According to renowned Marxist economist Samir Amin, the recent Arab Spring uprisings comprise an integral part of a massive "second awakening" of the Global South. From the self-immolation in December 2010 of a Tunisian street vendor, to the consequent outcries in Cairo's Tahrir Square against poverty and corruption, to the ongoing upheavals across the Middle East and Northern Africa, the Arab world is shaping what may become of Western imperialism - an already tottering and overextended system.The Reawakening of the Arab World examines the complex interplay of nations regarding the Arab Spring and its continuing, turbulent seasons. Beginning with Amin's compelling interpretation of the 2011 popular Arab explosions, the book is comprised of five chapters - including a new chapter analyzing U.S. geo-strategy. Amin sees the United States, in an increasingly multi-polar world, as a victim of overreach, caught in its own web of attempts to contain the challenge of China, while confronting the staying power of nations such as Syria and Iran. The growing, deeply-felt need of the Arab people for independent, popular democracy is the cause of their awakening, says Amin. It is this awakening to democracy that the United States fears most, since real self-government by independent nations would necessarily mean the end of U.S. empire, and the economic liberalism that has kept it in place. The way forward for the Arab world, Amin argues, is to take on, not just Western imperialism, but also capitalism itself.

What new products or services should you launch next year? How can you improve the productivity of a paint line? What should you name your new venture? How can you decrease patient waiting times? How can you improve the customer experience? Pretty much any creative problem-solving task can be framed as seeking a new match between solution and need, from operational process improvements to creating strategies to foster organic growth. Innovation tournaments aim to find a match that is not just good, but exceptional. Leveraging more than two decades of experience organizing innovation tournaments in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, from Buenos Aires to Kuwait City, Shanghai to Moscow, and with many Fortune 500 companies, two renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and the foremost experts on innovation tournaments offer a template that you can use to generate winning ideas that will drive great outcomes—whatever your challenges, whatever your business. In The Innovation Tournament Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Exceptional Solutions to Any Challenge, Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich offer an engaging, often humorous, and always actionable guide to help you learn: --How to frame and articulate your specific innovation challenge --How to decide on the right format, structure, and strategic direction for your own innovation tournament --How to maximize the quality of the opportunities that will compete --How to select the very best ideas --How to develop those ideas into real-world opportunities --How to use tournaments to foster a culture of innovation Fast-reading and filled with real-world successes, The Innovation Tournament Handbook is a comprehensive roadmap to finding a new match between a solution and a need that is not merely good, but exceptional.

Co-operativism and Local Development in Cuba consists of a series of pathbreaking essays on the role of co-operativism, and the new co-operatives, in the democratic transformation of Cuba and the government's plan to update the model in the current context. The contributors are well-known specialists on Cuba, co-operativism and local development. With a shared concern for how an increased focus on co-operativism and local development can contribute to the updating of the Cuban model and the advance of socialism, the contributors to the book have placed an analysis of the issues involved in the broader context of the international co-operative movement and the ongoing capitalist development process in Latin America. Contributors include: Milford Bateman, Al Campbell, Grizel Donestevez Sanchez, Cliff DuRand, Olga Fernandez Rios, Julio C. Gambina, Camila Pineiro Harnecker, Sonja Novkovic, Dayrelis Ojeda Suris, Gabriela Roffinelli, Frederick. S. Royce, Dean Sinkovic, Henry Veltmeyer, Marcelo Vieta.

This book presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker's key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker's own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.

Higher education, especially that which is publicly funded, is under increasing scrutiny from politicians and the public as competition in this sector increases. Susanne Warning provides a comprehensive analysis of the strategic positioning of public universities as service providers in a competitive sector. The author develops two distinct theoretical approaches to the analysis of public universities. The first is the concept of strategic groups, originating in management theory. It implies that due to different returns on investment in teaching quality and research quality, heterogeneity will exist in the university sector. The second approach involves a three-stage duopoly game of competition between universities, and is underpinned by the industrial economics literature. Universities in this formal equilibrium model of differentiation position themselves in terms of teaching and research quality in order to attract students. Although the analysis is based on data for German publicly funded universities, however, the author's conclusions offer important insights for all countries where publicly funded universities play a role, particularly in the current climate of shifts towards more competitive university systems. With an exclusive combination of economic analysis and institutional data, this book will prove invaluable for anyone with a particular interest in the economics of higher education.

This book looks at some of the major themes concerning governance in the EU, namely the focus on market-friendly regulations, output legitimacy and how the requirement of efficiency is combined with the requirement of democratic accountability. The dilemma between efficiency and democratic accountability is analysed in three cases of close collaboration between public and private actors: the European satellite navigation programme (Galileo), the European Investment Bank and health policies, and the European financial market - especially the banking sector. The background to this interest in the dilemma between efficiency and democratic accountability is that this is a time when the borders between the public and private spheres are being re-evaluated, transferred and becoming more porous. The author makes a compelling case to show that authority is being shared between public and private actors, rather than power being delegated - inn contrast with the apparent mode of democratic accountability. European Public-Private Collaboration will be warmly welcomed by postgraduate students and researchers of European studies and public policy.

The evolution of China's market economy is one of the most important developments in the world economy in the twenty-first century. The diverse contributors to this book provide a unique set of essays that evaluate legal, regulatory, and economic aspects of China's transition from planned to market economy. While market-oriented policy reform in China has led to substantial growth and progress since the onset of the reform period in 1979, many challenges remain. This study begins with a general survey of China's transition to a market economy and is followed by more elaborate analyses of specific sectors. The authors consider China's changing regulatory structure and the relationships of this structure to Chinese markets, developments in markets for goods, services, and production factors, changing trade patterns, and the determinants of foreign direct investment and its role in overall capital formation. They provide a comprehensive assessment of market reforms in China. In-depth yet accessible, the book will be of great value to policy makers, business planners, students and researchers concerned with China, as well as those interested in the world economy at large.

How Nations Innovate compares how affluent capitalist economies differ in their patterns of technological innovation. Building on the 'varieties of capitalism' literature, this book goes beyond the traditional focus on 'radical versus incremental innovation' in existing scholarship, and takes the comparison of capitalism to an entirely new set of questions around technological innovation. For example, which type of capitalism engages in job-threatening innovation? Whose innovation widens income inequality? Whose innovation raises productivity? Which type of capitalism has more effective financial markets for innovation? Whose innovators emphasize 'control' rather than 'flexibility' during innovation? By addressing these questions, the author demonstrates that the way nations innovate often has deep, and sometimes counter-intuitive, implications for how they compare in many areas of socio-economic performance. For example, although venture capital is most active in Anglo-Saxon economies, it seems that venture-capital performance in stimulating innovation is also poorest in precisely these countries. On the issue of employment, the author argues that, whilst technological innovation in Anglo-Saxon economies creates jobs, innovation in European economies destroys jobs. Nations also differ in the nature of income inequality driven by innovation. While innovation pushes top earners further ahead of median earners in Anglo-Saxon economies, it drags bottom earners further behind the median in European economies. Finally, varieties of capitalism also differ in their ability to cope with the volatilities of innovation. While Anglo-Saxon economies face a trade-off between low volatility and high innovation output, these two goals seem jointly achievable in European economies.

Mario Amendola and Jean-Luc Gaffard argue that all too often, markets and technology are treated as two magic words that will open the door to a wealth of riches. An increasing number of governments appear to be aiming for a pure market economy in order to reap the benefits of a benevolent technology that promises the most spectacular advances. Both markets and technology can certainly be considered essential economic factors, but which market and what technology? Is the current prevailing view of competition without restraints and privatisation at all costs actually the essence of the market? This book maintains that the dominant view mistakes the relationship between growth and technical change and, as a consequence, the role of the market in this context. The authors argue that once the issue is analysed in the proper light, the usual ingredients of the dominant policy recipe - zero inflation, balanced budgets, privatisations, deregulation of all markets, extreme flexibility - may not actually be the appropriate ones.The Market Way to Riches will appeal to academics from many branches of economics including heterodox, evolutionary and macroeconomics and those with an interest in economic growth generally. Policy makers influencing economic growth will also find much to engage them.

This book offers an assessment of new opportunities available for the agricultural sector and provides technical assistance to the Greek authorities with regards to its rural development and fishery sector. Karantininis follows a value chain approach and analyzes the Greek agri-food industry, breaking it down vertically and horizontally. Vertically, the Greek agri-food chain is stripped to its main upstream and downstream components: inputs, primary production, distribution and retail. Horizontally, the agri-food value chain is analyzed in terms of size, ownership, governance and space. The author pays special attention to policy formation, policy implementation, the political and industrial structure, land and credit markets, education, extension and research. The author focuses on this through three subcategories of fruits and vegetables, aquaculture and olive oil. A number of opinions and recommendations are presented in each section, concluding with propositions for a new institutional structure for Greek agriculture.

In The Fiat Standard, world-renowned economist Saifedean Ammous applies his unique analytical lens to the fiat monetary system, explaining it as a feat of engineering and technology just as he did for bitcoin in his global bestseller The Bitcoin Standard.

This time, Ammous delves into the world's earlier shift from the gold standard to today's system of government-backed fiat money—outlining the fiat standard's purposes and failures; deriving the wider economic, political, and social implications of its use; and examining how bitcoin will affect it over time.

With penetrating insight, Ammous analyzes global political currencies by analogy to bitcoin: how they're "mined" whenever government-guaranteed entities create loans, their lack of inherent restraints on inflation, and the rampant government intervention that has resulted in heavy, devastating, and persistent distortions to global markets for food, fuel, science, and education.

Through these comparisons, Ammous demonstrates that bitcoin could be our next step forward—providing high salability across space, just like the fiat system, but without the unchecked fiat-denominated debt. Rather than a messy hyperinflationary collapse, the rise of bitcoin could look like a debt jubilee and an orderly upgrade to the world's monetary operating system, revolutionizing global capital and energy markets.

Constitutional political economy applies an economic approach to the analysis of constitutional choice. Initially, research clearly leaned towards legitimizing the state and its actions. However, the transitions taking place in Central and Eastern Europe have made apparent the necessity to improve our knowledge of the working properties of alternative constitutional rules, thus stressing the importance of positive analysis. The authors analyse both the opportunities and dangers of importing constitutions from around the world into this area. The papers assembled in this volume deal with the question of what individual transition processes have taught us in terms of constitution-building. The book contains analyses of post 1989 constitutional developments in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the perspectives of varied disciplines; including academics, politicians and the judiciary. Constitutions, Markets and Law will be welcomed by scholars of transition studies and political economists as well as practitioners of, and academics with an interest in, constitutional law.

The OECD includes the richest nations in the world. It issues recommendations on economic and social policies. Is its counsel on welfare state policies coherent? And is it followed by member states in Western Europe? These are the guiding questions of this book, which is a first to deal with such issues. The OECD and European Welfare States comprises 14 country studies considering OECD recommendations and their implementation in Western European welfare states, an analysis of the internal processes in the OECD, a theoretical introduction and a concluding comparative chapter. The overall results show a large degree of consistency in OECD analyses and recommendations, though little efficacy is revealed. The authors of this book have compiled a major contribution to the analysis of the impact of international organisations on national welfare states, widening the scope of traditional analyses of national welfare state development. This edited book will be of special interest to those researchers and graduate students in the fields of international business, welfare state policy and comparative politics. It will also appeal to policy makers concerned with the OECD or welfare state development.

Social enterprises boost the economic landscape and benefit causes that are important to society in general. Examining the role of public policy within these small initiatives will produce more effective methods for these two avenues to work together. Influence of Public Policy on Small Social Enterprises: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a pivotal scholarly resource that provides in-depth discussion on how social enterprises are reshaping global economies. Highlighting relevant topics that include legal funding, government policies, third-sector enterprises, and procurement procedures, this reference publication is ideal for academicians, students, government officials, business managers, and researchers that are interested in staying current on the latest advances in the field of social enterprises.

CLASSIC STUDY OF AMERICAN LABOR ECONOMICS "This book outlines an evolutionary and behavioral theory of value based on data drawn from court decisions. Analyzing the meaning of reasonable value as defined by the courts, Commons finds that the answer is based on a notion of reasonable conduct. Expanding this point to encompass the habits and customs of social life, he shows that court decisions are based on customs that are powerful forces shaping the economic system. John R. Commons has contributed in one way or another to practically every piece of social and labor legislation that has been enacted in the 20th century." --JACK BARBASH, Monthly Labor Review, May 1989, Vol. 112, No. 5 " An] . . . analysis further along his chosen line than any of his predecessors. Into our knowledge of capitalism he has incorporated a great body of new materials which no one else has used adequately."-- WESLEY MITCHELL, American Economic Review, XIV (1924) 253 John R. Commons 1862-1945] was a Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. He was the author and editor of numerous works, and established his reputation with his editorial contributions to A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910-1911). He was the author of The Distribution of Wealth (1893), Institutional Economics (1934) and co-author of the History of Labor in the United States (1918-1935). Commons drafted much of the nationally influential labor legislation for the state of Wisconsin that gave unions legal privileges, offered compulsory unemployment insurance to workers and established the first system of workers' compensation in the United States. Due to these path-breaking reforms, he is considered to be the spiritual father of the Social Security Act.

Social economy organizations such as cooperatives, non-profits, mutual benefit groups, foundations, and non-governmental organizations are uniquely positioned to respond not only to emerging social and economic needs, but also to new collective aspirations. In Quebec, for instance, a pioneering social economy system has been developed that is recognized worldwide for its ability to foster innovative solutions to economic disparity and sustainability issues. In the wake of a global crisis that has emphasized the growing gap between economic and social concerns, what can other regions gain from this model? Through robust theoretical and in-depth empirical studies, this book offers the first opportunity to English-language readers to learn about the Quebec experience of a social economy system. It takes stock of recent developments in the province relating to policy planning, governance, financing, local development, and legal frameworks. Innovation and the Social Economy also emphasizes this system's potential for exploring alternative practices of production, consumption, and distribution that can foster social transformation.

This significant new book provides a succinct overview of the essential policy issues surrounding capital liberalization. The book compares the experiences of transition economies in Europe with those of advanced nations, allowing the reader to examine the changing international economic and financial environment within which transition countries have to liberalize. The book first deals with the critical issues concerning liberalization, including sequencing and financial market development. The authors move on to present an overview of the early liberalization experiences of advanced economies and East-Asian countries. This provides the context for a series of chapters reviewing liberalization progress in transition economies, in which international experts and senior officials analyze their own countries' experiences. The authors also emphasise the importance of financial market reform and the construction of a sound institutional framework if countries are to attract and productively use capital inflows. A stable financial system, whilst not infallible, is also crucial for minimizing the risk of financial crises of the type experienced by a number of countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The comprehensive scope of the subject matter and international contributions from a range of different perspectives will ensure this book is warmly received by academics and researchers with an interest in EU accession, transition economics and financial market reform. It will also serve as a useful guide to governments involved in capital liberalization in other parts of the world such as Latin America and Asia.

Since the popularization of Internet access and use, businesses have moved to create and include electronic markets to reach a larger customer base. These electronic markets can exacerbate already existing socioeconomic problems as well as limit the effect of regulation from national states. Regulation and Structure in Economic Virtualization: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical academic publication that discusses and explores the relationship between the Internet and business networks, especially the development of web markets and their relation to regulation in global societies. Covering a wide range of topics, such as business virtualization, global outsourcing, and innovations in public governance, this book is geared toward academicians, researchers, and students seeking relevant and research on the interaction between the internet and business as well as the development of internet markets.