. Most of the principles and recommendations described are also valid in organisations that are not critical infrastructure service providers. The book covers the following: - Lesson 1: Define critical infrastructure services. - Lesson 2: Describe the critical infrastructure service and determine its service level. - Lesson 3: Define the providers of critical infrastructure services. - Lesson 4: Identify the critical activities, resources and responsible persons needed to provide the critical infrastructure service. - Lesson 5: Analyse and identify the interdependencies of services and their reliance upon power supplies. - Lesson 6: Visualise critical infrastructure data. - Lesson 7: Identify important information systems and assess their importance. - Lesson 8: Identify and analyse the interconnections and dependencies of information systems. - Lesson 9: Focus on more critical services and prioritise your activities. - Lesson 10: Identify threats and vulnerabilities. - Lesson 11: Assess the impact of service disruptions. - Lesson 12: Assess the risks associated with the service and information system. - Lesson 13: Implement the necessary security measures. - Lesson 14: Create a functioning organisation to protect CII. - Lesson 15: Follow regulations to improve the cyber resilience of critical infrastructure services. - Lesson 16: Assess the security level of your information systems yourself and ask external experts to assess them as well. - Lesson 17: Scan networks yourself and ask external experts to scan them as well to find the systems that shouldn't be connected to the Internet but still are. - Lesson 18: Prepare business continuity and disaster recovery plans and test them at reasonable intervals. - Lesson 19: Establish reliable relations and maintain them. - Lesson 20: Share information and be a part of networks where information is shared. - Lesson 21: Train people to make sure they are aware of cyber threats and know the correct behaviour. - Lesson 22: If the CII protection system does not work as planned or give the desired output, make improvements. - Lesson 23: Be prepared to provide critical infrastructure services without IT systems. If possible, reduce dependence on IT systems. If possible, during a crisis, provide critical services at reduced functionality and/or in reduced volumes. Author Toomas Viira is a highly motivated, experienced and results-orientated cyber security risk manager and IT auditor. He has more than 20 years' experience in the IT and cyber security sectors.

Today's financial system is considerably more complex than in years past, as new financial instruments have been introduced that are not well understood even by the people and institutions that invest in them. Numerous high-risk opportunities are available, and the number of people who unwittingly wander into such ventures seems to grow daily. There is also the realization that people's lives are affected by the financial system without their overt participation in it. Despite no active participation, pensions can be emasculated by a sudden decline in interest rates, or a rise in rates can increase the monthly payments on a mortgage, credit cards or other debt. This book looks at the history of the American banking system, including the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the implementation of deposit insurance, along with certain other provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Bretton-Woods agreements, the forces of technological innovation and the Dodd-Frank Act, passed by Congress in 2010 for regulatory reform. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate level students that want to gain a broad understanding of how the financial system works, why it is important to the economy as a whole, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. Also, readers should gain an understanding of what the Federal Reserve, other regulators and other central banks are doing, and will be in a position to critique their actions and say with some depth of understanding why they agree or disagree with them.

This edited volume takes a closer look at various European pension-plan models and the recent challenges, trends and predictions related to the design of such schemes. The contributors analyse new ideas, both from national governments and European institutions, and consider current debates on topics such as the Capital Markets Union (CMU) and the so-called 'European Pillar of Social Rights' - calling for a new approach to social policy at the European level in response to common challenges, such as ageing and the digital revolution.This interdisciplinary work embraces economic, financial and legal perspectives, while focusing on previously selected coherence aspects in order to ensure that the analyses are comprehensive and globally consistent.

This Open Access book offers a novel view on the benefits of a lasting variation between the member states in the EU. In order to bring together thirty very different European states and their citizens, the EU will have to offer more scope for variation. Unlike the existing differentiation by means of opt-outs and deviations, variation is not a concession intended to resolve impasses in negotiations; it is, rather, a different structuring principle. It takes differences in needs and in democratically supported convictions seriously. A common core remains necessary, specifically concerning the basic principles of democracy, rule of law, fundamental rights and freedoms, and the common market. By taking this approach, the authors remove the pressure to embrace uniformity from the debate about the EU's future. The book discusses forms of variation that fall both within and outside the current framework of European Union Treaties. The scope for these variations is mapped out in three domains: the internal market; the euro; and asylum, migration and border control.

Explores capitalism’s role in creating the current state of climate emergency Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift� in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.