The globalization of the economy has become an irreversible, universally dominant trend. Industrialized and developing nations as well as countries in transformation have to face the challenge of building internationally competitive economic structures. One-sidedly liberalist economic policies do not lead to the emergence of systemic competitiveness. What is called for are active development strategies. But how are they to be implemented, and what is the state of the political governance capacity of societies in the context of the new world economy?

In recent years, the European Commission has attached increasing importance to the use of financial engineering instruments rather than traditional grant-based financing for the microcredit sector, considering these to be the most efficient option available. This book presents a study of capacity building and structural funds in public managing authorities for the microcredit sector. It presents two surveys to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the managing authorities' capacity building. The first survey investigates the authorities' need for and interests in capacity building activities, assessing the areas in which capacity building support is needed, and explores the different types of support offered. The second survey analyses the results of the microcredit and microfinance programming activity, investigating its target groups and other operational features. It examines the key monitoring and reporting issues involved in this activity, before analysing the regulatory framework of the microcredit and microfinance sector. This book presents an in-depth analysis of structural funds and their management by policy-makers in the European convergence regions. It explores the interests of managing authorities, microcredit institutions, operators and other financial intermediaries involved in microcredit programming activities, and offers some core strategic and operational recommendations for the use of structural funds in the microcredit sector.

The Economic Impact of New Firms in Post-Socialist Countries analyses the emergence and contribution of new entrepreneurs in the transforming economies of Eastern Europe.Small firms and new enterprises are widely assumed to play an important role in the process of economic development and transformation. The contributors to this volume investigate how far small and newly founded enterprises have compensated for losses in employment and contributed to economic recovery in Eastern Europe. With analysis based on new empirical data, this extensive volume covers the situation in Russia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia as well as East Germany. Issues covered include attempts to stimulate entrepreneurship, guidelines for successful bottom-up transformation and the prospects for new and small firms in Eastern Europe. The Economic Impact of New Firms in Post-Socialist Countries will be welcomed for its detailed, empirically-founded discussion of entrepreneurship, micro-level studies of transition, small business economics and comparative economic systems.

When people think of a grocery store, they have a multitude of images from a neighborhood shop on the corner to the modern-day supermarket. The grocery store has had a rich history, as business conditions have contributed to changes in both its economic and its architectural character. This book provides a history of the grocery store. Beginning with the public markets and general stores of our early cities and the general stores of small towns and hinterlands, this volume traces the evolution of the all-purpose grocery store with the advent of mass distribution, the growth of the supermarket, and the present-day convenience stores, co-ops, warehouse markets, hypermarkets, and wholesale clubs.

The world economy has undergone a fundamental transformation in recent decades and theoretical structures inherited from the 1930s through the 1950s, while retaining large elements of truth, are inadequate to deal with current problems. Benjamin Higgins feels that for a society such as the United States a fiscal policy needs to be adopted that can deal simultaneously with existing unemployment and inflation. He suggests three possible governmental policies: stimulating a high rate of long-run growth, by use of reward innovations and by maintaining the highest possible level of scientific and technical activity; isolating regions that are generators of inflation and others that are pools for unemployment; and establishing a system of direct controls similar to those used in wartime. Higgins describes the transformation of the cogent prewar business cycle, with its "alternations" of inflation or unemployment, then a transitional period of underemployment equilibrium and secular stagnation, and finally, the strange new world of today, one with economic fluctuations in the form of shifting trade-off curves and loops. He then applies his new paradigm to current problems, showing why they cannot be managed through macroeconomic monetary and fiscal policy. Higgins offers case studies of efforts to fight inflation and unemployment, and to reduce regional gaps, to show their strengths and weaknesses. It can be said that unemployment always results from too many people chasing too few jobs, and inflation is always caused by too much money chasing too few goods and services. Beyond such banal generalizations, Higgins maintains there is no single cause for either unemployment or inflation, and thus no single cure can be prescribed for either, let alone for both at once. Nor is it to be expected that the appropriate cure will prove to be the same in all countries at all times. He suggests that an optimal blend of monetary and fiscal policy that will produce the "minimum discomfort" is a good start. "Employment Without Inflation" will be of direct policy interest to economists, sociologists, and national planners.

'...a tightly argued and excellent book.' - William D. Wray, Journal of Japanese Studies;How did Japan, despite her lack of natural resources, become the world's leading iron and steel producing country? This book examines how the collaboration between government and industry created this economic miracle.

This monograph is a formal account of the structure and organization of a large Japanese advertising agency. Based on a year's fieldwork in a Tokyo-based agency, the book presents a case study of an advertising campaign to outline the complex relations that exist between different divisions (Account, Planning, Marketing, Creative) within an advertising agency, and between the agency and the client, on the one hand, and the agency and media, on the other.

Computers communicate globally via satellite or fiber optic links, wide area networks share resources thousands of miles away, and the average home can have the capacity of access information at the push of a button - the digital information age has arrived! Several technologies have made this computer age possible, helped it grow, and affected its dynamics over time. This book addresses the problem of formulating a model that interrelates the factors that drive the supply of these technologies over time to the attributes of the computers that are manufactured from them.

Chris Anderson's initial `Long Tail' analysis was released in 2004 just as the wave of mergers and acquisitions was sweeping the music publishing and radio industries. Music industry executives began looking for Anderson's 'Long Tail' effect and with it the implied redistribution of royalty income from popular songs to long dormant and forgotten works in their catalogs. These music publishers had hoped to further maximize the value of their copyright assets (lyrics and melody) in their existing music catalogs as the sale of compact disks diminished, and consumers switched their purchasing and listening habits to new digital formats in music technology such as the iPod. This book deals with the measurement of skewness, heavy tails and asymmetry in performance royalty income data in the music industry, an area that has received very little academic attention for various reasons. For example, the pay packages, including signing bonuses, of some `superstars' in the sports world are often announced when they join a team. In the art world, the value of an artist's work is sometimes revealed when the work is sold at auction. The main reason it is difficult to study art and culture from a royalty income perspective is that most of the income data at the individual level is often proprietary, and generally not made publicly available for economic analysis. As a Senior Economist for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) using both internal and licensed external proprietary data, the author found that the so-called `superstar effects' are still present in performance royalty income. Success is still concentrated on a relatively few copyright holders or members who can be grouped into `heavy tails' of the empirical income distribution in a departure from Anderson's `long tail' analysis. This book is divided into two parts. The first part is a general introduction to the many supply and demand economic factors that are related to music performance royalty payments. The second part is an applied econometrics section that provides modeling and in-depth analysis of income data from a songwriter, music publisher and blanket licensing perspective. In an era of declining income from CD album sales, data collection, mining and analysis are becoming increasingly important in terms of understanding the listening, buying and music use habits of consumers. The economic impact on songwriters, publishers, music listeners, and Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) is discussed and future business models are evaluated. The book will appeal to researchers and students in cultural economics, media and statistics as well as general readers and professionals in the music publishing industry.

This is the seventh volume in a series of studies on entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth. The work looks at reinventing government and the problem of bureaucracy.

Models derived from the Real Business Cycle perspective have recently taken a major place in business cycle research. The papers in this present volume bring three contributions to this research programme: A critical evaluation of the canonical RBC models, new elements of empirical relevance, based on comparative calibration and testing, and new specifications, at the frontier of business cycle research, coping with non walrasian features, contracts and nominal rigidities, unemployment and growth.

The 27 articles reprinted in this volume are among Peter Mieszkowski's most important contributions to public, urban and regional economics. Several of these pieces concern income distribution theory and policies for promoting equality in wages, housing and education.The first part of this book includes studies of labour markets, tax incidence and the distributive effects of trade unions and wage subsidies. Two important conclusions presented in these papers concern the local property tax: it is a tax on capital and it results in under-provision of local public goods. The second and third parts of the book address, respectively, the decentralization of cities and and tax reform. Issues discussed include: racial discrimination in housing markets, the design of land use regulation, the negative income tax, consumption taxes, and tax reform in transition countries, particularly Eastern European countries. These outstanding essays bring together, in an accessible form, the work of one of the most important scholars in the field of public finance and urban economics.

This study deals with recent changes in the industrial organization of grocery retailing. We make no pretense at taking the full measure of all changes which are relevant to the performance of the dynamic industry. Rather, we have concentrated our efforts on two major tasks. First, we have attempted to measure certain market characteristics which economic theory and emprical studies suggest as being important determinants of competitive behavior. This involved the often tedious task of compiling data necessary to understand the nature and to measure the magnitude of these changes. Second, we attempted to interpret the probable implications of these changes for the market performance of grocery retailing and related industries.

This textbook is a comprehensive introduction to applied spatial data analysis using R. Each chapter walks the reader through a different method, explaining how to interpret the results and what conclusions can be drawn. The author team showcases key topics, including unsupervised learning, causal inference, spatial weight matrices, spatial econometrics, heterogeneity and bootstrapping. It is accompanied by a suite of data and R code on Github to help readers practise techniques via replication and exercises. This text will be a valuable resource for advanced students of econometrics, spatial planning and regional science. It will also be suitable for researchers and data scientists working with spatial data.

Humans have long neglected to fully consider the impact of their behaviour on the environment. From excessive consumption of fossil fuels and natural resources to pollution, waste disposal, and, in more recent years, climate change, most people and institutions lack a clear understanding of the environmental consequences of their actions. The new field of behavioural environmental economics seeks to address this by applying the framework of behavioural economics to environmental issues, thereby rationalizing unexplained puzzles and providing a more realistic account of individual behaviour. This book provides a complete and rigorous overview of environmental topics that may be addressed and, in many instances, better understood by integrating a behavioural approach. This volume features state-of-the-art research on this topic by influential scholars in behavioural and environmental economics, focussing on the effects of psychological, social and cognitive factors on the decision-making process. It presents research performed using different methods and data collection mechanisms (e.g. laboratory experiments, field experiments, natural experiments, online surveys) on a variety of environmental topics (e.g. sustainability, natural resources). This book is a comprehensive and innovative tool for researchers and students interested in the behavioural economics of the environment and in the design of policy interventions aimed at reducing the human impact on the environment.

This textbook presents a systematic study of terrorism from the standpoint of economic analysis. Choosing the kind and level of measures to counter terror is, to a large extent, an economic decision, as counterterrorism (CT) measures and their side effects are costly. This text, contains theoretical models that illustrate the economic mechanisms of different types of CT measures. A vast array of empirical studies and regularities are also presented. Some chapters discuss in depth the empirical results in the literature as well as the underlying statistical/econometric methodologies that go beyond ordinary regression. General Appendix A provides an exposition of the concept of compensating surplus and elements of the basic game theory, to help the reader with an economics background recapitulate micro theory concepts used in the book. General Appendix B lays out the notions of hypothesis testing, regression and more advanced statistical/econometric methods, so that the reader understands or at least can have an intuitive idea of how the results are derived and what they mean with some degree of inner comfort. Aimed at students at the intermediate undergraduate and graduate levels, the text requires knowledge of basic micro, first-order conditions of profit or utility maximization and cost minimization, and statistical concepts of hypothesis testing and regression. This textbook is intended for use in courses in economics, political science, criminal justice, and emergency management. Additionally, professionals working with national security in government and non-governmental organizations may find it useful.

... a new twist on the eternal question of inequitable income distribution, though they focus on wealth (accumulated income) rather than income. The authors document the dramatic disparities in the distributions of income and wealth and describe the problems these cause. Their solution, the alternative distribution system, is quite simple: tax inheritance rather than estates. Individuals could inherit up to $1 million tax free. Each succeeding million would be taxed at progressively higher rates. This plan, they argue, would force an estate to be distributed among more people and would cuase beneficiaries to use inheritances more vigorously and creatively.' The authors do an excellent job of making obscure economic data understandable. "Booklist"

A physicist and an economist, writing for a broad audience and using real--not theoretical--data, answer the age-old question: How rich is too rich? In the process, they suggest some practical solutions to the problem of excessive wealth. They outline a way to deal with the too rich that will also create a healthier economy. Merging a hundred years of economic theory and research on wealth and income distributions with anecdotal evidence, Herbert Inhaber and Sidney Carroll create a framework with which to evaluate proposals to redistribute great wealth and income. The authors set forth an Alternative Distribution System, based on the fact that much of the income of the well-off, that upper 3 percent of the United States population with incomes exceeding $110,000 per year, is due to wealth. The ADS, an inheritance plan, would bring the distribution of the lower 97 percent and the upper 3 percent closer together. It would allow a partial correction of the disparity while adding to the total fairness of our society. This very readable text is complemented by a dozen tables that illustrate The Power of Compound Interest, United States Income Distribution, The Estimated Size of the Domestic Underground Economy, and more.

Inhaber and Carroll first describe the existence of an extremely unequal distribution of income and wealth, with enormous resources held by a small percentage of Americans at the top. Other chapters detail the law of income distribution, explain the difference between wealth and income, and explain previous theories of income and wealth distributions. In addition to defining and describing the rich, the authors devote a chapter to how the rich avoid income tax. The volume concludes with an examination of the Alternative Distribution System and how income would be altered by it. How Rich Is Too Rich? will enable the informed general reader to assess policies on wealth and income distribution that have been the subject of Congressional budget debates and best-selling books.

This pioneering work presents for the first time a comprehensive study of the role of Shanghai in the economic development of China. Shanghai experienced stagnation and setbacks in comparison with other big cities and provinces in South China with the open door policy of 1979 and other economic reforms. In terms of export volume, use of foreign capital and overall economic growth, Shanghai remained behind Guangdong and Jiangsu. The fundamental question of why Shanghai maintained a lead position in the national economy and how it was neglected in the Special Economic Zones established in early 1980 is examined herein. In addition, the benefits of trade reform, comparative advantage, and foreign direct investment in Shanghai's recent expansion is discussed.

This book contains a concise, simple, yet precise discussion of externalities, public goods and insurance. Rooted in the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics and in noncooperative equilibrium, it employs elementary calculus. The book presents established theory in novel ways, and offers the tools for the application of the social welfare criteria of efficiency and equity to environmental economics, networks, bargaining, political economy, and the pricing of public goods and public utilities.This innovative, user-friendly textbook will be of use over a broad range of disciplines. The applications found here include international global-warming issues (North vs. South model), and bargaining over externalities (Coase's theorem). This text also introduces the Wicksell-Lindahl model in its original form, which depicts the parliamentary negotiation between representative parties and provides an effective introduction to political economy. Later, these ideas are applied to the pricing of an excludable public good, revealing the theoretical connection between public utility pricing and the pricing of excludable public goods. The text integrates three forms of discourse: verbal, graphical, and formal. Elementary calculus is frequently used, allowing for clarity and precision; qualities that are often missing in conventional textbooks. The main text considers a finite number of consumers and appendices cover the continuum mathematical model, which is implicit in the references to the 'marginal consumer' found in traditional texts. The analysis found in Public Microeconomics is simple and operational, conducive to computationally easy examples and exercises. This textbook is ideally suited to graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in economics, political science, policy and philosophy. Contents: Preface Foreword to Students 1. Introduction 2. Private Goods Without Externalities 3. Externalities 4. Public Goods 5. Public Utilities 6. Uncertainty and Asymmetrical Information Index

This challenging book tackles one of the most fundamental questions in economics: Why are commercial organizations more efficient than organizations in the public domain? It is generally accepted that the traditional answer (the fact that commercial organizations maximize profits) does not necessarily hold true. Finding a solution to this anomaly, as this book attempts to do, should therefore be a prime concern in economics. The authors believe the answer lies in the fact that even in a completely stable environment, all organizations will eventually fail irreparably. Organizations operating in the market are more efficient because, once in decline, they are 'free to fail' and allowed to be disassembled or even replaced. Public organizations that fail are more often than not protected and allowed to continue even though their efficiency is questionable. This fascinating and thought-provoking book will provide a stimulating read for academics and students with an interest in economics, business and management and public policy. Contents: Preface 1. Introduction 2. Key Concepts 3. The Historic Debate 4. Profit Maximization is Only Part of the Answer 5. Organizational Mortality and its Fruits 6. Causes of Organizational Failure 7. Uncontrollability 8. Empirical Evidence 9. The Soft Constraint Syndrome 10. When Left to its Own Devices 11. Necrosis and Apoptosis 12. Why Public Organizations? Appendix: The Dutch Affair or the Destructive Power of Organizational Warfare References Index