This important new collection of contributions brings together current thinking on poverty reduction and rural livelihoods in developing countries. As well as leading economists in the field such as Frank Ellis and Chris Barrett, there are a number of contributors from developing countries themselves. The book examines both macroeconomic and microeconomic phenomena and contains wide range of case studies. Skilfully exposing the gap that exists between the rhetoric of poverty reduction strategies in capital cities and the practice of public sector delivery in rural areas, this key text will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers in the fields of rural development, rural livelihoods, poverty reduction strategies and Sub-Saharan Africa development as well as advisors and practitioners in international organizations.

Change Ahead focuses on the emerging practices at the intersection of business strategy, research, and design. It introduces the need for an adventurous, explorative mindset in order to grow businesses that last by creating meaning and relevance. It reveals the philosophy, working processes, and approaches to twenty-first century business development.

This book looks at how the benefits of economic development in the Great Lakes Region of Africa are not being equally distributed. It studies the impact of the increasing scramble for natural resources upon local livelihoods and considers the ambiguities that characterise the relationship between mining and development.

Economic turmoil has spread throughout the western world, but terrorists and other threats to national security have not been put out of business by the Great Recession. "Economic Instruments of Security Policy" explores the critical question: does the United States and its allies still maintain effective economic tools to influence the behavior of those who seek to cause us harm? Governments have at their disposal many economic instruments to promote national security, such as sanctions, foreign aid, international trade, international finance, and laws blocking funds for international terrorism. This book examines the use of theses economic policies and addresses how best to measure their effectiveness.

The game-theoretic modelling of negotiations has been an active research area for the past five decades, that started with the seminal work by Nobel laureate John Nash in the early 1950s. This book provides a survey of some of the major developments in the field of strategic bargaining models with an emphasize on the role of threats in the negotiation process. Threats are all actions outside the negotiation room that negotiators have ate their disposal and the use of these actions affect the bargaining position of all negotiators. Of course, each negotiator aims to strengthen his own position. Examples of threats are the announcement of a strike by a union in centralized wage bargaining, or a nation's announcement of a trade war directed against other nations in negotiations for trade liberalization. This book is organized on the basis of a simple guiding principle: The situation in which none of the parties involved in the negotiations has threats at its disposal is the natural benchmark for negotiations where the parties can make threats. Also on the technical level, negotiations with variable threats build on and extend the techniques applied in analyzing bargaining situations without threats. The first part of this book, containing chapter 3-6, presents the no-threat case, and the second part, containing chapter 7-10, extends the analysis for negotiation situations where threats are present. A consistent and unifying framework is provided first in 2.

This book looks at how the benefits of economic development in the Great Lakes Region of Africa are not being equally distributed. It studies the impact of the increasing scramble for natural resources upon local livelihoods and considers the ambiguities that characterise the relationship between mining and development.

Corporate social responsibility is examined in this book as multi-stakeholder approach to corporate governance. This volume outlines neo-institutional and stakeholder theories of the firm, new rational choice and social contract normative models, self regulatory and soft law models, and the advances from behavioural economics.

This volume deals with both a new theoretical framework and the capability of new economics to tackle a number of economic problems. It offers detailed analysis and informed comment on the type of new economics emerging in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the 'great recession'.

This book focuses on the concepts of social capital, corporate social responsibility, and economic development in relation to economic theory of institutions and behavioural economics. It also takes a macroeconomic and empirical approach, on the relationship between social capital, ethical behaviour and economic development.

Technological Infrastructure Policy provides a systematic treatment of technological infrastructure (TI) and Technological Infrastructure Policy (TIP) which are emerging fields of interest both for academic economists and for policy makers in both advanced and developing economies. The specific topics covered include: the role of TI in economic growth and development; the nature and definition of TI; TI-components; the relationships between TI and markets; salient features of TIP. Technological Infrastructure Policy reflects the distinction made between basic and advanced TI. Basic TI involves the collective absorption of foreign technology for subsequent diffusion to domestic firms. Several chapters explicitly deal with this process with an emphasis on the supply of advisory services to small and medium enterprises. Advanced TI involves precompetitive, cooperation research and development in cutting edge technologies undertaken by consortia of firms. Several examples of advanced TIP are given. The novel integration of various conceptual and practical aspects of TI and TIP is the strong point of this book.

This book focuses on the concepts of social capital, corporate social responsibility, and economic development in relation to economic theory of institutions and behavioural economics. It also takes a macroeconomic and empirical approach, on the relationship between social capital, ethical behaviour and economic development.

Modem geometric methods combine the intuitiveness of spatial visualization with the rigor of analytical derivation. Classical analysis is shown to provide a foundation for the study of geometry while geometrical ideas lead to analytical concepts of intrinsic beauty. Arching over many subdisciplines of mathematics and branching out in applications to every quantitative science, these methods are, notes the Russian mathematician A.T. Fomenko, in tune with the Renais sance traditions. Economists and finance theorists are already familiar with some aspects of this synthetic tradition. Bifurcation and catastrophe theo ries have been used to analyze the instability of economic models. Differential topology provided useful techniques for deriving results in general equilibrium analysis. But they are less aware of the central role that Felix Klein and Sophus Lie gave to group theory in the study of geometrical systems. Lie went on to show that the special methods used in solving differential equations can be classified through the study of the invariance of these equations under a continuous group of transformations. Mathematicians and physicists later recognized the relation between Lie's work on differential equations and symme try and, combining the visions of Hamilton, Lie, Klein and Noether, embarked on a research program whose vitality is attested by the innumerable books and articles written by them as well as by biolo gists, chemists and philosophers."

Corporate social responsibility is examined in this book as multi-stakeholder approach to corporate governance. This volume outlines neo-institutional and stakeholder theories of the firm, new rational choice and social contract normative models, self regulatory and soft law models, and the advances from behavioural economics.

The theoretical claims for eco-tariffs are rigorously analyzed within a unified framework formed of an international trade model enriched with both a domestic and a global externality. During the course of the analysis the model is modified to analyze an array of contexts for which eco-tariffs have been claimed to improve environmental quality or welfare. The circumstances and conditions are characterised under which such tariffs can be shown to improve environmental quality and social welfare, taking account of general equilibrium effects. The theoretical results are applied in a policy analysis of eco-tariffs and other trade instruments in the context of domestic and global environmental policy in order to assess the relevance of the eco-tariffs that have been subjected to the theoretical analysis. Finally, the GATT/WTO rules and regulations are presented, since to date these have banned the use of eco-tariffs. The rules and regulations are mapped against the theoretical results to show which rules ought to be changed.

Applied Industrial Organization offers a perspective on the richness of empirical industrial organization studies. Some papers derive empirical implications from theoretical models, but other papers start from empirical evidence and construct a theory. Three major topics are explored: the role of innovation, the evolution of market structure and firms, and the determinations of performance. As the central force of market economies, innovation is the essence of competition and results in changes to market structures. Other forces driving the evolution of markets and firms are also analyzed. Finally, the determinants of profitability are investigated. In particular, characteristics such as price flexibility, successful lenders and monopoly regulation are examined. Contributors include F.M. Scherer, Paul Geroski, John Hey, David Audretsch, Manfred Neumann, among others.

Deregulation has introduced competition into traditionally monopolistic markets, particularly telecommunications and electric utilities. This book brings together ten essays that were presented at the Center for Research in Regulated Industries at Rutgers University and funded by several regulated companies. The authors, who include young scholars as well as established and highly regarded consultants and researchers, address some of the major issues now facing network industries and regulators - deregulation, competition, stranded assets, diversification, pricing, and mergers and acquisitions.

G. Galeotti* and M. Marrelli** *Universita di Perugia **Universita di Napoli 1. The economic analysis of optimal taxation has permitted considerable steps to be taken towards the understanding of a number of problems: the appropriate degree of progression, the balance between different taxes, the equity-efficiency trade-off etc .. Though at times considered as abstract and of little use in policy design, the issues it addresses are real ones and very much on the agenda of many countries. As usual in scientific debate, criticisms have contributed to the correct understanding of the theoretical problems involved and made clear that, at the present state of the art, definitive conclusions may be premature. A first well-taken criticism addresses the assumption, underlying optimal taxation models, of a competitive economy with perfect information on the part of individual agents and full market clearing. Once we leave the Arrow-Debreu world, it is no longer necessarily the case that taxes and transfers introduce distortions on otherwise efficient allocations.

Motivated employees play a crucial role in creating a companys sustainable competitive advantage. Successful Management by Motivation shows that in a knowledge-based society, this goal cannot be achieved by extrinsic motivation alone. Pay for performance often even hurts because it crowds out intrinsic motivation. To succeed, companies have to find ways of fostering and sustaining intrinsic motivation. With the help of in-depth case studies, representative surveys, and analysis based on a large number of firms and employees, this work identifies the various aspects of motivation in companies and shows how the right combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be achieved.

Emerging Competition in Postal and Delivery Services brings together practitioners, postal administrators, the courier industry, regulators, academic economists and lawyers to examine important policy and regulatory issues facing the postal and delivery industries. This volume reviews such topics as cost and productivity analysis, universal service and entry, demand analysis and the structure of postal payment system, price regulation and competition.

Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.

For a number of years, I have been teaching and doing research in the economics of uncertainty, information, and insurance. Although it is now possible to find textbooks and books of essays on uncertainty and in formation in economics and finance for graduate students and researchers, there is no equivalent material that covers advanced research in insurance. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap in literature. It provides original surveys and essays in the field of insurance economics. The contributions offer basic reference, new material, and teaching supple ments to graduate students and researchers in economics, finance, and insurance. It represents a complement to the book of readings entitled Foundations of Insurance Economics - Readings in Economics and Finance, recently published by the S.S. Huebner Foundation of Insurance Education. In that book, the editors (G. Dionne and S. Harrington) disseminate key papers in the literature and publish an original survey of major contributions in the field."

Uncertainty could be associated with wisdom, enterprise, and discovery. In ordinary speech, however, it has mostly negative connotations. There is "fear of the unknown" and "ignorance is bliss;" there are maxims to the effect that "what you don't know doesn't hurt you" (or: "bother you") in several languages. This volume suggests that we need be bothered by the excessive confidence with which scientists, particularly social scientists, present some of their conclusions and overstate their range of application. Otherwise many of the questions that should be raised about all the major uncertainties attending a particular issue routinely may continue to be thwarted or suppressed. Down playing uncertainty does not lead to more responsible or surer action, it sidetracks research agendas, and leaves the decision makers exposed to nasty surprise. This volume demonstrates that recognizing the many forms of uncertainty that enter into the development of any particular subject matter is a precondition for more responsible choice and deeper knowledge. Our purpose is to contribute to a broader appreciation of uncertainty than regularly accorded in any of the numerous disciplines represented here. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes, quoted in this volume, wrote that "whoever is searching after truth must, once in his life, doubt all things; insofar as this is possible. " White areas left on maps of the world in past centuries were a much more productive challenge than marking the end of the known world with the pillars of Hercules.

Taking advantage of the many specialists visiting Spain prior to the INFORMS Meeting in Barcelona, hold from July 14th to July 17th 1997, we organized a work shop on Decision Analysis Applications at the Real Academia de Ciencias, Madrid, Spain, from J uly 11th to 12th 1997, under the sponsorship of de the Instituto Espaiia. This workshop had a precedent in the International Conference Decision Making: Towards the 21st Century also held at the Real Academia de Ciencias in 1993. The idea of organizing an event, this time devoted to applications of Decision Analysis, was due to Prof. Sixto Rfos, who some four years ago, .sponsored and encouraged by the Royal Academy of Sciences, was the creator of an Interdisciplinary Working Group on Decision Analysis -formed with researchers from within and outside this Academy- which has been active since then, organizing periodical meetings, and whose last project has tumed out into this Workshop. The workshop turned out to be an stimulating opportunity for communicating and discussing the enormous variety of applications of Decision Sciences. In this volume we have included most of the invited papers and a selection of refereed contributed papers. Due to the varied nature of the applications, we have grouped them into five groups ending, as way of an epilog, with a paper by Sarin which contains important insights and reftections on the nature of Decision Analysis in public and private sectors."

When Murat Sertel asked us whether we would be interested in organizing a special issue of the Review of Economic Design on the formation of networks and groups, we were happy to accept because of the growing research on this important topic. We were also pleasantly surprised at the response to our request for submissions to the special issue, receiving a much larger number of sub missions than we had anticipated. In the end we were able to put together two special issues of insightful papers on this topic. Given the growing interest in this topic, we also decided (with encouragement from Murat) to combine the special issues in the form of a book for wider dissemination. However, once we had decided to edit the book, it was natural to move beyond the special issue to include at least some of the papers that have been influential in the literature on the formation of networks. These papers were published in other journals, and we are very grateful to the authors as well as the journals for permission to include these papers in the book."

It is generally acknowledged that deterministic formulations of dy namical phenomena in the social sciences need to be treated differently from similar formulations in the natural sciences. Social science phe nomena typically defy precise measurements or data collection that are comparable in accuracy and detail to those in the natural sciences. Con sequently, a deterministic model is rarely expected to yield a precise description of the actual phenomenon being modelled. Nevertheless, as may be inferred from a study of the models discussed in this book, the qualitative analysis of deterministic models has an important role to play in understanding the fundamental mechanisms behind social sci ence phenomena. The reach of such analysis extends far beyond tech nical clarifications of classical theories that were generally expressed in imprecise literary prose. The inherent lack of precise knowledge in the social sciences is a fun damental trait that must be distinguished from "uncertainty. " For in stance, in mathematically modelling the stock market, uncertainty is a prime and indispensable component of a model. Indeed, in the stock market, the rules are specifically designed to make prediction impossible or at least very difficult. On the other hand, understanding concepts such as the "business cycle" involves economic and social mechanisms that are very different from the rules of the stock market. Here, far from seeking unpredictability, the intention of the modeller is a scientific one, i. e."