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.

In The Implosion of Capitalism world-renowned political economist Samir Amin connects the key events of our times - financial crisis, Eurozone implosion, the emerging BRIC nations and the rise of political Islam - identifying them as symptoms of a profound systemic crisis. In light of these major crises and tensions, Amin updates and modifies the classical definitions of social classes, political parties, social movements and ideology. In doing so he exposes the reality of monopoly capitalism in its contemporary global form. In a bravura conclusion, Amin argues that the current capitalist system is not viable and that implosion is unavoidable. The Implosion of Capitalism makes clear the stark choices facing humanity - and the urgent need for a more humane global order.

This book explores the pivotal role of think tanks in the democratization and economic reform movements by evaluating their overall effect on the transformation process in developing and transitional countries around the world. James G. McGann assesses twenty-three think tanks, located in nine countries and four regions of the world: Chile, Peru, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Botswana, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, that have most impacted political and economic transitions in their respective countries. The author examines the role they played in the process of democratization and market reform during the late 80s and 90s and identifies the importance of think tanks in these processes by evaluating their overall effect on the policymaking process. He argues in the early stages of a transition from an authoritarian regime to an open and democratic society the activities of think tanks are especially critical, and they have provided a civil society safety net to support these fragile democracies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, democratization, development, economic development and civil society.

This book, based on in-depth field research at the local level, assesses the different factors that are contributing to the transition to a market economy and the growth of networks in rural China. It analyses the different socio-economic actors - peasant households, out-migrants, family businesses and peasant entrepreneurs, uses the key concept of markets as a nexus of social networks, and identifies three different kinds of 'social capital' - human capital, political capital/status, and network capital. This book demonstrates the importance of socio-political networks and highlights significant regional differences.

Despite the common held belief that Asian nations have displayed anti-market tendencies of under-consumption and export-oriented trade since the Asian financial crisis, in the 10 years since the crisis, South Korea has bucked this trend accruing a higher debt rate than the US. This groundbreaking collection of essays addresses questions such as how did the open market policies and restructuring processes implemented during the Asian financial crisis magnify the consumption and debt level in South Korea to such an extent? What is the impact of these financial changes on the daily lives of people in different cultural and socio-economic groups? In examining these questions the authors provide valuable insight into the rise of financial capitalism, transnational mobility and the implications of neoliberal governing tactics following the Asian Financial Crisis. Examining South Korea's transformation during the early years of the 21st century, New Millenium South Korea will be of interest to anthropologists, economists and sociologists, as well as students and scholars of Korean Studies.

Presenting a profound and far-reaching analysis of economic, ecological, social, cultural and political developments of contemporary capitalism, this book draws on the work of Karl Polanyi, and re-reads it for our times. The renowned authors offer key insights to current changes in the relations between the economy, politics and society, and their ecological and social effects. They explore the commodification of land, labour, money, care and knowledge, and analyse labour and social movements, right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism. Bringing together insights from different parts of the world and from historical, theoretical and empirical research, the book sheds light on important facets of the crisis-driven transformation of contemporary capitalism. Social and political science scholars will greatly benefit from this timely analysis of contemporary capitalism. Those researching economic history and the impact of Polanyi's work on the analysis of the modern society will also find this a useful read. Contributors include: R. Atzmuller, B. Aulenbacher, R. Barnthaler, K. Becker, D. Bohle, U. Brand, M. Brie, A. Bugra, M. Cangiani, F. Decieux, C. Deutschmann, K. Doerre, K. Fischer, C. Goerg, B. Greskovits, B. Jessop, E. Langthaler, M. Leiblfinger, M. Markantonatou, A. Novy, A. Palumbo, K. Polanyi-Levitt, V. Satgar, B. Sauer, A. Scott, B. Silver, B. Stadelmann, C. Thomasberger, H.-J. Urban, B. Weicht, M. Williams, M. Wissen

Devine begins with an analysis of the theory and practice of capitalist planning, central planning and 'market socialism'. He argues that, while market socialism is currently favoured by many economists who reject both capitalism and the command planning of the Soviet model, it cannot fulfil the promises held out for it. In the remainder of the bo

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.

Arising from the Cohens' work on the epidemiology of childhood psychopathology, this book explores the two aspects of motivational structure--ideas and values--that underlie the development of maladaptive functioning and symptoms. The first aspect is a measure of what children admire in their peers; this measure is seen as an operationalization of personal ideals. The second is a measure of life goals, seen as a representation of the contemporary structure of long-term personal values. Despite the considerable amount of attention given in the popular press and among social critics and politicians, values have been relatively neglected as a topic of empirical research in this country. To fill the void, this work uses data from a large cohort of young people who have been studied longitudinally since early childhood to elucidate three aspects of life goals and values: * What are the demographic, family, peer, school, and intrapersonal influences that shape values and life goals of adolescents? * How do they change over the course of adolescence? * What impact do these values have on the lives of adolescents and young adults? Decisions about what we find most admirable and which of the many apparently good things in life we will take on as our top priorities are consequential both for the contemporary and for the future emotional and behavioral well-being of the individual. Thus, this book explores systematically the environmental origins of ideals and values, using deprivation and attainment hypotheses to examine a variety of influences on the development of differences in values. This book also examines the relationship between the measures of children's values and psychopathology, examining both the "Axis 1" diagnosis, including disruptive behavior disorders, depression, and anxiety, and the "Axis 2" personality disorders. Providing an extensive study of the life values of adolescents and the state of their mental health, this monograph will be of interest to developmental psychologists specializing in adolescence, child clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists.

The first book for a popular audience on the transformative, democratising technology of 'DeFi'.

After over a decade of Bitcoin, which has now moved beyond lore and hype into an increasingly robust star in the firmament of global assets, a new and more important question has arisen. What happens beyond Bitcoin? The answer is decentralised finance - 'DeFi'.

Tech and finance experts Steven Boykey Sidley and Simon Dingle argue that DeFi - which enables all manner of financial transactions to take place directly, person to person, without the involvement of financial institutions - will redesign the cogs and wheels in the engines of trust, and make the remarkable rise of Bitcoin look quaint by comparison. It will disrupt and displace fine and respectable companies, if not entire industries.

Sidley and Dingle explain how DeFi works, introduce the organisations and individuals that comprise the new industry, and identify the likely winners and losers in the coming revolution.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Henry A. Abbati was not an economist by profession. After retiring from business, in 1924 he published his first book, The Unclaimed Wealth: How Money Stops Production in which he expounded his theory of 'effective demand' (terminology of his own) and its differences with respect to current theories on economic fluctuations. He was advocating public intervention in the economy in the crisis. His second book, The Final Buyer marshalled his criticisms of current theories and further clarified salient aspects of his theory, such as 'saving' and its various definitions, the working of the banking system, the interest rate and the role of public works as a means of reducing unemployment. Later work in the 30s and 40s looked at full employment, reflections on the economic crisis and further analysis of the concept of unclaimed wealth. In many ways Abbati's work in the twenties was an important precursor to Keynes' Treatise on Money, though despite being admired by Robertson and indeed Keynes, his work is today largely unknown and entirely ignored by the numerous authors who have examined the debate of the twenties and thirties on the crises and business cycles and by academic opinion in general. In this book, Di Gaspare restores Abbati's position as a pioneer in macroeconomic theory with a selection of his writings and a far reaching introduction to his contribution to the history of economic thought.

The financial crisis of 2008 brought new urgency to the question how best to organise national economies. This volume gives a business history perspective on the Varieties of Capitalism debate and considers the respective merits of the liberal and coordinated market economies. It looks at individual firms and business people as well as institutions and takes a long-term perspective by covering the whole 20th century. The authors examine both continuity and change with a particular focus on the Netherlands, a nation with an open economy, situated between two countries that oppose each other in the way they organize their economies: Germany and Great Britain. The Netherlands also provides an important case study with Dutch business maintaining strong links to the United States, widely considered to be the 'typical' liberal market economy. Contributors address the main topics of the capitalism debate, including labour relations, corporate governance, the firm and its leaders, coordination between firms, innovation, multinationals as agents of change, and economic performance. They show that the Netherlands moved from a mostly liberal market economy before 1914 towards a coordinated market economy from the 1930s onwards, and - up to a certain extent - back again to a more liberal market economy. Under both varieties of capitalism the country experienced economic growth and stagnation, but a more equal division of wealth occurred in the coordinated market economy only. Wars and international economic crises offered moments for revaluation and changes of tack. This book raises questions for every country around the globe: How is change being brought about? Can one see different results from a liberal or a more coordinated market economy? And most critically: which system is more effective in bringing prosperity and enabling enough people to share in the wealth?

In the light of the deepening crisis of capitalism and continued non-Western capitalist accumulation, Henry Heller re-examines the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and elsewhere. Focusing on arguments about the origin, nature, and sustainability of capitalism, Heller offers a new reading of the historical evidence and a critical interrogation of the transition debate. He advances the idea that capitalism must be understood as a political as well as an economic entity. This book breathes new life into the scholarship, taking issue with the excessively economistic approach of Robert Brenner, which has gained increasing support over the last ten years. It concludes that the future of capitalism is more threatened than ever before. The new insights in this book make it essential reading for engaged students and scholars of political economy and history.

This book presents a chronology of state policy in industry since the 1500s to the mid twentieth century, and explains the ideas that have shaped it. Includes chapters on: The state and exploitation; state participation in industry; state information and services; state operation of industry and state control over industry.

Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained renewed visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists. The monistic, mechanical "economic systems" that characterized the capitalism vs. socialism debates of the mid-twentieth century have given way to pluralistic ecologies of economic provisioning in which complexly constituted agents cooperate via heterogeneous forms of production and exchange. Through the lenses of multiple disciplines, this book examines how this pluralistic turn in economic thinking bears upon the venerable social-theoretical division of cooperative activity into separate spheres of impersonal Gesellschaft (commerce) and ethically thick Gemeinschaft (community). Drawing resources from diverse disciplinary and philosophical traditions, these essays offer fresh, critical appraisals of the Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft segregation of face-to-face community from impersonal commerce. Some authors issue urgent calls to transcend this dualism, whilst others propose to recast it in more nuanced ways or affirm the importance of treating impersonal and personal cooperation as ethically, epistemically, and economically separate worlds. Yet even in their disagreements, our contributors paint the process of voluntary cooperation - the space commerce and community - with uncommon color and nuance by traversing the boundaries that once separated the thin sociality of economics (as science of commerce) from the thick sociality of sociology and anthropology (as sciences of community). This book facilitates critical exchange among economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social theorists by exploring the overlapping notions of cooperation, rationality, identity, reciprocity, trust, and exchange that emerge from multiple analytic traditions within and across their respective disciplines.

The essays in this volume were published across the 1984-2011 period, and range across a variety of topics and approaches to investigate the changing nature of global capitalism as a social order. As such, they are a valuable and instructive account of the evolution of global capitalism and of the debates which sought to make sense of this; moreover, they enable us to understand more clearly how capitalism may change and evolve in the coming years and decades. The introduction provides a brief historical account of how global capitalism has changed since the 1960s, before summarising each of the essays, situating them more immediately in the context in which they were written. After sketching the evolution of his views over the period, the author concludes by discussing some important dimensions of global capitalism that need further study. The twelve essays are presented in four sections, dealing with the overarching theme of globalisation; the case of Britain; the developing regions of the global South and the former Soviet bloc; and the crisis that has gripped global capitalism since 2008. Presenting an interdisciplinary approach that corresponds with the emergence of international political economy as a distinct field of scholarship, this book will prove to be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of international political economy, politics, economics, international relations, development studies, human geography, critical sociology and business studies.

In this study of politics in capitalist society Bryan Turner explores the development of citizenship as a way of demonstrating the effective use of political institutions by the working class and other subordinate groups to promote their interests. Marxist criticisms of reformism are rejected; it is shown that subordinate groups can achieve significant advances in social and economic rights, and that democracy is not a sham but a necessary mechanism for the pursuit of interests.

How valid is the Marxian theory of imperialism? This text traces the historical development of the theory of imperialism, the internationalisation of capital and theories of capitalist nation-state formation.

This volume centres on the collaborative work of Ivan Berend and GyArgy RA!nki, begun in Hungary in the 1950s and continuing till Ranki's death in 1988, but includes papers by each individually as well as those written jointly. The subject is the social and economic history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus upon Hungary. The first part looks at the troubled German-Hungarian relations during Hitler's rule; although focusing on Hungary, it also provides an understanding of the economic ties between Germany and Central and Eastern Europe during the turbulent war years. The economic and political problems of the region in the interwar years are dealt with in the second part. Two of the four studies in the final section present the efforts and strict limitations of reforms in state socialist Hungary. The other two analyze the post-communist economic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s in a broad international context.

This volume does four things. Firstly it examines the nexus between the illegal narcotics enterprise as a social phenomenon and political economy as a scholarly issue area. Secondly it explores the regional and global contexts of the political economy of illegal narcotics operations in the Caribbean. Thirdly it assesses some of the political economy connections and consequences of the enterprise in the region. Finally, it discusses some of the measures adopted to contend with the illegal drug challenge in the area.

Have you ever considered what the middle ground between capitalism and socialism would look like? Socially Mixed Economies offers a tantalizing snapshot of this brave new world, a third way born of compromise by countries accepting that social gains can develop in opposed systems. John Weber takes the reader on an intellectual journey through the give-and-take of post Cold War history. Drawing on examples from Europe, the United States, and the developing world this provocative work suggests that today's political landscape is far from polarized between purely socialist and capitalist regimes. Rather than documenting the triumph of "pure" capitalism over "pure" socialism, by means of different country-specific examples, Weber illustrates how much of today's political fabric has been shaped by "concessions." The result is a socially mixed economy, of coexisting capitalist and socialist structures. This is essential reading for economists, political scientists, and historians seeking to understand the evolution of a new transitional society and its important, unprecedented consequences for twenty-first century world politics.

From personal finance and consumer spending to ballooning national expenditures on warfare and social welfare, debt is fundamental to the dynamics of global capitalism. The contributors to this volume explore the concept of indebtedness in its various senses and from a wide range of perspectives. They observe that many views of ethics, citizenship, and governance are based on a conception of debts owed by one individual to others; that artistic and literary creativity involves the artist s dialogue with the works of the past; and that the specter of catastrophic climate change has underscored the debt those living in the present owe to future generations."

Recognising the different ways that capitalism is theorised, this book explores various aspects of contemporary capitalism in India. Using field research at a local level to engage with larger issues, it raises questions about the varieties and processes of capitalism, and about the different roles played by the state. With its focus on India, the book demonstrates the continuing relevance of the comparative political economy of development for the analysis of contemporary capitalism. Beginning with an exploration of capitalism in agriculture and rural development, it goes on to discuss rural labour, small town entrepreneurs, and technical change and competition in rural and urban manufacturing, highlighting the relationships between agricultural and non-agricultural firms and employment. An analysis of processes of commodification and their interaction with uncommodified areas of the economy makes use of the 'knowledge economy' as a case study. Other chapters look at the political economy of energy as a driver of accumulation in contradiction with both capital and labour, and at how the political economy of policy processes regulating energy highlights the fragmentary nature of the Indian state. Finally, a chapter on the processes and agencies involved in the export of wealth argues that this plays a crucial role in concealing the exploitation of labour in India. Bringing together scholars who have engaged with classical political economy to advance the understanding of contemporary capitalism in South Asia, and distinctive in its use of an interdisciplinary political economy approach, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Politics, Political Economy and Development Studies.