This anthology is an attempt to make sense of conferences and trade fairs as phenomena in contemporary society. The authors describe how these large-scale professional gatherings have become key sites for making and negotiating both industries and individual professions. In fact, during the past few decades, conferences and trade fairs have become a significant global industry in their own right. The editors assert that large-scale professional gatherings are remarkable events that require deeper analysis and scholarly attention.

Productivity Perspectives offers a timely and stimulating social science view on the productivity debate, drawing on the work of the ESRC funded Productivity Insights Network. The book examines the drivers and inhibitors of UK productivity growth in the light of international evidence, and the resulting dramatic slowdown and flatlining of productivity growth in the UK. The reasons for this so-called productivity puzzle are not well understood, and this book advances explanations and insights on these issues from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. It will be of value to all those interested in, and engaging with, the challenge of slowing productivity growth. This book will be essential and insightful reading for academics across the social sciences, business leaders and policy makers working on the productivity puzzle. Written in an accessible manner, it will also be of interest to a wide audience in government, the private sector and civil society. Contributors include: M. Abreu, J. Cook, I. Docherty, G. Dymski, B. Gardiner, D. Hardy, R. Harris, A. Henley, R. Huggins, H. Izushi, R. Lewney, K. Lisenkova, C. Mason, P. McCann, L. McSorley, J. Nelles, K. Newsome, V. Sena, I. Sprackling, T. Vorley, D. Waite

This book analyses the household demand for consumer goods using a diverse database, consisting of 45 developed and developing countries. Household consumption patterns have undergone dramatic changes due to rapid economic growth, increasing household income and changing demographics. Using the most recent data available and the latest econometric techniques, the authors model demand for 12 different commodities such as food, alcohol and tobacco, housing, health, transport, health communication, and recreation and provide insightful comparisons of consumption patterns in developed and developing countries. The analysis presented in this book highlights valuable policy insights for planning government budgetary allocations and implementing policies towards an enhanced standard of living for people. The book also provides some important guidance for researchers interested in the theory and empirical application of the analysis of consumer demand.

Women in Print is a collection of essays in two related volumes which considers the diversity of roles occupied by women in the design, authorship, production, distribution and consumption of printed material from the thirteenth century onwards. Women in Print I: Design and Identities demonstrates women's multi-layered contribution to design, printing and publishing history through eleven case studies of women artists, compositors, editors, engravers, photographers, printers, publishers, scribes, stationers, typesetters, widows in business, and writers. It offers an examination of women as active participants and contributors in the many and varied aspects of design and print culture, including the production of illustrations, typefaces, periodical layouts, photographic prints and bound volumes. Women have often participated in design and print culture throughout history, yet their impact has typically been neglected and undervalued, or deliberately obscured from historical accounts. This collection of essays covers, and recovers, the lives and work of women in print, emphasizing how their contributions brought positive change not only to the industries they contributed to, but also to the wider social and cultural settings of their time.

In 1987 the Swedish National Board for Technical Development (STU, later becoming the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development, NUTEK) initiated a study of Sweden's Technological Systems and Future Development Potential. A comprehensive, interdisciplinary study was envisioned, yielding not only useful insight but also a permanent competence base for future analyses of technological systems and technology policy in Sweden. Three leading Swedish research institutes were invited to participate: the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research in Stockholm, the Department ofIndustrial Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, and the Research Policy Institute at the University of Lund. I was invited to direct the project. The project group decided to focus initially on a particular technological system, namely factory automation, to be followed by similar studies of other systems. Numerous publications have resulted from the project thus far. The current volume represents a summary of our work on factory automation. It consists of several original essays and of some previously published papers which have been edited, in some cases substantially, in order to form a comprehensive and coherent picture of a technological system. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth analysis of a technological system designed as a component of a systematic study of technological systems more generally. At the time of this writing, three further studies on electronics and computers, pharmaceuticals, and powder technology are under way, to be published in a later volume.

Written by leading experts in the field of business, finance, law and economics, this edited volume brings together the latest thoughts and developments on turnaround management and business rescue from an academic, judiciary and turnaround/insolvency practitioner perspective. Turnaround Management and Bankruptcy presents different viewpoints on turnarounds and business rescue in Europe. Presenting a state-of-the-art review of failure research in finance, such as on bankruptcy prediction, causes of decline, or distressed asset valuation. It also presents the latest insights from turnaround management research as well as giving a contemporary insight into law debates on insolvency legislation reform, cross-border judicial issues, bankruptcy decision-making by judges and competition policy in distressed economies. Finally, the book provides a regional and sector perspective on how the current crisis affects Europe, its government policies and industry performance. In this way, the volume presents a modern, interdisciplinary and scholarly overview of the latest insights, issues and debates in turnaround management and business rescue, developing a European perspective in an attempt to redress the predominance of an American orientation in the academic literature. It aims at a wider audience interested in turnarounds and failure, such as faculty and students in the fields of law, business, economics, accountancy, finance, strategic management, and marketing, but also at judges, insolvency practitioners, lawyers, accountants and turnaround professionals, as well as the EU and government officials, staff of trade unions and employer's associations.

Women in Print is a collection of essays in two related volumes which considers the diversity of roles occupied by women in the design, authorship, production, distribution and consumption of printed material from the fifteenth century onwards. The contributions included in Women in Print 2 cover the whole of the "letterpress era" in Europe from the early fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The essays address three themes: the role of women in the production of print; in its distribution; in addition to some neglected areas of women's consumption of print. To a greater extent the participation of women in the production and distribution of print has been written by the men who dominated the trade. Women in Print 2 explores the often-overlooked contribution to the business aspects of the printing and publishing industries, particularly female involvement in roles that were customarily seen as male preserves. This collection of essays brings together insights from multiple perspectives, seeking to recover the unheard voices and hitherto unnoticed activities of the many women who participated in the production, distribution and consumption of the printed word and image.

This book presents a comparative study of the land settlements and sovereign arrangements between the US government and the three major aggregated groups of indigenous peoples-American Indians, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians-whose land rights claims have resulted in very different outcomes. It shows that the outcomes of their sovereign claims were different, though their bases were similar. While the US government insists that it is committed to the government-to-government relationship it has with the tribes, federal authority severely limits the ability of tribal governments to participate as an equal partner.

This book provides an introductory theoretical foundation of the ethics embedded in Islamic economics and finance, and it shows how this ethical framework could pave the way to economic and social justice. It demonstrates how Islamic finance-a risk-sharing and asset-backed finance-has embedded universal values, ethical rules, and virtues, and how these qualities may be applied to a supposedly value-neutral social science to influence policy-making. This book argues that ethical and responsible finance, such as Islamic finance, could lead the efforts to achieve sustainable economic development. Iqbal and Mirakhor then conduct a comparative analysis of Islamic and conventional financial systems and present Islamic finance as an alternative that can address today's growing problems of inequality, social injustice, financial repression, unethical leadership, and lack of opportunity to share prosperity.

Foundations of Organisational Economics: Histories and Theories of the Firm and Production delves into a range of key topics to do with the history of the mainstream approach to the theory of production and the theory of the firm. This includes the frameworks used to analyse production, the division of labour and its application to the firm and the development of the neoclassical model of production. The first topic explored is the change from a normative approach to a largely positive approach to the analysis of the theory of production, which occurred around the seventeenth century. The next topic is an examination of the relationship (or the lack of a relationship) between the division of labour and the theory of the firm. In the fourth chapter, the focus is on the development of the proto-neoclassical approach to production. Here, the development of the theories of monopoly, oligopoly and perfect competition are discussed, as well as the theory of input utilisation. Chapter 5 looks at Marshall's idea of the representative firm, which was the main early neoclassical approach to the theory of industry-level production. The penultimate chapter considers the criticisms made of the neoclassical model between 1940 and 1970. This work is an illuminating reference for students and researchers of the history of economic thought, industrial organisation, microeconomic theory and organisational studies.

This book contains the papers that were presented in 1994 at the conference "Transaction Cost Economics and Beyond" organized by GRASP at the Tinbergen Institute in Rotterdam. It is generally recognized that transaction cost economics (TCE) is at the heart of the new theory of the firm. It is a well established research program with a well developed theoretical framework and good results in empirical testing. However, critics consider the approach too limited to understand the essential characteristics of such complex organizations like firms. Critics plea convincingly for the need to go beyond the original TCE framework and to develop a more pluralistic approach towards issues of economic organization. The new theory of the firm can only be further developed when scholars are willing to debate the issues in an open-minded, academic way. I thank the participants of the conference very much for putting so much effort in writing their papers and for their contribution to an open and stimulating discussion. It is my wish that this book contributes to the further deve lopment of the theory of the firm and that it helps us to a better understan ding of the complexities of economic organization. I would like to thank the following organizations for their support: the Tinbergen Institute, the "Vereniging Trust Fonds" of the Erasmus University, the Faculty of Economics of the Erasmus University, and GRASP (Group for Research and Advice in Strategic management and Industrial Policy)."

This comprehensive two-volume set brings together important contributions providing fundamental economic analyses of social networks and the central roles they play in many facets of our lives. The first volume consists of classic articles that model network formation and games on networks, as well as those on the identification of peer effects from an econometric viewpoint. The second volume provides empirical analyses of network effects on labor, education, development, crime and industrial organization, as well as some laboratory and field experiments. This set of indispensable papers, with an original introduction by the editors, will prove an essential tool to researchers, scholars and practitioners involved in this field.

This volume focuses on incentive regulation and competition. While much of the regulatory action is taking place in telecommunications, the impact of competition and the resultant regulatory change is being felt in other traditional public utilities including electricity. The book reviews topics including price caps, incentive regulation, market structure and new regulatory technologies.

Although what has come to be known as transaction cost economics has its origins in the 1930s, it was not until the 1970s that transaction cost economics as a systematic and identifiable field of study began. Since then, numerous theoretical developments and empirical applications have expanded and enriched the field. Recognition of its contributions to our understanding of organizations and institutions includes two Nobel laureates, Ronald Coase in 1991 and Oliver Williamson in 2009. This is an important selection of key articles on transaction cost economics by distinguished scholars including Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon, Kenneth Arrow and Richard A. Posner. This research review addresses key areas such as private ordering and credibility, contracts and organization, internal organization, vertical integration and contracting.

Peter M. Lichtenstein believes that any social-economic theory of capitalism must begin with a theory of value and price. Dismissing the neoclassical school, he turns to post-Keynesian and Marxian economics with their coherent and consistent theories of value and price based on concrete objective circumstances. The development of these theories in the author's aim because he believes that this approach comes much closer than neoclassical theory to capturing the essence of a capitalism economy. This book, first published in 1983, is addressed to economics students, especially to those studying microeconomics or the history of economic thought, and to economists seeking an overview of these issues.

The growing indebtedness of households reported over the last 30 years and in most developed countries has serious economic and social implications. This book provides insight into the concepts, measures, and determinants of household indebtedness, over-indebtedness, and well-being by integrating theoretical perspectives, adopting recent analytical methods, and using a sample of Polish households. The authors identified the socio-demographic and economic characteristics of indebted and over-indebted households, as well as the basic characteristics of indebtedness and the differences in its subjective perception among over-indebted households and those that are not over-indebted. They determined the spatial differentiation of over-indebtedness, examining the relationship between economic, social and behavioural factors and over-indebtedness and the role of over-indebtedness in shaping the economic well-being of households. The results of a questionnaire conducted on a sample of Polish households and econometric modelling served as the basis for assessing the economic well-being of indebted households. This assessment was conducted with the use of a composite well-being indicator developed by the authors. Given the multidimensional nature of the issues being analysed, the authors offer an approach that accounts for two separate but overlapping dimensions of economic well-being, namely material and financial, and two ways of assessing each of them: objective and subjective. The book holds appeal for researchers, scholars, and students of economics, finance, consumer economics, and economic psychology and offers practical guidance for policymakers and advisors who deal with consumer affairs.

This book is a continuation of Corporate Law and the Theory of the Firm: Reconstructing Corporations, Shareholders, Directors, Owners, and Investors. The author extends his analysis of contract law, property law, agency law, trust law, and corporate statutory law and applies that analysis to defy conventional concepts and theories in economics, finance, investment, and accounting and expose the artificial boundaries established by decades of research founded on indefensible assumptions and fallacious conclusions. Using the Humpty Dumpty principle, where words mean what the authors want them to mean, economists have created "strange new worlds" where contract law, property law, agency law, and corporate statutory law no longer apply. The author dismantles the theory of the firm by proving the theory of the firm wilfully and intentionally ignores fundamental contract law, property law, agency law, and corporate statutory law. Contrary to the theory of the firm, shareholders do not own corporations, directors are not agents of shareholders, and shareholders are not investors in corporations. The author proves that by property law and corporate law, capital is not privately owned by capitalists but by corporations. Entire economic and social systems have been constructed that have no basis in law. With the advent of publicly traded corporations, the capital is there, but both capitalists and capitalism have been rendered extinct. This book will appeal to researchers and graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in economics, finance, accounting, law, and sociology, as well as legal scholars, attorneys and accountants.

The concept of economic democracy is traditionally identified with workplace democracy and participation at the enterprise level. This is a very important dimension, but the concept of new economic democracy also recognizes that, in a world of increasing complexity, the principles of democratic deliberation and social participation have to be applied to other areas as well. This book takes a fresh look at economic democracy from various perspectives. It provides rich historical narratives of episodes of social participation in the economy and society, more broadly, from the 19th to the 21st century. It dissects the various analytical underpinnings informing the theory of economic democracy connecting it with collective choice, social contract theory, Marxian analysis and libertarian critiques. The book identifies new areas of application of the principles of democratic deliberation and oversight such as the adoption of austerity policies, the signing of free trade agreements, the conduct of central bank policies, international investment treaties and natural resource management. It takes a guided tour through the evolution of economic, social and cultural rights and their impact on the design and implementation of social policy and the welfare/ developmental state. The book expands the notion of economic democracy from factory level to the macro-economy and then to global economic governance. It also discusses the critical links between political democracy and economic democracy and the need for a more democratic and socially equitable economy in the 21st century. This volume will find an audience among economists, political scientists, social activists, philosophers and sociologists.

The concept of localized technological change is emerging at the crossroads of different approaches to the economics of innovation and new technologies. The term localized technological change' refers to the introduction of technological changes which make possible an increase in total factor productivity within only a limited range of techniques defined by the levels of factor intensity. This contrasts with generalized technological change', which is defined as the global shift of all the techniques represented on the map of isoquants of the neoclassical tradition. The Economics of Localized Technological Change elaborates the notion of localized technology with respect to firms, factor substitution, sectors, regions and techniques. It also assesses the implications for industrial policy, technology and innovation policy. The book will be of interest to corporate policy makers, scholars of industrial organization and economics of innovation as well as business school students.

This book discusses China's tax system, presenting a comprehensive and systematic research based on a multidisciplinary approach involving economics, finance, political science, sociology, law, public administration, history, and econometrics.With China moving toward the rule of law, this book proposes reforms to the tax laws and the stratified governance with a view to achieving tax neutrality, law-based taxation, tax equality and tax burden stability. It focuses on clarifying the implications, extension, nature, and features of a law-based tax system as well as the logical relationships between the optimization of the tax system structure, modern governance, law-based tax administration, as well as the tax-sharing system of tax collection and the rule of tax law. It suggests that optimizing the tax structure, reforming the tax-sharing system, improving local taxes, and restructuring the tax collection and management system will push China's tax system toward sound design and rule of law.This book is intended for scholars specializing in China's tax system and general readers interested in China's economy.

This book moves away from the orthodox neoliberal paradigm to suggest a new framework linking social policy with citizenship and transformation. The interjection of nation building, public society and public provisioning to the study of education, healthcare and employment caters to the needs of citizens equitably. By combining and coagulating these three broad arenas of politico-economic discussion, this book takes a new approach to the analysis of social policymaking in developing countries to indicate the drivers and triggers of transformation. It makes comprehensive, thorough critical comparisons between the trajectories of developed and developing countries, finds out the gaps in transformation and suggests drivers for changes. The intentions of social policymaking, as proposed in the book, are to curb the growing inequalities in the forms of class, power and marginalisation. The chapters on education focus on provisioning of public goods for skills formation, innovation and citizenship education. The sections on healthcare centre on universal health care as opposed to universal health coverage by analysing access, healthcare-seeking behaviour, price setting, market provisioning etc. For the chapters on employment, propositions are posited regarding the expansion of productive capacity, factor mobility and social security to ensure work for all. Besides theorising education, healthcare and employment based on public provisioning by the people's state, underwritten by a public society, the book provides feasible solutions through data sourced from all major international organisations. In addition, it recognises the unique postcolonial struggles and aspirations of the developing countries, and accordingly resorts to defining the normative principles, reflecting nuances, subtleties and peculiarities. This book is a continuation of the author's Fiscal and Monetary Policies in Developing Countries: State, Citizenship and Transformation (Routledge) and will draw the attention of scholars and researchers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of, and pragmatic solutions to, social policies that address the transformational pathways of developing countries, accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ever since Marx, the future of capitalism has been fiercely debated. Marx and his followers predicted capitalism will end by violent overthrow, while others prophesied its demise will be the result of collapsing under its own weight. Still others argue that capitalism will not only continue to exist but continue to expand globally. This book takes a distinctively different approach by presenting solid evidence that capitalism has already ended. The author argues that corporate statutory law, securities laws, and generally accepted accounting principles have combined to cause the extinction of capitalists. Without capitalists as owners of capital, there can be no capitalism. The book examines the factors that converged to contribute to and hasten the extinction of capitalists, and thus of capitalism as an economic system, in an ironic case of the law of unintended consequences. The very things that were intended to promote, protect, and sustain capitalism are the things that caused its death. It exposes the fallacy that capitalism as an economic system not only continues to exist but is expanding globally. Capitalism is extinct and the social system constructed on capitalism as an economic system cannot be sustained. This book will appeal to economists, accountants, historians, political scientists, lawyers and sociologists, as well as students of those disciplines.

Oligopoly theory is one of the most intensively studied areas of mathematical economics. On the basis of the pioneering works of Cournot (1838), many res- rchers have developed and extensively examined the different variants of oligopoly models. Initially, the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium of the different types of oligopolies was the main concern, and later the dynamic extensions of these models became the focus. The classical result of Theocharis (1960) asserts that under discrete time scales and static expectations, the equilibrium of a sing- product oligopoly without product differentiation and with linear price and cost functions is asymptotically stable if and only if it is a duopoly. In the continuous time case, asymptotic stability is guaranteed for any number of ?rms. In these cases the resulting dynamical systems are also linear, where local and global asymptotic stability are equivalent to each other. The classical book of Okuguchi (1976) gives a comprehensive summary of the earlier results and developments. The multipr- uct extensionshave been discussed in Okuguchiand Szidarovszky(1999);however, nonlinear features were barely touched upon in these contributions. WiththedevelopmentofthecriticalcurvemethodbyGumowskiandMira(1980) (see also Mira et al. (1996))fordiscrete time systemsand the introductionof cont- uously distributed information lags by Invernizzi and Medio (1991) in continuous time systems, increasing attention has been given to the global dynamics of n- linear oligopolies. The authors of this book have devoted a great deal of research effort to this area.