This volume spans economics, history, sociology, law, graphic design, religion, environmental science, politics and more to offer a transdisciplinary examination of debt. From this perspective, many of our most pressing social and environmental crises are explored to raise critical questions about debt's problems and possibilities. Who do we owe? Where are the offsetting credits? Why do such persistent deficits in care permeate so much of our lives? Can we imagine new approaches to balance sheets, measures of value, and justice to reconcile these deficits? Often regarded as a constraint on our ability to meet the challenges of our day, this volume reimagines debt as a social construct capable of empowering people to organize and produce sustainable prosperity for all. This text is ideal for provoking classroom discussions that not only point out the gravity of the crises we face in the twenty-first century, but also seeks to set readers' minds free to create innovative solutions.

'Time and the Macroeconomic Analysis of Income' will undoubtedly puzzle, stimulate, infuriate, or annoy many readers. Alvaro Cencini challenges so many of the commonly held notions which are perpetuated in elementary textbooks and taken for granted in learned journals that a first reaction is bound to be that the author must be naive or ignorant - this is far from the case; the questions that Cencini raises are original and searching. His answers are even more intriguing for economists and interested readers.

The collected papers of Costas Lapavitsas are a pathway to Marxist monetary theory, a field that continues to attract strong interest. The papers range far and wide, including markets and money, finance and the enterprise, power and money, the financialisation of capitalism, finance and profit, even money as art. Despite its breadth, the collection remains highly coherent. Money and finance are pre-eminent, even dominant, features of contemporary capitalism. Lapavitsas has been one of the first political economists to notice their ascendancy and to devote his research to it. He offers a resolutely Marxist perspective on contemporary capitalism while remaining conversant with the history of political economy, sensitive to mainstream economic theory, and fully aware of the empirical reality of financialisation.

This volume contains an Open Access Chapter The Sustainability of Health Care Systems in Europe provides a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability of health systems in Europe. Furthermore, it includes an introduction to how EU action in supporting health- care policies in the EU Member States, looking both at implemented actions and describing current priorities for the future. There has been a rapid evolution of the structure of society and the economy over the last few decades which has created new demands for healthcare services. This has placed pressure on policy makers to ensure the sustainability of the health care sector. Policy makers understand the efficiency of the healthcare delivery system needs to be improved, the shortage of health professionals must be tackled, and that there are growing health inequalities and inequity in access to healthcare. These challenges are exacerbated by recent economic shocks including the 2008 recession, the uncertainty related to Brexit, and the crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which have impacted the ability of European health systems to finance the health care sector. This book is a must read for researchers and students of health economics and health policy.

Toseef Azid, Murniati Mukhlisin, Nashr Akbar, and Muhammad Tahir bring together leading researchers to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the monetary policy, corporate governance, their legal and regulatory issues and procedures that structure Islamic banks (IBs) and other Islamic financial institutions (IFIs). Monetary policy and corporate governance are integral to macroeconomics and microeconomics while interest rates are a key part of monetary policy. Given negativity associated with interest rates, Islamic economists have sought alternative instruments. Focusing on the populous Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia this book explains how corporate and shari'ah governance structures work together under the umbrella of Islamic monetary policy, and in the process, provides guidelines that how such structures improve corporate social responsibility in order to serve the best interests of all stakeholders. The chapters included here cover various features of IBs and IFIs, corporate performance and strategic analysis of microfinance shari'ah based non-banking institutions, in order to investigate the role that these processes play in shaping broader global financial systems. For instance, it portrays different governance models of central bank of a country like Iran having a shari'ah based financial system. In conclusion, Monetary Policy, Islamic Finance, and Islamic Corporate Governance: An International overview explores the interrelationships between corporate governance from the perspective of shari'ah, banking industry and Islamic monetary policy. This is a must-read for the corporate sector, banking experts and monetary authorities including academics and postgraduate students.

Walter Bagehot noticed once that "John Bull can stand many things, but he cannot stand two per cent." Well, for several years, he has had to stand interest rates well below that, in some countries even below zero. However, despite this sacrifice, the economic recovery from the Great Recession has been disappointingly weak. This book's aim is to answer this question. The central thesis of the book is that the standard understanding of the monetary transmission mechanism is flawed. That understanding adopts erroneous assumptions-such as, that low interest rates always stimulate economic growth by boosting the credit supply, investment, and consumption-and does not fully take into account several unintended channels of monetary policy, such as risk-taking, high level of debt, or zombification of the economy. In other words, the effectiveness of monetary policy is limited during economic downturns accompanied by the debt overhang and the balance sheet recession, and generates negative effects, which can make the policy counterproductive. The author provides a thorough analysis of the issues related to the interest rates in the conduct of monetary policy, such as the risk-taking channel of monetary policy, the portfolio-balance channel and the wealth effect, zombie firms in the economy, the misallocation of resources, as well as the neutral interest rate targeting and the difference between the neutral and natural interest rate and the negative interest rate policy. The book is written in an accessible and engaging manner and will be a valuable resource for scholars of monetary economics as well as readers interested in (unconventional) monetary policy.

The great recession is changing the way many people live and the way they perceive their prospects for the near and more distant future. Its longer term consequences will not be known for some time, but something can be learned from the effect on individuals and households who experienced financial hardship. This volume is the first to use innovative survey data on the lives of Europeans to investigate the long term impact of financial hardship on earnings, standards of living, and health. The data provide a detailed account of the key events that have taken place over the course of the recession. It compares the well-being of individuals who were lucky to escape negative shocks to their income or their circumstances to the less fortunate who may have lost their job, faced divorce, or serious illness. The wide array of welfare state and social support provisions across different European countries adds an important policy angle to the analysis: has the welfare state, currently under heavy pressure, been able to provide an adequate safety net in the face of extended periods of financial difficulties, or has the family instead proven the ultimate source of support in difficult times?

This book focuses on the recent rise of new regional economic institutions such as the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralisation, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which were established, in part, as a result of dissatisfaction of dynamic emerging markets with global economic institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT/WTO. The latter were formed by advanced economies in the West, after the historic Bretton Wood Conference of 1944. In doing so, the book addresses how this recent round of decentralisation, defined as the co-existence of "senior" global institutions and a plethora of newly-established regional institutions, has affected global economic governance, and the delivery of global public goods. It also poses the question if this has led to the fragmentation of global economic governance. The book adds value to existing literature by using a benefit-risk analytical framework to study the decentralisation process. Unlike the "contested multilateralism" argument used by some authors which focuses on the costs of decentralisation, the authors argue that benefits must also be considered. It also describes and analyses the establishment of global and regional international economic institutions and the evolving relationships between the two. Third, the authors argue that this decentralisation process will continue in the postpandemic period and recommend policies to reset the relationship between global and regional institutions. And lastly, the book discusses proposals to reform the international monetary system including the global reserve system with a view to reducing the hegemony of the US dollar. Throughout the book, the role for Asia is also identified, and elaborated on.

Income Distribution was written primarily as a textbook intended for undergraduate economics majors. The material, however, is treated with sufficient rigor to meet the needs of first year graduate students also. The book may also serve the needs of sociologists and political scientists who are primarily interested in the related social justice topics of income inequality and poverty. Each chapter is logically connected with the preceding chapters, providing a general overview of income distribution and its applications.

The global financial and economic shock of 2007-09 is the third major economic crisis to have buffeted Cambodia in its post-conflict period, coming in the wake of the food crisis of 2007-08 and just a decade after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (the ""triple crises""). Cambodia's post-conflict history can be divided into two periods: 1991-98, referred to as the early phase of transition during which the first of the triple crises, the Asian financial crisis, occurred; and 1998 to the present, the late phase of transition during which the food and economic shocks transpired. A stocktake of the developments in Cambodia's post-conflict history suggests that the country has come a long way in reinstituting the foundations of a capitalist economic and procedural democracy but has yet to make significant headway in economic sophistication and substantive democracy. The triple crises were different, yet had similar characteristics. They were all exogenously-driven shocks with their own specific causes but their effects were shaped by the country's situation at the time. In terms of magnitude of impact, the global financial and economic downturn was the worst of the three crises. That it caused the first ever growth contraction in the post-conflict period was sufficient rationale for the series of studies that substantiate this book. Like the two shocks that preceded it however, the way it impacted on Cambodia cannot be understood in isolation from the overall post-conflict milieu. The thesis here is not that endogenous factors caused the crisis. It is simply that endogenous factors shaped the impact of the crisis and a historical, as opposed to a static, analysis better illuminates the nature of the impact. This book is an in-depth comprehensive examination of the impact of the global financial and economic crisis on Cambodia. It probes into the effects of the shock at macro, sectoral and micro levels using qualitative and quantitative techniques.

The first book-length treatment to conclusively demonstrate the link between income inequality and the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession Prevailing economic theory attributes the 2008 crash and the Great Recession that followed to low interest rates, relaxed borrowing standards, and the housing price bubble. After careful analyses of statistical evidence, however, Matthew Drennan discovered that income inequality was the decisive factor behind the crisis. Pressured to keep up consumption in the face of flat or declining incomes, Americans leveraged their home equity to take on excessive debt. The collapse of the housing market left this debt unsupported, causing a domino effect throughout the economy. Drennan also found startling similarities in consumer behavior in the years leading to both the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Offering an economic explanation of a phenomenon described by prominent observers including Thomas Piketty, Jacob Hacker, Robert Kuttner, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz, Drennan's evenhanded analysis disproves dominant theories of consumption and draws much-needed attention to the persisting problem of income inequality.

Central banking independence is a crucial factor for sustainable economic development of multiple countries. The multiple components for such systems, however, makes it difficult to evaluate how the success of such a system may be determined. Monetary Policies and Independence of the Central Banks in E7 Countries is an essential reference source that evaluates the effectiveness of monetary policies and the independence of central banks to contribute to economic development within seven emerging economies (E7): Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey. Featuring research on topics such as global economics, independent banking, and foreign investing, this book is ideally designed for financial analysts, economists, government officials, policymakers, researchers, academicians, industry professionals, and students seeking coverage on improved econometric methods for effective financial systems.

Most works on John Maynard Keynes deal with his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and his theory of unemployment. Much less well-known are his publications on money, finance, and international trade. This book fills that void by providing an analysis of Keynes' works from "Indian Currency and Finance" to "The Proposal for a Currency Union." It seeks to show that his concerns extended beyond his magnum opus to include the monetary and financial concerns of Great Britain and the world at large.