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Books > Business & Economics > Economics > Political economy
This book is about tax and social policy and how they interact with each other. The impact of taxation as an instrument of social policy is central in influencing redistribution and behaviour. This broad-based edited collection fills a significant gap in both literatures, bringing together disparate debates in this emerging area of analysis. It guides readers through the key interactions of tax and social policies and the central debates and challenges posed by their effect on each other. It examines how analyses might be combined and policy options developed for more effective delivery and impact in both areas.
This book explores the causes and consequences of market failure in bridging societal differences to create a shared economy. It questions the current world order and evaluates socio-economic gains in reference to the social origins of the economic agents. With a need to counterbalance economic growth with social equality and environmental sustainability, the book proposes innovative approaches to address key questions on the contemporary global economy such as, "Is the Global socio-economic order supportive of the pursuit of rational and enlightened self -interest?", "Is it a unipolar power centre and neoliberal economic policy regime?", "Can the system reinvent itself?", etc. One approach encourages going back to the golden past and making things "great again", insisting that history has ended and the failures of old global institutions be blamed on the "Clash of Civilizations". Another approach advocates giving up the intellectual comfort zone of elegant but irrelevant neo-liberal explanations of global challenges and asking new questions that take academic debate to the public square. The book examines the internal challenges and contradictions that cause disintegration and proposes alternative ideas and practices in moving the global community beyond the free market regime. The book will appeal to students and academics of development studies, political economy, political science, sociology, as well as policymakers and public opinion makers interested in creating a new egalitarian global society.
This book examines the ability of the EU and European actor networks to coherently and effectively navigate, manage, and influence debates and policy on the international stage. It also questions whether increasing complexity across a range of critical global issues and networks has affected this ability. Engaging with the growing theoretical and conceptual literature on networks and complexity, the book provides a deeper understanding of how the European Union and European actors navigate within global networks and complex regimes across a range of regulatory, policy cooperation, and foreign and security policy issue areas. It sheds light on how far they are able to respond to and shape solutions to some of the most pressing challenges on the global agenda in the 21st century. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU/European and global networks and more broadly to European and EU studies, Global Governance, International Relations, International Political Economy, and Foreign Policy and Security Studies.
In recent years, there have been a number of new developments in what came to be known as the "Capital Theory Debates". The debates took place mainly during the 1960s as a result of Piero Sraffa's critique of the neoclassical theory according to which the prices of factors of production directly depend on their relative scarcities. Sraffa showed that when income distribution changes, there are many complexities developed within the economic system impacting on prices in ways which are not possible to predict. These debates were revisited in the 1980s and again more recently, along with a parallel literature that has developed among neoclassical economists and has also looked at the impact of shocks on an economy. This book summarizes the debates and issues around the theory of capital and brings to the fore the more recent developments. It also pinpoints the similarities and differences between the various approaches and critically evaluates them in light of available empirical evidence. The focus of the book is on the price trajectories induced by changes in income distribution and the resulting shape of the wage rates of profit curves and frontier. These issues are central to areas such as microeconomics, international trade, growth, technological change and macro stability analysis. Each chapter starts with the theoretical issues involved, followed by their formalization and subsequently with their operationalization. More specifically, the variables of the classical theory of value and distribution are rigorously defined and quantified using actual input-output data from a number of major economies, but mainly from the USA, over long stretches of time. The empirical results are not only consistent with the anticipations of the theory but also further inform and therefore strengthen its predictive content raising new significant questions.
Democratic Economic Planning presents a concrete proposal for how to organize, carry out, and integrate comprehensive annual economic planning, investment planning, and long-run development planning so as to maximize popular participation, distribute the burdens and benefits of economic activity fairly, achieve environmental sustainability, and use scarce productive resources efficiently. The participatory planning procedures proposed provide workers in self-managed councils and consumers in neighbourhood councils with autonomy over their own activities while ensuring that they use scarce productive resources in socially responsible ways without subjecting them to competitive market forces. Certain mathematical and economic skills are required to fully understand and evaluate the planning procedures discussed and evaluated in technical sections in a number of chapters. These sections are necessary to advance the theory of democratic planning, and should be of primary interest to readers who have those skills. However, the book is written so that the main argument can be followed without fully digesting the more technical sections. Democratic Economic Planning is written for dreamers who are disenamored with the economics of competition and greed want to know how a system of equitable cooperation can be organized; and also for sceptics who demand "hard proof" that an economy without markets and private enterprise is possible.
This edited collection examines the gig economy in the age of convergence from a critical political economic perspective. Contributions explore how media, technology, and labor are converging to create new modes of production, as well as new modes of resistance. From rideshare drivers in Los Angeles to domestic workers in Delhi, from sex work to podcasting, this book draws together research that examines the gig economy's exploitation of workers and their resistance. Employing critical theoretical perspectives and methodologies in a variety of national contexts, contributors consider the roles that media, policy, culture, and history, as well as gender, race, and ethnicity play in forging working conditions in the 'gig economy'. Contributors examine the complex and historical relationships between media and gig work integral to capitalism with the aim of exposing and, ultimately, ending exploitation. This book will appeal to students and scholars examining questions of technology, media, and labor across media and communication studies, information studies, and labor studies as well as activists, journalists, and policymakers.
This major volume features a key selection of Wilfred Beckerman's work on the determinants of economic growth in the post-war world, income distribution and environmental policy. Economic growth is the focus of the first part of this volume which includes papers on the causes of differentiated rates of growth in the post-war years, its relationship to welfare, and the desirability of economic growth. The relationship between growth and the state of the environment is the subject of the second part of the volume which includes discussion of the economics of climate change, obligations to future generations and the justification of discounting. In this part of the book, Wilfred Beckerman also questions the value of sustainable development. The third part of the book, on inequality and poverty, focuses on the distribution of incomes, the conceptual problems of poverty measurement and the impact of social security payments in Britain. This volume also features an extensive introduction in which the author looks back on his career both as an academic and as a civil servant. Iconoclastic and thought-provoking, Growth, the Environment and the Distribution of Incomes will be welcomed as a wide-ranging and unconventional discussion of economic approaches to the environment, wealth distribution and growth.
Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledge and influence which has led economics to be both a source and beneficiary of widespread power and influence. The contributors to this book explore the complex and diverse methods and channels that economists have used to exert and expand their influence from different disciplinary and national perspectives. Four different analytical views on the role of power and economics are taken: first, the role of economic expert discourses as power devices for the formation of influential expertise; second, the logics and modalities of governmentality that produce power/knowledge apparatuses between science and society; third, economists as involved in networks between academia, politics and the media; and forth, economics considered as a social field, including questions of legitimacy and unequal relations between economists based on the detention of various capitals. The volume includes case studies on a variety of national configurations of economics, such as the US, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Mexico and Brazil, as well as international spaces and organisations such as the IMF. This book provides innovative research perspectives for students and scholars of heterodox economics, cultural political economy, sociology of professions, network studies, and the social studies of power, discourse and knowledge. "The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780367817084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."
Contrary to the claims made by neoliberal governments and mainstream academics, this book argues that the huge increase in trade in recent decades has not made the world a fairer place: instead, the age of globalization has become a time of mass migration caused by increasing global inequality. The theory of unequal exchange challenges the free trade doctrine, claiming that transfers of value from poorer to richer countries are hidden behind apparently equivalent market transactions. Following a critical review of the existing approaches, the book proposes a general theory of unequal exchange in the light of an innovative reconstruction of Marx's international law of value, in which money and exchange rates play a crucial role in decoupling value captured from value produced by different countries, even in perfectly competitive world markets. On this theoretical basis, the book provides an empirical analysis of the international transfers of value in both traditional trade and Global Value Chains. The resulting world mapping of unequal exchange shows the geographical hierarchy of capital global exploitation by revealing a world divided into two quite separate camps of donor and receiving countries, the former being the poorer countries and the latter the richer countries. This book is addressed to scholars and students of economics and social sciences, as well as activists of the North and the South, interested in a better understanding of the asymmetric power relations implied in global trade. It makes a significant contribution to the literature on political economy, trade, Marxism, international relations, and economic geography.
The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics presents a comprehensive overview of the contributions of feminist economics to the discipline of economics and beyond. Each chapter situates the topic within the history of the field, reflects upon current debates, and looks forward to identify cutting-edge research. Consistent with feminist economics' goal of strong objectivity, this Handbook compiles contributions from different traditions in feminist economics (including but not limited to Marxian political economy, institutionalist economics, ecological economics and neoclassical economics) and from different disciplines (such as economics, philosophy and political science). The Handbook delineates the social provisioning methodology and highlights its insights for the development of feminist economics. The contributors are a diverse mix of established and rising scholars of feminist economics from around the globe who skilfully frame the current state and future direction of feminist economic scholarship. This carefully crafted volume will be an essential resource for researchers and instructors of feminist economics.
This book studies the cultural framework of the connections between homeownership and social stability in Hong Kong. In the post-war period, homeownership became the most preferable housing choice in developed societies, such as Australia, Britain, Japan, Spain, and the United States. In the financialization era, its proliferation aggregated enormous wealth and debt in the housing and mortgage markets, affecting social stability by creating inequality and housing unaffordability. Hong Kong is the most extreme example of this among developed societies - in recent years, the city has made international headlines both for its housing problem and its social instability. By studying the history of homeownership in Hong Kong over a period of four decades, Chung-kin Tsang proposes that homeownership is inseparable from the social imagination of the future, conceptualizing this framework as "hope mechanism". This perspective helps trace the connections between 'House Buying' as a hope mechanism - one which is central to subject formation, life goals, and temporal mapping for socially shared life planning - and social stability. Given its unique approach, specifically its use of "hope" as an analytical category, this book will prove to be a useful resource for scholars in economic culture and financialization, and Asian Studies, especially those working on the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic history of Hong Kong.
Originally published in 1979, The Idea of Welfare critically reviews the concepts of egoism and altruism as they are expressed in residual and intuitional models of social welfare. The book describes the way in which the scope and limits of obligation and entitlement are determined in practice by the interplay of familial, communal, national and international loyalties. It also looks at the similarities and differences between economic and social forms of exchange and mutual aid. These major themes are developed in a comparative review, which explores the effects of social change on the ways in which people seek to preserve and enhance their welfare through self-help and collective action. The book focuses on Britain, the USA and Russia, it challenges conventional definitions of welfare, largely concerned with formal social policies sponsored by government and uses historical material to illustrate the dominant forms of a mutual aid which were practised before the development of modern welfare states.
This authoritative collection brings together 100 key articles on the subject of the welfare state selected by one of the world's leading experts. The first volume discusses the economic theory and related matters which underpin analysis of the welfare state. Volume II is about income transfers, especially social security benefits and poverty relief. Volume III looks at benefits in kind, particularly health care and education. This important work provides an analytical background to the subject whilst illustrating the vast array of literature available. It will be invaluable to students and professionals alike.
This book tracks the phenomenon of international corporate personhood (ICP) in international law and explores many legal issues raised in its wake. It sketches a theory of the ICP and encourages engagement with its amorphous legal nature through reimagination of international law beyond the State, in service to humanity. The book offers two primary contributions, one descriptive and one normative. The descriptive section of the book sketches a history of the emergence of the ICP and discusses existing analogical approaches to theorizing the corporation in international law. It then turns to an analysis of the primary judicial decisions and international legal instruments that animate internationally a concept that began in U.S. domestic law. The descriptive section concludes with a list of twenty-two judge-made and text-made rights and privileges presently available to the ICP that are not available to other international legal personalities; these are later categorized into 'active' and 'passive' rights. The normative section of the book begins the shift from what is to what ought to be by sketching a theory of the ICP that - unlike existing attempts to place the corporation in international legal theory - does not rely on analogical reasoning. Rather, it adopts the Jessupian emphasis on 'human problems' and encourages pragmatic, solution-oriented legal analysis and interpretation, especially in arbitral tribunals and international courts where legal reasoning is frequently borrowed from domestic law and international treaty regimes. It suggests that ICPs should have 'passive' or procedural rights that cater to problems that can be characterized as 'universal' but that international law should avoid universalizing 'active' or substantive rights which ICPs can shape through agency. The book concludes by identifying new trajectories in law relevant to the future and evolution of the ICP. This book will be most useful to students and practitioners of international law but provides riveting material for anyone interested in understanding the phenomenon of international corporate personhood or the international law surrounding corporations more generally.
This book explores the causes and consequences of market failure in bridging societal differences to create a shared economy. It questions the current world order and evaluates socio-economic gains in reference to the social origins of the economic agents. With a need to counterbalance economic growth with social equality and environmental sustainability, the book proposes innovative approaches to address key questions on the contemporary global economy such as, "Is the Global socio-economic order supportive of the pursuit of rational and enlightened self -interest?", "Is it a unipolar power centre and neoliberal economic policy regime?", "Can the system reinvent itself?", etc. One approach encourages going back to the golden past and making things "great again", insisting that history has ended and the failures of old global institutions be blamed on the "Clash of Civilizations". Another approach advocates giving up the intellectual comfort zone of elegant but irrelevant neo-liberal explanations of global challenges and asking new questions that take academic debate to the public square. The book examines the internal challenges and contradictions that cause disintegration and proposes alternative ideas and practices in moving the global community beyond the free market regime. The book will appeal to students and academics of development studies, political economy, political science, sociology, as well as policymakers and public opinion makers interested in creating a new egalitarian global society.
Democratic Economic Planning presents a concrete proposal for how to organize, carry out, and integrate comprehensive annual economic planning, investment planning, and long-run development planning so as to maximize popular participation, distribute the burdens and benefits of economic activity fairly, achieve environmental sustainability, and use scarce productive resources efficiently. The participatory planning procedures proposed provide workers in self-managed councils and consumers in neighbourhood councils with autonomy over their own activities while ensuring that they use scarce productive resources in socially responsible ways without subjecting them to competitive market forces. Certain mathematical and economic skills are required to fully understand and evaluate the planning procedures discussed and evaluated in technical sections in a number of chapters. These sections are necessary to advance the theory of democratic planning, and should be of primary interest to readers who have those skills. However, the book is written so that the main argument can be followed without fully digesting the more technical sections. Democratic Economic Planning is written for dreamers who are disenamored with the economics of competition and greed want to know how a system of equitable cooperation can be organized; and also for sceptics who demand "hard proof" that an economy without markets and private enterprise is possible.
Persistent Disparity provides a comprehensive examination of the magnitude and scope of racial economic disparity in the United States. The authors directly assess the extent of black economic progress in the US since World War II and address the controversy of whether the racial income gap is closing or widening as America approaches the 21st century. Darity and Myers explicitly make the connection between what the theory of racial inequality espouses and corresponding policy recommendations for remedying such disparity such as affirmative action and reparations. The authors challenge the cultural-genetic explanation and advance a new theoretical explanation that incorporates a more expansive characterization of the nature and role of discrimination. They also conclude that conventional anti-discrimination efforts are unlikely to be sufficient to close the gap. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in US social and economic history, political economy, African-American studies, and public policy.
This innovative book explores the dynamic and contested interactions - including the mutually constitutive relationships - among sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation. Bringing together contributors with a variety of disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical perspectives, this text explores new theories and trends in sexuality research, including lived experiences of sexuality in this rapidly globalising world; changing relationships between sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation; interventions, activism, and policy responses to the global challenges of sexual health; and relevant reflections on and implications for equity and social justice in the ongoing processes of contemporary globalisation. It is comprised of three sections, focusing on: transnational sexualities; transnational sexual politics; and transnational sexual activism. Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalisation will be of interest to students and scholars from a range of disciplines and fields, including sociology, sexuality studies, anthropology, geography, international relations, politics, and public health.
Within the European context of innovation for growth, public and corporate actors are faced with pressing questions concerning innovation policy and the return on public and private investment in innovation at the regional level. To help them answer these questions, researchers in the field of Geography of Innovation propose interesting developments and new perspectives for the analysis of localized innovation processes, interactions between science, technology and industry, and their impact on regional growth and competitiveness, offering new foundations for designing and evaluating public policies. The aim of this book is firstly to highlight major recent methodological advances in the Geography of Innovation, particularly concerning the measurement of spatial knowledge externalities and their impact on agglomeration effects. Strategic approaches using microeconomic data have also contributed to showing how firms' strategies may interact with the local environment and impact upon agglomeration dynamics. Interesting new results emerge from the application of these new methodologies to the analysis of innovation dynamics in European regions and this book shows how they can help revisit some of the main tenets of received wisdom concerning the rationale and impact of public policies on the Geography of Innovation. This book was previously published as a special issue of Regional Studies.
Drawing on Australian and comparative case studies, this volume reconceptualises non-metropolitan creative economies through the 'qualities of place'. This book examines the agricultural and gastronomic cultures surrounding 'native' foods, coastal sculpture festivals, universities and regional communities, wine in regional Australia and Canada, the creative systems of the Hunter Valley, musicians in 'outback' settings, Fab Labs as alternatives to clusters, cinema and the cultivation of 'authentic' landscapes, and tensions between the 'representational' and 'non-representational' in the cultural economies of the Blue Mountains. What emerges is a picture of rural and regional places as more than the 'other' of metropolitan creative cities. Place itself is shown to embody affordances, unique institutional structures and the invisible threads that 'hold communities together'. If, in the wake of the publication of Florida's Rise of the Creative Class, creative industries models tended to emphasize 'big cities' and the spatial-cum-cultural imaginaries of the 'Global North', recent research and policy discourses - especially, in the Australian context - have paid greater attention to 'small cities', rural and remote creativity. This collection will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in creative industries, urban and regional studies, sociology, geography and cultural planning.
This book introduces readers to the world of international financial markets and their integration on a global and regional scale. The author presents the theoretical and practical issues concerning the processes of financial market integration, with a particular focus on the monetary union. The empirical research results are based on econometric modeling, thus simplifying them for a non-specialist audience, who can instead concentrate on the author's conclusions, which comprise the results of these complicated research methods. The author outlines the role and functions of financial markets in the economy, in particular the relationship between financial intermediaries and financial markets and tackles the question of integration of new EU member countries' financial markets within the eurozone. The integration of financial markets in an international context is inevitable, and the author argues that we must learn how to benefit from it from in terms of economic growth. This book will be a valuable resource for students of economics and finance, particularly those studying financial management and international business and finance, as well as professionals in these fields. Further, this book will be of interest to anyone looking to discover more about the problems of globalization and the integration of financial markets into the modern economy.
This book is a Festschrift to Annamaria Simonazzi and embraces the themes that she has contributed to over the years through her insightful and inspiring works. It brings together contributions from a number of distinguished European economists, which pay tribute to her by engaging in a dialogue with her research, simultaneously reflecting on the process of growing economic disintegration in the European Union, its causes and its possible remedies. The book shows the deep interrelations between macroeconomic issues and the social sphere, and points to the need to rethink the very foundations of European economic policies as an effective antidote to growing imbalances and disintegration. In particular, the effects of austerity are assessed alongside the dimensions of inequality, gender discrimination, poverty, and unemployment, broadening the perspective also beyond the Eurozone. The authors envision a progressive society, in which investments in research and intelligent industrial policies govern the processes of technological change and drive the economy towards a more efficient and more equal model of development characterized by high productivity and high wages. While some chapters deal directly with policy issues, policy suggestions and proposals are scattered throughout the whole book. This volume will appeal to academics, economists, and policy-makers interested in understanding the policy response of European institutions to the challenges posed by both the Great Recession and subsequent developments in the European economies. The book is written in an engaging and accessible way, and the themes are broad enough to generate interest from the international public.
Impoverishment and Asylum argues that a shift has taken place in recent decades towards construing asylum as primarily a political and/or humanitarian phenomenon, to construing it as primarily an economic phenomenon, and that this shift has had led to the purposeful impoverishment, by the state, of people seeking asylum in the UK. This shift has far-reaching consequences for people seeking asylum, who have been systematically impoverished as part of the effort to strip out any possibility of an economic pull factor leading to more arrivals, but also for those administering their support system, and for civil society organisations and groups who seek to ameliorate the worst effects of the resulting asylum regimes. This book argues that within this context asylum support policies in the UK which are meant to help and protect, in fact do serious harm to their recipients. It argues that the shift from construing asylum seekers as economically, rather than politically, motivated migrants across the West, is part of a much broader set of historical and philosophical worldviews than has previously been articulated. The book offers a rigorously researched and richly theorised analysis drawing on postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in making sense of the purposeful impoverishment by the state of a particular group of people, and why this continues to be tolerated in the fourth richest country in the world.
The economic upturn and performance of Mauritius is a far cry from predictions made in the 1960s. The island's remarkable economic performance since the 1980s can been attributed to a multitude of factors instrumental to the success of the economy, including structural reforms, outward looking export orientated strategies, diversification in the manufacturing, tourism and financial services sectors amongst others, sound economic governance and institutions, and significant investment in human capital. This book attempts to provide a detailed analysis of the various key ingredients which have helped to propel Mauritius to its current status. The various chapters provide important readings for both academics and policymakers, with the final chapter providing key policy strategies which the government needs to implement to help Mauritius graduate to the next level of development: namely to that of a high-income economy and, in moving out of the middle-income trap, laying the foundations for future growth and shared prosperity in the light of both domestic challenges and global constraints.
This book contributes new theoretical insight and in-depth empirical analysis about the relationship between transnational legality, state change and the globalisation of markets. The role of transnational economic law in influencing and reorganising national systems of governance evidences the constitutional dimensions of global capitalism: the power to institute new rules and limits for national states. This form of new constitutionalism does not undermine the state but transforms it by eroding national capacities and implanting global alternatives. While leading scholars in the field have emphasised the much-needed value of case studies, there are no studies available which consider the cumulative impact of multiple axes of transnational legal ordering on the national state or its constitution. This monograph addresses this empirical gap, whilst expanding the theoretical scope of the field. Mongolia's recent transformation as a mineral-exporting country provides a rare opportunity to witness economic and legal globalisation in process. Based on careful empirical analysis of national law and policy-making, the book traces the way distinctive processes of transnational legal ordering have reorganised and reframed the governance of Mongolia's mining sector, specifically by redistributing state power in relation to the market, sub-national administrations and civil society. The book investigates the role of international financial institutions, multinational corporations and non-governmental organisations in normative transmission, as well as the critical role of national actors in embedding transnational investment norms within the domestic legal and policy environment. As the book demonstrates, however, the constitutional ramifications of transnational legal ordering extend beyond the mining regime itself into more fundamental questions of the trajectory of state transformation, institutionally and ideologically. The book will be of interest to scholars of international law, global governance and the political economy of development. |
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