"The athor views the fiscal crisis as both a product and the process of class struggle. . . . Interview data and documents are combined to present a useful and interesting counter-perspective sensitive to the contingencies of struggle." Choice

The Arab upheaval and the world's biggest financial crisis after the Great Depression were almost simultaneous in their occurrence. The Mediterranean economies now face a dual challenge of a political and financial restructuring in the light of a shaky economic pedestal on which they stand. In light of this socio-political and economic shift in both inland and in world markets, this book offers a thorough analysis on problems, prospects and the way ahead for the financial integration of the South-Mediterranean region. Several perspectives on financial integration and policy recommendations are put forward from a leading group of researchers specializing on the Mediterranean region.

This book gives readers the theoretical and empirical methods to analyze applied economics. They are institutional economics, information economics, environmental economics, international economics, financial economics, industrial organization, public economics, law and economics, and spatial economics. Because the chapters of this book deal with current topics in these categories, they are relevant not only to researchers and graduate students but also to policy makers and entrepreneurs. As there is uncertainty about the global economy, it is necessary to consider optimal, efficient behavior to survive in the confused world. The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 deals with institutional economics, information economics, and related topics, approached through game theory. Part 2 focuses on environmental economics, international economics, and financial economics, through a microeconomic or econometric approach. Finally, Part 3 concentrates on public economics, social security, and related fields, through microeconomics or macroeconomics.

Kessler shows how political considerations distorted the liberalization process in Mexico, leading to inconsistent and unsustainable patterns of financial policy. Although market reform is promoted in developing countries to improve economic efficiency and stimulate growth, in Mexico financial liberalization provided rent-seeking opportunities for privileged groups and increased the states' ability to finance politically inspired obligations. The research examines four periods: the populist administrations of Echeverria and Lopez Portillo, during which the foundations of modern financial markets were paradoxically laid; the debt-crisis years of de la Madrid, who reversed his party's political strategy by favoring the business class with financial opportunities; the economic transformation undertaken by Carlos Salinas, who mixed genuine reform with destabilizing anti-market measures; and the political watershed of the Zedillo administration, whose unpopular bank rescue gave opposition parties unprecedented power within Mexico's policy making process. Kessler also provides a comparison of financial collapse in two other emerging markets, South Korea and Russia, and examines the political roots of crisis in both countries. He concludes by suggesting how greater attention to questions of power, social organization, and challenges to state authority can help the policy-making community avoid giving well-meaning advice that is unlikely to be implemented in a sustainable way.

In his latest work, Macesich examines democracy and its economic counterpart, the free market, and the place of money (monetary and fiscal policy as controlled by the state bureaucracy) in such a system. DeTocqueville warned in the first half of the 19th century that democracy could falter as a consequence of citizens' diminished interest in restraining central authority. And now, there is evidence that vote-maximizing behavior of politicians and politically induced cycles in such key variables as inflation, unemployment, government transfers, taxes and monetary growth have become a critical problem in American democracy. The author examines, then, how best to consider money, monetary policy and the monetary regime--increasingly a function of political/bureaucratic pressures--against the argument for a liberal, freely functioning trading world and for fully-employed, prosperous countries.

This study considers the constraints that must be placed on the exercise of discretionary authority by vote maximizing bureaucracies and political elites if democracy is to thrive and prosper. Satisfactory resolution of these issues is basic to reducing monetary uncertainty and stabilizing the long-term price level, according to Macesich. These issues are deeply rooted in traditional American ideology and experience, and the author makes this clear in weaving together historical, institutional, theoretical, philosophical, and empirical results in the case of money and monetary policy.

Praise for the Classic Guide to the Bond Market

"This is simply the most comprehensive, useful look-it-up book on municipal bonds I’ve ever read (said with all due respect to The ABC of Municipal Bonds my dad wrote in 1937 when I was nine). Read Fundamentals cover to cover. I’m keeping mine in my briefcase, under my arm, at my fingertips. No accountant, financial advisor, attorney, new bond salesman, reporter, regulator, test-writer, cautious, suspicious first-time investor in municipal bonds, or dinner guest is ever going to catch me again with a question about municipal bonds I can’t answer."–Jim Lebenthal, Chairman, Lebenthal & Co.

"Judy Wesalo Temel gives us the Rosetta stone of the municipal bond market, the key to unraveling the many mysteries of ‘muni’s.’ Her book, a fresh take on the old standard Fundamentals of Municipal Bonds, updates chapter and verse on everything from investing to underwriting, from over-the-counter to over-the-Internet. The style is clean, crisp, and as simple as this complex subject can be. Are you a novice who wonders how to invest in bonds? She lays out the basics. Examples are easy to follow–even the mathematical ones that are critical to explaining how municipal bonds work. At the same time, there is plenty of meat for the pros. Whether you need to start from square one and learn all about municipal bonds and how they work, or need a ready reference for specific technical questions you run across as a market professional, this book is for you."–Kathleen Hays, Economics Editor, Credit Markets Reporter, and "Bond Belle" CNBC

"This is a must-read for every scholar, banker, and public official concerned with local government finance in the United States. Judy Wesalo Temel has done the impossible: she has clearly and insightfully explained how we finance the development of the nation's vital public infrastructure. This is an important book, one that will be required reading for professionals responsible for planning, designing, and evaluating publicly financed projects–the health care, transportation, and educational facilities that all citizens rely upon. The bond market is an essential element in the life of local and state government, and this book makes it understandable to all Americans."–Mitchell Moss, Henry Hart Rice Professor of Urban Planning and Director, Taub Urban Research Center, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University

Gordon maintains that the United States must implement policy measures to reduce the large amounts of capital it is borrowing from the rest of the world--a problem she attributes, mainly, to low private savings rates and high federal budget deficits. She explains how the United States became a debtor nation, describes the changes in global capital markets that occurred in the 1980s, and analyzes the extent of global capital requirements, the drop in the U.S. savings rate, and the policy measures that could be taken to raise it. Unlike most discussions that focus on faulty international trade practices as a cause of U.S. deficits, Gordon places a large share of the responsibility on U.S. macroeconomic policies. Concise, readable, lucid, Gordon's book will be useful to professionals in banking and finance, and to academics and upper-level students of international business, finance, and economics.

With the current global crisis, high levels of volatility in trade, capital flows, commodity prices, aid, and the looming threat of climate change, this book brings together high-quality research and presents conceptual issues and empirical results to analyze the determinants of the vulnerability to poverty in developing countries.

This book is an examination of the sovereign risk and debt limit issues facing the Eurozone (crisis/post crisis) and the need for alternative mechanisms to fund the capital investment requirements of the region.

This book provides compelling arguments for the exclusive concern with efficiency ('a dollar is a dollar') in all specific areas of public economic policy, leaving the objective of equality to be achieved through the general tax/transfer system. Public policies should ultimately maximize the sum of individual welfares which should be individual happiness rather than preferences. Relative-income and environmental disruption effects cause a bias in favour of private spending which is no longer conducive to happiness socially. Welfare can be increased more by higher public spending on research and environmental protection, including the perfection of the techniques of brain stimulation to increase happiness.

This volume presents selected papers from the 18th Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES) Conference, with major emphasis placed on highlighting the latest research developments in the economics of innovation, public economics, and management. The articles in the volume also address more specialized topics such as luxury fashion, weather derivatives, health management, islamic bonds, and life satisfaction, among others. The majority of the articles focus on phenomena observed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and South Asia, representing a unique contribution to understanding contemporary research challenges from a different perspective.

This data-rich work examines today's most compelling and controversial public health issues, including alcohol and drug abuse, AIDS, abortion, black and infant mortality, drug-affected babies, child abuse, teenage pregnancy, and cigarette smoking. Hammerle's theme is that individual behavioral choices often have far-reaching and costly effects. When practiced by large numbers of people, the human and fiscal costs can be monumental, taxing virtually all of our social systems as well as our financial resources. Hammerle enumerates these costs and, employing economic analytical tools, recommends public policies that will reduce the incidence of such behavior or otherwise reduce its social cost. Some recommendations are outside the mainstream, but all are well substantiated and soundly argued.

This volume will be of great interest to academics, practitioners, and policy-makers in the fields of public health, health care administration, public policy, child protection, and family planning. The work will also interest economists and sociologists in the field of social welfare, as well as lay persons who are concerned about these timely public health issues.

The study of poverty dynamics is important for effective poverty alleviation policies because the changes in income poverty are also accompanied by changes in socioeconomic factors such as literacy, gender parity in school, health care, infant mortality, and asset holdings. In order to examine the dynamics of poverty, information from 1,212 households in 32 rural villages in Bangladesh was collected in December 2004 and December 2009. This book reports the analytical results from quantitative and qualitative surveys from the same households at two points of time, which yielded the panel data for understanding the changes in situations of poverty. Efforts have been made to include the most recent research from diverse disciplines including economics, statistics, anthropology, education, health care, and vulnerability study. Specifically, findings from logistic regression analysis, polychoric principal component analysis, kernel density function, income mobility with the help of the Markov chain model, and child nutrition status from anthropometric measures have been presented. Asset holdings and liabilities of the chronically poor as well as those of three other economic groups (the descending non-poor, the ascending poor, and the non-poor) are analyzed statistically. The degrees of vulnerability to poverty are examined by years of schooling, landholding size, gender of household head, social capital, and occupation. The multiple logistic regression model was used to identify important risk factors for a household's vulnerability. In 2009, some of the basic characteristics of the chronically poor were: higher percentage and number of female-headed households, higher dependency ratio, lower levels of education, fewer years of schooling, and limited employment. There was a low degree of mobility of households from one poverty status to another in the period 2004-2009, implying that the process of economic development and high economic growth in the macroeconomy during this time failed to improve the poverty situation in rural Bangladesh.

This volume sheds new light on economic developments in several countries of Southeast Europe. The European Union and especially the eurozone continue to experience rhythms of fiscal crisis, as can most clearly be seen in the debt crisis in the South Periphery. Despite the fact that several measures and decisions have been taken to deal with the crisis (banking union, liquidity support from the European Central Bank), proposals to reform Europe's strategic policy in order to find a way out of the crisis have been put forward. This book explores the respective roles that specific sectors, e.g. the agricultural sector, social capital, tax policies and labour immigration, can play in this regard. The importance of international economic relations (exports, imports, FDI, exchange rates) is analysed, in order to illustrate the nature of the economic developments and the major economic difficulties these countries face.

The changing economic conditions of the 1990s now demand a review of the framework and adaptation to conditions currently prevailing in the government's role in social welfare. Recognizing that the national political leadership no longer was willing to support all of the public programs and benefits that it had initiated in the past 50 years, the authors assume that a downsizing of the national government's role in social welfare will occur. This volume explores how downsizing will affect the private sector, nonprofit organizations, families, and individuals, while including specific recommendations and suggestions on how social welfare programs can be reformed or modified.

Analyzes the contemporary operations and goals of the Federal Reserve, with particular attention to the present continuing state of recession and the role that monetary policy may or may not have played in its development.

Privatization and capital markets support and reinforce each other to promote economic growth around the world. This work is intended to fill a gap in the literature by discussing the links between privatization and capital markets, and to provide useful insights for policy makers in developing countries and in the international donor agencies, for academics and practitioners dealing with economic development, and for the internationally minded private sector around the world. Privatization, in its various forms, and the development of capital markets will be a primary catalyst for economic growth and development well into the next century.

Economic globalization is a complex phenomenon where the links between social security expenditures and globalization are not well understood so far. This study summarizes new key findings and highlights new theoretical insights in the field of social security systems, labor standards, taxation and economic globalization. Moreover, new thoughts on the links between social security systems and migration as well as between free trade areas and social market economy development are presented. The book analyzes the role of a changing age dependency using a Branson model and it derives implications for the stock market price index, the exchange rate and the interest rate. Economic globalization needs to be politically managed and through the Transatlantic Banking Crisis and the Euro Crisis the need to more carefully draw the rules of the game for financial globalization has been highlighted. Unstable financial markets have a large potential to undermine social market economies and social security systems. The rising income inequalities within countries raise more policy challenges for Europe than for the US.

The first book of its kind, this is a collection of essays on the financing of transportation in non-metropolitan areas in the United States. It reviews basic demographic trends and conditions of infrastructures at the present time while exploring a wide range of alternatives for improving them. Including contributions from local finance personnel, engineers and other government officials, Financing Local Infrastructure in Nonmetropolitan Areas is an exhaustive study of the problems facing local infrastructure, providing an invaluable resource for scholars, administrators, and laypersons whose jobs are affected by infrastructure issues, such as agricultural and business personnel.

This comprehensive book presents an original reconstruction of the different interpretations of the Phillips curve. The authors demonstrate through an in-depth analysis how it is possible to find non-neoclassical foundations in the trade-off between inflation and unemployment. The debate is presented from a historical perspective which charts the evolution of the Phillips curve from a non-neoclassical perspective, taking account of post Keynesian literature.In the first part of the book the authors focus on the origins of the Phillips curve and they critically analyse Richard Lipsey's interpretation and approach to the Phillips curve. They then explore the neoclassical and monetarist interpretation, paying special attention to the evolution of monetarism and the Keynesian critique of this approach. The Kaleckian, Keynesian and Marxist interpretations of the Phillips trade-off are then presented. Here the authors show how the relationship between inflation, unemployment and money described in these approaches accurately reflects the fundamental features of today's capitalist economies. In the final section a new Phillips curve is constructed, taking into account the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment and the hysteresis of it. Inflation, Unemployment and Money will be of interest to macroeconomists, post Keynesians and monetary and financial economists.

"This book analyses privatisation in Ireland, a European economy that has experienced rapidly changing fortunes over the last 30 years. It examines the effects of privatisation in terms of corporate performance, public finances and the distributional aspects of privatisation including the impact on employment and share ownership"--

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

This book examines history of Russian finances in the period of Russia's transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and in the current decade. It focuses on obstacles to market reforms and macroeconomic policy choices that resulted in the state debt expansion and the financial crisis of 1998.

Budget deficits, gas prices, health care costs, social security, job security.... Anxiety over the economy pervades our daily lives-from reports on the early morning newscasts to gossip around the water cooler to dinner table debate. Yet most citizens are woefully ignorant when it comes to understanding how the economy works and how to interpret the impact of policies and business decisions. It's easy to slip into generalities: government spending is wasteful, taxes are too high, good-paying jobs are being shipped overseas, Americans don't save enough. Other issues become hijacked by political partisans to advance their agendas: trade must be fair!, tax cuts will pay for themselves!, there will be no money left in the social security till after the baby boomers loot it! In Smart Economics, Michael Walden provides an antidote: take 50 of today's top economic issues and explain their meaning, implications, and potential solutions in a logical, straightforward, commonsense, and non-partisan way. Has Government Spending Been Out of Control? Is Profit Bad? Walden applies basic economic concepts and logical argumentation to help readers get their bearings-to separate fact from fiction and ultimately make better economic decisions themselves. The result is an entertaining and highly informative introduction to economic principles and their influence on our behavior. In Smart Economics, Michael Walden provides an antidote: take 50 of today's top economic issues and explain their meaning, implications, and potential solutions in a logical, straightforward, commonsense, and non-partisan way. From Has Government Spending Been out of Control? to Is Profit Bad? to Why Are Pro Sports Stars Paid So Much? Walden demystifies the dismal science, using basic concepts and logical argumentation to help readers get their bearings-to separate fact from fiction and ultimately make better decisions, when it comes to spending, investing, saving, and voting. The result is an entertaining and informative introduction to economic principles and their influence on our behavior.