Through a deep examination of what has become known as the 'Preston Model', this book explores an innovative approach to local economic development that utilises economic democratisation to realise both social and economic objectives. The first part of the book examines the main strands of the Preston Model framework and what makes it different to other urban regeneration schemes: the combination of local anchor institution procurement to generate and retain local wealth, and the development of cooperatives to fill gaps in local supply chains. The chapters in this section consider the Preston Model as viewed through different lenses: politics and society, community, economics, democracy, trade unionism, language and communication, education and transferability. The second part explores the influences and applications of the Preston Model, in theory and practice, in selected locations and various circumstances worldwide. This includes discussion of key ideas such as economic democracy, social enterprise and the creation of capacity for cooperative self-government, alongside essays on prominent international examples of similar approaches, which can inform and in turn be informed by the Preston Model. This book is essential reading for those interested in regional and national policy, economic democracy and alternative economic and political ideas.

"Globalization," surely one of the most used and abused buzzwords of recent decades, describes a phenomenon that is typically considered to be a neutral and inevitable expansion of market forces across the planet. Nearly all economists, politicians, business leaders, and mainstream journalists view globalization as the natural result of economic development, and a beneficial one at that. But, as noted economist Martin Hart-Landsberg argues, this perception does not match the reality of globalization. The rise of transnational corporations and their global production chains was the result of intentional and political acts, decisions made at the highest levels of power. Their aim - to increase profits by seeking the cheapest sources of labor and raw materials - was facilitated through policy-making at the national and international levels, and was largely successful. But workers in every nation have paid the costs, in the form of increased inequality and poverty, the destruction of social welfare provisions and labor unions, and an erratic global economy prone to bubbles, busts, and crises. This book examines the historical record of globalization and restores agency to the capitalists, policy-makers, and politicians who worked to craft a regime of world-wide exploitation. It demolishes their neoliberal ideology - already on shaky ground after the 2008 financial crisis - and picks apart the record of trade agreements like NAFTA and institutions like the WTO. But, crucially, Hart- Landsberg also discusses alternatives to capitalist globalization, looking to examples such as South America's Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) for clues on how to build an international economy based on solidarity, social development, and shared prosperity.

German economic performance has astonished the world. At the turn of the century, Germany had been written off as the sick man of Europe. No more. Even as most of its European neighbors and OECD trading partners have struggled in the face of a turbulent global economy, the German economy has thrived. How does Germany do it? What is the secret? In The Seven Secrets of Germany, authors David Audretsch and Erik Lehmann answer these very questions. This book reveals, explains, and analyzes seven key aspects of Germany, its economy, and its society that have provided the nation with considerable buoyance in an era of global turbulence. These seven features range from the key and strategic role played by small firms to world leadership in its skilled and trained labor force, an ability to harness global opportunities through leveraging local resources, public infrastructure, the capacity to deal with change and confront challenges in a flexible manner, and the emergence of a remarkably positive identity and image. The Seven Secrets of Germany have insulated the country from long-term economic deterioration and enabled it to take advantage of the opportunities afforded from globalization rather than succumbing as a victim to globalization. This insights can be instructive to other countries and refute the defeatist view that globalization leads to an inevitable deterioration of the standard of living, quality of life, and degree of economic prosperity.

Privatization is now a universal practice and is the result of a set of interrelated factors, all of which are explored in this collection. Privatization has also become an academic industry, generating a vast outpouring of books and articles. This authoritative two volume collection, which includes a new introduction by the editors, concentrates on the public policy of privatization, and explores its dimensions by presenting key theoretical and empirical articles. The volumes are also clearly interdisciplinary, bringing together for the first time articles informed by political science, economics and sociology. The collection will be invaluable for both practitioners and academics, especially those involved in the study of applied economics, public policy and political science.

Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009.
This book presents a radically new answer, insisting that global society has only begun to realize its full potential. Author Howard Bloom argues that there's a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It's struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings." Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race.
In more than eighty short, fast chapters, insights appear suddenly, like the quick bursts of flashbulbs, taking the reader on a sweeping tour of human history, from the Stone Age to the present. Every chapter conveys a radically new way to see the astonishing mechanism we call "Western Civilization." Bloom marvels at how humans have turned toxic waste into food and fuel, trash into treasure, and garbage into gold. He shows how we've produced material miracles based on immaterial things--passion, persistence, and fantasy. He shows that what many regard as the end is just the beginning. The beginning of something you've never before imagined.
The author explains why the secret to capitalism's next great leap does not lie in new financial tricks, but in tapping things right under our noses in radically new ways--that is, tapping our imagination, our desire to feel useful, our desire to help others, and our desire to be recognized for contributing to the welfare of humanity. The key to next-generation capitalism lies in a big-picture view that's utterly unlike anything you've previously perceived. A big-picture view that will startle you. A big-picture view with which you can ignite the world, get a new handle on your life, and help transform society.
This brilliant, inspirational work of daring ideas and breath-taking research offers more than hope. It offers unseen levels of understanding. Understanding that can literally redefine what it means to be a human being.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

This book presents a state-of-the-art portrait of entrepreneurship in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as well as Georgia and Ukraine. Based on new empirical evidence, it highlights major trends in, characteristics and forms of entrepreneurship common to countries in transition. The contributions cover topics such as levels of opportunity-based entrepreneurship, incentives for innovation, dominance of large-scale international corporations, the role of family businesses, and opportunities for grass-roots entrepreneurship. The first part of the book focuses on theoretical considerations regarding the establishment of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems and private business. In turn, the second part offers cross-border studies of entrepreneurial environments and activities, while the third and fourth present case studies on the current state and unique characteristics of entrepreneurship in various countries of the CEE and CIS as well as Georgia and Ukraine. Finally, the last parts discuss the role of institutions and policy recommendations.

"Money from Nothing" explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion--dubbed "banking the unbanked"--which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement.
Through rich and captivating accounts, Deborah James reveals the varied ways in which middle- and working-class South Africans' access to credit is intimately bound up with identity, status-making, and aspirations of upward mobility. She draws out the deeply precarious nature of both the aspirations and the economic relations of debt which sustain her subjects, revealing the shadowy side of indebtedness and its potential to produce new forms of oppression and disenfranchisement in place of older ones. "Money from Nothing" uniquely captures the lived experience of indebtedness for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.

This book chronicles the divergent growth trends in car production in Belgium and Spain. It delves into how European integration, high wages, and the demise of GM and Ford led to plant closings in Belgium. Next, it investigates how lower wages and the expansion strategies of Western European automakers stimulated expansion in the Spanish auto industry. Finally, it offers three alternate scenarios regarding how further EU expansion and Brexit may potentially reshape the geographic footprint of European car production over the next ten years. In sum, this book utilizes history to help expand the knowledge of scholars and policymakers regarding how European integration and Brexit may impact future auto industry investment for all EU nations.

This book discusses Bangladesh's economic and social development that may be called a "miracle" since the country has achieved remarkable development progress under several unfavorable situations: weak governance and political instabilities, inequality, risks entailed in rapid urbanization, and exposure to severe disaster risks. The authors examine what led to this successful economic development, and the potential challenges that it presents, aiming to elicit effective policy interventions that can be adapted by other developing countries.

This book offers a snappy but comprehensive investigation of how the resource needs of today could become the resource conflicts of tomorrow. As the most populous country in the world, the security of China's "rice bowl" is not only a top political priority for China's policymakers but increasingly a critical global concern as the country emerges as a leading food importer and a major player in outward agricultural investment. This book sheds light on China's efforts, both at home and abroad, to safeguard its food security and how these efforts will affect global food systems. This book will be of interest to industry analysts, institutional investors, and scholars of China's global rise.

"Money from Nothing" explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's national project of financial inclusion--dubbed "banking the unbanked"--which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement.
Through rich and captivating accounts, Deborah James reveals the varied ways in which middle- and working-class South Africans' access to credit is intimately bound up with identity, status-making, and aspirations of upward mobility. She draws out the deeply precarious nature of both the aspirations and the economic relations of debt which sustain her subjects, revealing the shadowy side of indebtedness and its potential to produce new forms of oppression and disenfranchisement in place of older ones. "Money from Nothing" uniquely captures the lived experience of indebtedness for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive statistical picture of the Russian economic development covering the Imperial, Soviet, and New Russian periods. The authors have reconstructed Russian socio-economic statistics from both published and archival materials. The book gives concise descriptions as well as new insights on the Russian economic development. Compiled such that estimations by the authors are kept to a minimum and extensive explanations and notes on the sources, the definitions, the statistical methodologies, the problems and inconsistencies of the original data, and the pitfalls of interpreting the time series are given makes this a standard reference book of the Russian economic history. It will be of value to economists, scholars of collectivist economics, and scholars of Russia and the Soviet experience.

This book brings together a diverse range of responses to China's Marine Silk Road Initiative, which proposes to redraw the map of Asia, particularly South Asia. China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) is a massive scheme to connect wide swaths of East, Southeast, South, and West Asia through a dense web of interconnected hard and soft infrastructure involving ports, roads, logistics facilities, special industrial zones, and free trade and investment agreements. This book will be invaluable for students of Chinese foreign security and foreign economic policy, those interested in South Asia including Indian foreign security and economic policy as well as Indian relations with China, those attentive to international economic developments in East and South Asia, and those interested in the political and economic situation in specific MSRI participant countries such as Pakistan, Maldives, and Sri Lanka as well as their political and economic relations with China.

As health care concerns grow in the U.S., medical anthropologist Linda M. Whiteford and social psychologist Larry G. Branch present their findings on a health care anomaly, from an unlikely source. Primary Health Care in Cuba examines the highly successful model of primary health care in Cuba following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. This model, developed during a time of dramatic social and political change, created a preventive care system to better provide equity access to health care. Cuba's recognition as a paragon of health care has earned praise from the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Pan American Health Organization. In this book, Whiteford and Branch explore the successes of Cuba's preventive primary health care system and its contribution to global health.

This book analyses the fast spread of free trade agreements (FTAs) across the globe, their content and their economic impact. In the wake of Brexit and the new protectionism of President Trump, Melchior offers a timely assessment of key issues relating to FTAs. Dividing the world into seven major regions, he analyses world trade, the globalisation of FTAs and their role within and between the regions. Using a new world trade model, he then presents new evidence on the impact of trade agreements, the value of trade, the impact of China's growth and the West's industrial decline, and the role of reciprocity in trade policy. Covering rich and poor countries, commodity exporters and all of the world's regions, he offers new and original insights about a number of pertinent issues facing today's world.

Inefficient, overstaffed and indifferent to the public's needs, the Soviet economic bureaucracy operates today much as it did in the 1930s. In Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy, Paul R. Gregory takes an inside look at how this system works and why it has traditionally been so resistant to change. Gregory's findings shed light on a bureaucracy that is widely considered the greatest threat to Gorbachev's efforts at perestroika, or restructuring. Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy is based on Soviet and Western published accounts as well as interviews with former members of the Soviet economic bureaucracy, mainly from the middle elite. These informants, with their expert knowledge of the system, tell how bureaucrats big and small make the routine and extraordinary decisions that determine Soviet resource allocation. This highly personalized account reveals Soviet bureaucratic practices to be the response to an inherently complex resource-allocation problem that defies easy solutions. The often-criticized irrationalities of the Soviet bureaucracy are revealed to contain their own internal logic and consistency.

More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences. As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism's heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends. By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn't, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.

In this addition to the award-winning Church and Postmodern Culture series, respected theologian Daniel Bell compares and contrasts capitalism and Christianity, showing how Christianity provides resources for faithfully navigating the postmodern global economy.
Bell approaches capitalism and Christianity as alternative visions of humanity, God, and the good life. Considering faith and economics in terms of how desire is shaped, he casts the conflict as one between different disciplines of desire. He engages the work of two important postmodern philosophers, Deleuze and Foucault, to illuminate the nature of the postmodern world that the church currently inhabits. Bell then considers how the global economy deforms desire in a manner that distorts human relations with God and one another. In contrast, he presents Christianity and the tradition of the works of mercy as a way beyond capitalism and socialism, beyond philanthropy and welfare. Christianity heals desire, renewing human relations and enabling communion with God.

The current dynamics of world economy show remarkable changes in the socio-economics of credit provision and entrepreneurship. If the emergence of the sharing economy is fostering innovative models of collaborative agency, networking and venture business, economic actors are also looking for a more sustainable development, able to foster profitability as well as community welfare. This book investigates Islamic social finance as a paramount example of this economy under change, where the balance between economic efficiency and social impact is contributing to the transformation of the market from an exchange- to a community-oriented institution. The collected essays analyse the social dimension of entrepreneurship from an Islamic perspective, highlighting the extent to which the rationales of "sharing," distribution and cooperation, affect the conceptualization of the market in Islam as a place of "shared prosperity." Moving from the conceptual "roots" of this paradigm to its operative "branches," the contributing authors also connect the most recent trends in the financial market to Shari'ah-based strategies for community welfare, hence exploring the applications of Islamic social finance from the sharing economy, FinTech and crowdfunding to microcredit, waqf, zakat, sukuk and green investments. An illuminating reference for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers dealing with the challenges of a global market where not only is diversity being perceived as a value to be fostered, but also as an important opportunity for a more inclusive economy for everybody.

Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

Anchoring his schema in the belief that nonorganic disorders are disturbances in adaptation explicable within a depth-psychological framework, Gedo posits two broad categories of functional disorder: "apraxias" that represent any failure to learn adaptively essential skills, and disorders of what her terms "obligatory repetition." Within both categories of disorder, Gedo avers, the vicissitudes of mental functioning are understandable in terms of regression to relatively archaic modes of function and the reversal of regression and return to expectable modes of adult function. It follwos from Gedo's understanding of how and why the mind becomes disordered, that diagnosis utilizing psychoanalytic principles can only be based on the succession of transference constellations encountered in treatment, since these constellations invariably pinpoint the developmental impasses in which maladaptive repetitive patterns and the failure to learn basic psychological skills are rooted. For purposes of understanding a variety of apraxic and repetitive disorders, Gedo equates such basic skills not only with the three major psychobiological attainments he has invoked in the past, but with the development of adequate perception, cognition, affectivity, and communication skills. Beautifullu organized, lucidly written, and richly illustrated with case vignettes, The Mind in Disorder is not only the thoughtful yield of an outstanding clinician's three decades of experience. It is also the first psychoanalytic book since Otto Fenichel's masterwork of 1945, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, to take the issue of how we conceptualize psychopathology as its central focus.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license. This book addresses the issue of how a country, which was incorporated into the world economy as a periphery, could make a transition to the emerging state, capable of undertaking the task of economic development and industrialization. It offers historical and contemporary case studies of transition, as well as the international background under which such a transition was successfully made (or delayed), by combining the approaches of economic history and development economics. Its aim is to identify relevant historical contexts, that is, the 'initial conditions' and internal and external forces which governed the transition. It also aims to understand what current low-income developing countries require for their transition. Three economic driving forces for the transition are identified. They are: (1) labor-intensive industrialization, which offers ample employment opportunities for labor force; (2) international trade, which facilitates efficient international division of labor; and (3) agricultural development, which improves food security by increasing supply of staple foods. The book presents a bold account of each driver for the transition.

This book develops a comprehensive systematic economic theory, conceiving how the dynamic of market relations generates an economy dominated by the competitive process of individual profit-seeking enterprises. The author shows how, contrary to classical political economy and contemporary economics, the theory of capital is an a priori normative account properly belonging to ethics. Exposing and overcoming the limits of the economic conceptions of Hegel and Marx, Rethinking Capital determines how the system of capitals shapes economic freedom, jeopardizing the very rights in whose exercise it consists. Winfield thereby provides the understanding required to guide the private and public interventions with which capitalism can be given a human face.

This book provides an assessment of the role of the International Monetary Fund in poor countries. In recent years, a large portion of the work of the IMF has focused on the economies of low-income countries by aiming to create conditions conducive to poverty reduction and stable economic growth. More than two fifths of the IMF's 185 members are low-income countries and many others have substantial pockets of poverty in their populations. Since economic development and the reduction of poverty are the most important economic challenges that these countries face, how can the IMF best help them? How can the imperative of macroeconomic and financial stability be reconciled with the requirements for sustained economic growth? This volume brings together the research of leading economists, political scientists, and historians to suggest ways for the IMF to address these issues effectively