The collection considers several aspects of the transformation of the former state socialist countries: social and economic outcomes; forces in the transformation process; problems of consolidation of the new regimes; and alternative scenarios. Comparisons are made between the successful central European countries now members of the European Union with those of the former Soviet Union. The impact of the collapse of the USSR and the course of transformation is considered on China, Cuba, and North Korean. The book also contemplates the alternative types of society that might replace state socialism, particularly state capitalism and market socialism.

Labour: A Heterodox Approach provides a theoretical reconstruction of the labour and job market by examining it in a rich historical context. It explores the fundamental implications of the theories of consumption and growth and aims at solving the difficulties raised by the dominant economic theories (neoclassical, Keynesian, supply side) by taking into account the dimension of the historical conflict of the labour market and the public intervention that results from it, such as the construction of a specific legal framework that is to say, labour law. The work focuses on providing a description of conflict and intervention, the market's leading characteristics, and demonstrates that they can be interpreted by introducing two major remedial hypotheses in economic fundamentals. It also contributes to solving several theoretical controversies and highlights the two main perspectives on the economic regulation of the labour market.

This book is the outcome of the international symposium on 'Economic Integration in Asia and India' held in Tokyo, Japan, on Decemeber 8, 2005.
In the flow of globalization in the world economies, the regional economic integrations which have been progressing institutionally in the EU and Americas are now substantially under way among countries in Asia, including Japan, Korea, China and the ASEAN countries. India has also taken steps on the passage towards economic integration. India's full-scale participation in the Asian market will affect other East Asian countries, which in turn will also have manifold influences on India. This book aims to trigger a wider examination of Asian economic integration.

This book explores the opportunities and limits of currency cooperation in East Asia. Currency issues play an important role in the region. The Asian crisis of the late 90s was rooted in deficient currency arrangements. The Chinese RMB is not freely convertible yet, but policymakers in China nevertheless aim for a more international role of the Chinese currency. The recent change of direction in Japanese monetary policy caused a drastic depreciation of the Yen and led to warnings against a possible "currency war", thus demonstrating that currency issues can also easily lead to political frictions. Most trade in and with the East Asian zone on the other hand is still conducted in US $. Against this background different modes of currency cooperation serve the goal of smoothing exchange rate fluctuations and capital flows. They are an important element to promote financial stability and to reduce the transaction cost for foreign trade or investment. The contributions of this book analyze the environment and design of currency cooperation in East Asia and their effects from a macro-and microeconomic viewpoint.

In the aftermath of the devastating economic depression suffered for almost a decade, Modeling Economic Growth in Contemporary Greece assesses the conditions shaping the Greek economy's restart, discussing the effect of institutions on the business environment and highlighting the factors which are critical for achieving sustainable economic growth. The intrinsic properties of the Greek economic and business environment imply that there are country-specific factors responsible for the performance of the Greek economy, which is differentiated from its European counterparts. Despite being a member of the European Union since 1981 and one of the twelve first countries who adopted the euro, Greece has not been able to converge in crucial macroeconomic indicators with the early euro area Member States. The European stimulus package to support post COVID-19 recovery appears as a unique opportunity for Greece to develop a long-term vision and materialize reforms that will unlock the economy's true potential. This latest book in the Entrepreneurship and Global Economic Growth series is centred around the determinants of and obstacles to Greece's sustainable economic growth, presenting the macroeconomic and external environment and the dynamics of Greek economy and focuses onto internal conditions shaped by country-specific characteristics affecting labor and product markets' efficiency and the performance of institutions and production factors.

This book explores the role of political factors in the occurrence of currency crises, using an eclectic approach that blends case studies, a rigorous theoretical discussion, and econometric analysis.

This book examines alternative economic policies for the European Union in the aftermath of the rejection of the European Constitution. The subject range includes macroeconomic policy and the European Constitution, EU financial integration, the reform of European regional policy, assessment and alternative proposals on European structural policies and labour market policies in the European Union.

Economists increasingly agree on the nature of the development and social policies needed to halve poverty over the next ten years. A similar convergence is nowhere in sight in the case of macroeconomic policies. Disagreements in this area remain significant, exacerbated by rising financial instability and a string of banking and currency crises that impacted negatively on poverty, growing macro imbalances in some industrialized countries and the rapid development of difficult-to-regulate international financial markets. This volume presents a pro-poor macroeconomic policy allowing countries to recapture policy space, help promote growth, reduce inequality and diminish poverty in a sustainable way.

The contributors present theoretical and empirical advances on business cycles analysis with particular attention to Euro-zone characteristics. The book also identifies applications of sophisticated tools by private and public institutions involved in the analysis of economic fluctuations.

In this book export demand and supply are modeled simultaneously using a new proxy for globalization. Empirical estimates for the United States, Canada, and Germany show that the countries differ as to the price elasticities of demand and supply and the effects of globalization. However, the elasticity of exports to world production equals unity throughout, which is in line with constant returns to scale, but lower than the values found in previous studies that do not distinguish between growth and globalization.

China's explosive economic growth since 1988 has not resulted in an equal increase of income among all Chinese citizens. The authors explore a range of reasons for the disparity and base their conclusions on strong empirical evidence--especially the 1996 survey conducted by the State Statistical Bureau.

Analyzing the Gross National Product (GNP) and other national economic statistics is one way to look at the financial well being of a country. Another more revealing and more interesting way is to analyze the variety and amount of goods and services consumed by citizens, businesses, and the various levels of government. The "Handbook" presents a systematic and statistical portrait of consumption and wealth, allowing readers to better understand America's economic, political, and cultural landscape. This handbook focuses on the latest statistical information available on U.S. spending habits by exploring a wide range of economic, demographic, and geographic variables.

Volatility is very much with us in today's equity markets. Day-to-day price swings are often large and intra-day volatility elevated, especially at market openings and closings. What explains this? What does this say about the quality of our markets? Can short-period volatility be controlled by better market design and a more effective use of electronic technology? Featuring insights from an international array of prominent academics, financial markets experts, policymakers and journalists, the book addresses these and other questions concerning this timely topic. In so doing, we seek deeper knowledge of the dynamic process of price formation, and of the market structure and regulatory environment within which our markets function.

The Zicklin School of Business Financial Markets Series presents the insights emerging from a sequence of conferences hosted by the Zicklin School at Baruch College for industry professionals, regulators, and scholars. Much more than historical documents, the transcripts from the conferences are edited for clarity, perspective and context; material and comments from subsequent interviews with the panelists and speakers are integrated for a complete thematic presentation. Each book is focused on a well delineated topic, but all deliver broader insights into the quality and efficiency of the U.S. equity markets and the dynamic forces changing them.

This book arose from our conviction that the NNS-DSGE approach to the analysis of aggregate market outcomes is fundamentally flawed. The practice of overcoming the SMD result by recurring to a fictitious RA leads to insurmountable methodological problems and lies at the root of DSGE models failure to satisfactorily explain real world features, like exchange rate and banking crises, bubbles and herding in financial markets, swings in the sentiment of consumers and entrepreneurs, asymmetries and persistence in aggregate variables, and so on. At odds with this view, our critique rests on the premise that any modern macroeconomy should be modeled instead as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting individuals, acting adaptively and autonomously according to simple and empirically validated rules of thumb. We call our proposed approach Bottom-up Adaptive Macroeconomics (BAM). The reason why we claim that the contents of this book can be inscribed in the realm of macroeconomics is threefold: i) We are looking for a framework that helps us to think coherently about the interrelationships among two or more markets. In what follows, in particular, three markets will be considered: the markets for goods, labor and loanable funds. In this respect, real time matters: what happens in one market depends on what has happened, on what is happening, or on what will happen in other markets. This implies that intertemporal coordination issues cannot be ignored. ii) Eventually, it s all about prices and quantities. However, we are mostly interested in aggregate prices and quantities, that is indexes built from the dispersed outcomes of the decentralized transactions of a large population of heterogeneous individuals. Each individual acts purposefully, but she knows anything about the levels of prices and quantities which clear markets in the aggregate. iii) In the hope of being allowed to purport scientific claims, BAM relies on the assumption that individual purposeful behaviours aggregates into regularities. Macro behaviour, however, can depart radically from what the individual units are trying to accomplish. It is in this sense that aggregate outcomes emerge from individual actions and interactions.

The author examines the indirect macroeconomic roots of the global financial crisis and Eurozone debt crisis: the escalation of global trade imbalances between the US and China and regional trade imbalances in the Eurozone. He provides new insights into the sources and dynamics of power and instability in the contemporary global monetary system

The emergence of a new macro economy in Euro-Asia is a great challenge for academics and policy makers alike. Our book focuses on this macro economy and the monetary and fiscal policy responses. As the new environment has evolved over time, private behaviour as well as policy responses have changed. Policy makers as well as private agents had to learn the new environment. In our book we thus put heavy emphasis on uncertainty and learning. The first part of the book explores monetary policies allowing for uncertainty and time-varying behaviour of economic agents in markets, in particular in the labour market and the monetary policy responses to it. We study both forward and backward looking behaviour, learning and robust control as well as the role of financial markets for policies. The second part explores fiscal policy in the Euro-area, its sustainability, its effects on economic growth and the attempts of the Euro-area to stabilize the public debt. The third part explores monetary and fiscal policy interactions in the Euro-area countries. Since there are many national fiscal authorities but only one monetary authority this is a particularly challenging problem of Euro-area countries. Methodologically, we use modern methods such as advanced econometric methodology, learning models that allows to study time varying behaviour, and dynamic macro modelling and dynamic optimization.

A topical insider view of causes and consequences of financial crises since the Mexican collapse of 1995. The book includes a detailed exploration of recent and ongoing firestorms, including the near meltdown of the global financial system and the euro crisis, and suggests ways to save the international financial and monetary system.

This volume presents a critical examination of the EMU from different perspectives. It includes essays on the political economy of currency unions, on the Growth and Stability pact, the European Central Bank, an evaluation of the first four years of the EMU, and the costs and benefits for Sweden as well as for Britain of adopting the euro. JAMES FORDER Lecturer in Economics, Balliol College, Oxford University, UK JAMES FOREMAN-PECK Professor in Economics and Director of the Welsh Institute for Research in Economics and Development at Cardiff Business School, UK JESPER JESPERSON Professor in Economics at Roskilde University, Denmark ARJO KLAMER Professor in Cultural Economics at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands HANS ALBIN LARSSON Professor in History at the School of Education and Communication, Jonkoping University, Sweden RENATE OHR Professor in Economics at the Georg-August University of G/ttingen, Germany ROLAND VAUBEL Professor in Economics at the University of Mannheim, Germany MARKET 1: Postgraduates and academics in the fields of Finance; European Economics and Development Economics

This collection of essays examines the development of the American South from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II. Written by both well-known and emerging scholars, the essays are divided into sections that address some of the major issues of that era, such as race relations, economic development, political reform, the roles of southern women, the messages of folk music, and the problems of the region's historians. Each article offers fresh insights or new information on its subject, and collectively the articles help to illuminate how the most traditional of American regions tried to cope with the forces of modernization.

This book was prompted by the current, lingering financial crisis, which has its basis in the disorderly financial practices of the United States. These practices have resulted in an accumulated debt which now requires the United States to run financial policies at artificially low interest rates. In principle, these low interest rates should flood the markets with ready money. Since the spread for banks is very thin, however, and they must carefully discriminate between available risks and finance only those propositions with no risk, credit is not abundantly available. With staggering foreign debt and a myriad of other perils looming, this great nation is at peril for sure. In the tradition of the Heilbronn Symposium, the authors look at historical cases as a means of understanding the current situation and informing possible solutions to a problem that continues to affect the global economy. The volume analyzes cases such as Prussia, Greece, Italy, Estonia, and the European Union. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of economic history as well as policy makers who may benefit from an historical understanding of the economic challenges their countries currently face.

This volume addresses trends, causes, and consequences of the new economy in micro- and macroeconomic terms. Modern information and communications technologies increase the efficiency of traditional activities and pave the way for creating new activities and products. How will market participants cope with the challenges of the new economy and which role will governments play in a dramatically changing world?The book presents a thorough analysis of the effects of new technologies and products on overall productivity and on goods markets, labor markets, and financial markets. It also deals with the implications of the new economy for the welfare state and discusses the issue of whether there is a need for new regulatory devices, in particular in the field of international trade in goods and services.

A human economy puts people first in emergent world society. Money is a human universal and now takes the divisive form of capitalism. This book addresses how to think about money (from Aristotle to the daily news and the sexual economy of luxury goods); its contemporary evolution (banking the unbanked and remittances in the South, cross-border investment in China, the payments industry and the politics of bitcoin); and cases from 19th century India and Southern Africa to contemporary Haiti and Argentina. Money is one idea with diverse forms. As national monopoly currencies give way to regional and global federalism, money is a key to achieving economic democracy.

This is a groundbreaking volume of theory and strategy on political economy and polity of the twenty-first century, which unites domains of economics, politics, international relations, and the environment in an organic whole. Distilled in concrete terms, it elucidates the enigma of oil in view of the centrality of global social relations and with respect to two major exigencies of our time, namely, world peace, and defense of our ecosystem. A Prelude to the Foundation of Political Economy also highlights the need for detachment of US foreign policy from dependence on oil, to reveal rather vividly the illusion of America's power and leadership. This book is a wakeup call to the altered reality in which we live.

The deregulation of domestic financial markets and the capital account in developing countries has frequently been associated with financial turmoil and macro volatility. The book analyzes the experience of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, and Thailand, and draws implications for building development-friendly domestic and international financial architectures. The recommendations are made in light of the key challenge: to design and implement policies able to control macro volatility while building the rules of the financial game that will ultimately contribute to mitigating the sources of aggregate risk.

In its latest Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) projects that without further action the global average surface t- perature would rise by a further 1. 8-4. 0 DegreesC until the end of this century. But even if the rise in temperature could be limited to the lower end of this range, irreversible and possibly catastrophic changes are likely to occur. Consequently, the protection of the earth's atmosphere requires substantial efforts to reduce CO and other green- 2 house gas emissions - especially in countries with very high per capita emissions. To limit the imminent rise in temperature, in the Kyoto-Protocol, the European Union has committed itself to reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases by 8% up to 2008-2012 compared to 1990 levels. Within the EU burden sharing agr- ment, some countries have to achieve even higher emissions reductions. Germany was assigned a reduction target of 21%. The entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol in February 2005 marks a first step towards meting global climate targets, but more ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is needed after 2012, when the Kyoto targets expire. Under German presidency, the EU has committed itself to unilaterally reduce its greenhouse gas emissions until 2020 by 20%. In case a Post- Kyoto agreement can be reached, the EU reduction target would be 30% (CEU, 2007).