Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Business & Economics > Economics > Political economy
Today's society is completely dependent on critical networks such as water supply, sewage, electricity, ICT and transportation. Risk and vulnerability analyses are needed to grasp the impact of threats and hazards. However, these become quite complex as there are strong interdependencies both within and between infrastructure systems. Risk and Interdependencies in Critical Infrastructures: A guideline for analysis provides methods for analyzing risks and interdependencies of critical infrastructures. A number of analysis approaches are described and are adapted to each of these infrastructures. Various approaches are also revised, and all are supported by several examples and illustrations. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of various interdependencies that often exist between the infrastructures. Risk and Interdependencies in Critical Infrastructures: A guideline for analysis provides a good tool to identify the hazards that are threatening your infrastructures, and will enhance the understanding on how these threats can propagate throughout the system and also affect other infrastructures, thereby identifying useful risk reducing measures. It is essential reading for municipalities and infrastructure owners that are obliged to know about and prepare for the risks and vulnerabilities of the critical infrastructures for which they are responsible.
This book corrects an imbalance in Canadian political literature through offering a conservative account of Canadian political thought, within a framework of global politics. Across 15 chronologically organized chapters, and with a mixture of established and rising scholars, the book offers an investigation of the defining features and characteristics of Canadian conservative political thought, asking what have Canadian conservative political thinkers and practitioners learned from other traditions and, in turn, what have they contribute to our understanding of global politics and political thought? Rather than its culmination Canadian Conservative Political Thought will be the beginning of conservative political thought's recovery, and will spark debates and future research. The book will be a great resource for courses on Canadian politics, history, political philosophy and conservatism, Canadian Studies, and political theory.
Navigating Time and Space in Population Studies presents innovative approaches to long-standing questions about the diffusion of population and demographic behavior across space and over time. This collection utilizes newly-available historical data along with spatially and temporally explicit analytical methods to evaluate and refine core demographic theories and to pose new questions about mortality and fertility transitions, migration, urbanization, and social inequality. It adds a spatial dimension to the analysis of temporal processes and a temporal element to spatial processes. Chapters cover a broad range of geographical settings, including the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Islamic world, and span time periods from the eighteenth to twentieth century. Contributors from a variety of disciplines reveal the complexity of factors involved in population processes that spread across space and unfold over time, and demonstrate a rich set of tools with which to explore, analyze, and test the spatial and temporal dynamics of these phenomena. The theories, methods, and substantive findings presented here provide new lenses through which to view time and space in population studies, offering useful models and valuable insights to demographers and other social scientists exploring both historical and contemporary questions about population dynamics anywhere in the world.
This monograph is the first academic work to apply a neo-Marxist approach to 20th-century Canadian social realist novels, pursuing a refreshingly (neo-)Marxist approach to such issues as Bakhtinian notions of the novelistic form and dialogism as applied to Canadian socio-political novels influenced by various socialisms, socialist-feminist concerns, economic and sexual politics, and the genre of social realism. In so doing, it demonstrates that Marxist socialism is as relevant today as it was in the 1930s, just as social realist novels continue to thrive as a critique of capitalism. Readers will find valuable insights into the social significance, formal innovations, moral sensitivity, aesthetic enrichment, and ideological complexity of Canadian social realist novels.
Drawing on Marxism and engaging with theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj i ek, John Michael Roberts argues that a new expressive ideology has coalesced within the contemporary workplace around the theme of 'competence'. The 'competence' agenda encourages management and workers to build networks of trust, cooperation and dialogue between one another. By examining the competent public sphere as it appears in the global economy, the author takes to task the competence agenda, relates this agenda to the hegemony of global finance and to the fetishism of the new economy, exposes the dilemmas and contradictions of the competence agenda, and through everyday examples from the UK and USA illustrates how competence is played out and resisted in the contemporary workplace. This bookprovides a fascinating critical account of how the way we work today is debated and discussed by management and workers.
Using figures from European Union members, the volume highlights the conditional effects of globalization, asset specificity, and domestic institutions. Far from being impotent, democratic states face politically powerful pressures to continue to shield social actors from the vagaries of the global market.
This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary analysis blends history, economics, and politics to challenge most of the prevailing accounts of the rise of U.S. militarism. While acknowledging the contributory role of some of the most widely-cited culprits (big oil, neoconservative ideology, the Zionist lobby, and President Bush's world outlook), this study explores the bigger, but largely submerged, picture: the political economy of war and militarism. The study is unique not only for its thorough examination of the economics of military spending, but also for its careful analysis of a series of closely related topics (petroleum, geopolitics, imperialism, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, the war in Iraq, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) that may appear as digressions but, in fact, help shed more light on the main investigation.
The book brings together implementation studies from the Asia Pacific countries in the context of the deadline of 2015 for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The contributors to this volume are scholars belonging to the Network of Asia Pacific Schools and Institutes of Public Administration and Governance (NAPSIPAG). NAPSIPAG is the only non-West governance research network presently located at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi after having shifted from its original location at INTAN (Government of Malaysia) at Kuala Lumpur in 2009. Implementation is a less understood but a much debated area of governance research. It requires micro-level analysis of government agencies, service delivery departments and stakeholders on one hand and its national and global policy level connections on the other. Implementation studies are above disciplinary divides and subsequent disjunctions which inhibit explorations on policy downslides or failures. The studies relate to the new initiatives which governments across the region have undertaken to reach out to the MDG targets agreed upon in 2000. The focus of analysis is the policy framework, local capacities of both the government agencies and people in drawing partnerships with relevant expert groups, ability to bring transparency and accountability measures in transactions for cost-effective results, leadership and sustainability dimensions which influence the functioning of local agencies. The book is especially important in the background of 15 voluminous Administrative Reforms Commission Reports accumulating dust in India and similar efforts lying unattended in many other countries of this region as well. Countries like Malaysia, which has focused upon implementation strategies combined with timely evaluation and supervision of administrative agencies has almost achieved most of their committed MDGs. A special report of Malaysian efforts, initiates the debate of moving beyond the best practice research in implementation arena. The central idea of this book is to demonstrate the role of communities in making governance effective and government responsive to the needs of people.
This volume offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art portrait of entrepreneurship and small business management issues in former Yugoslavian countries. Further, it provides a wealth of theoretical and empirical evidence on the role of entrepreneurship in transition economies and emerging markets. Country-based studies identify the processes in each country that attract financial investors and yield new business and employment opportunities. In addition, the studies highlight institutional constraints and political factors that hinder the development of entrepreneurship in these countries, and offer recommendations for policymakers on how to improve the general business environment. This book will appeal to entrepreneurship researchers, as well as public policymakers in transition economies and emerging markets.
Malaysia is one of the fastest growing economies in the world today, and this book reflects current debates about the future directions of the national economy, polity and society in light of the late 1990s watershed period of financial crisis, the arrest of Anwar Ibrahim and the subsequent 1999 general election. Malaysian Economics and Politics in the New Century aims to answer questions about how the economy and society are organized, about how the benefits from economic development are distributed, about government's relations to major national institutions, and about the nature of the political process. With its focus firmly on Malaysia's future, this will be a volume of particular interest to scholars, academics, researchers, business leaders and policymakers involved in the Asian region, and Malaysia in particular.
This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The importance of the pharmaceutical industry in Sub-Saharan Africa, its claim to policy priority, is rooted in the vast unmet health needs of the sub-continent. Making Medicines in Africa is a collective endeavour, by a group of contributors with a strong African and more broadly Southern presence, to find ways to link technological development, investment and industrial growth in pharmaceuticals to improve access to essential good quality medicines, as part of moving towards universal access to competent health care in Africa. The authors aim to shift the emphasis in international debate and initiatives towards sustained Africa-based and African-led initiatives to tackle this huge challenge. Without the technological, industrial, intellectual, organisational and research-related capabilities associated with competent pharmaceutical production, and without policies that pull the industrial sectors towards serving local health needs, the African sub-continent cannot generate the resources to tackle its populations' needs and demands. Research for this book has been selected as one of the 20 best examples of the impact of UK research on development. See http://www.ukcds.org.uk/the-global-impact-of-uk-research for further details.
This book investigates the increasing circulation and transfer of public policy ideas between the UK, US and Australia since the 1990s. It argues that the upsurge in policy transfer amongst and between these states can be explained by a structural and shared commitment between these states to a distinctive institutional ideology of policy-making. This ideology, it is claimed, is partly a product of the historical proximity of 'Anglosphere' states, and in recent years can be traced through the evolution of New Public Management principles through to Third Way communitarianism.
This volume interrogates the condition of the neoliberal project in the wake of the global crisis and neoliberalism's predicted death in 2007, both in terms of the regulatory structures of finance-led capitalism in Europe and North America, and the impact of new centres of capitalist power on global order.
Advances in GIS technologies have provided a more robust framework for planners and designers. These frameworks offer greater control and monitoring, which can lead to greater accuracy in policymaking and urban planning. Utilizing Decision Support Systems for Strategic Public Policy Planning is an essential research publication that provides comprehensive research on the possibilities of GIS technology for spatial analysis and visualization. Featuring a wide range of topics such as open data, architecture, and regional development, this book is ideal for design professionals, academicians, policymakers, researchers, professionals, and students.
Rescuing the Enlightenment from Itself: Critical and Systemic Implications for Democracy presents papers that make the case that good governance is about thinking and practice that can lead to a better balance of social, cultural, political, economic and environmental concerns to ensure a sustainable future for ourselves and for future generations. The work is inspired by the thinking of C. West Churchman and forms the first volume in a new series: C. West Churchman 's Legacy and Related Works. The book features contributions from a range of invited authors including Russell L. Ackoff, Ken Bausch, John van Gigch and Norma Romm. The volume is aimed at academics, post-graduate students and members of professional associations working in the fields of systems sciences, public policy and management, politics, and international relations.
This book argues that economic inequalities are devastating the socio-economic and political potential of developing countries. Inequality is worsening in most parts of the developing world - this is a timely examination of its causes and consequences. It suggests political and policy solutions to inequality. It looks at data from over 150 countries in an accessible way. Inequalities of wealth and income have a significant impact for the achievement of economic, political and human development in developing counties. This book argues that a high level of economic inequality undermines a country's growth potential, retards the development of social capital, and encourages corruption.
For five months in 2013-2014, Dusan Pavlovic took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia's Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency. Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers' money from "non-economic" activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture. What Pavlovic found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance.
Rural regions in Europe are evolving under powerful boundary conditions such as globalisation, socio-cultural transformations and climate change, which in turn increases natural hazards. The regional land use and the evolvement of landscapes is increasingly shaped trends and drivers like infrastructural, energy or housing needs, globalised agricultural markets, and consumption habits. To face these challenges and to balance competitiveness with social cohesion, the "InnoLand research and development network" induces and accompanies promising land use innovations at the landscape scale in 10 European rural regions. Based on a common conceptual approach among the InnoLand partners, the development and implementation of new competitive strategies is conducted as a science-practice dialogue with strong commitment to the regional policy design for rural development. With this book, the network partners provide an overview and a comparative analysis of selected experimental regional approaches and give examples for the successful tackling of future opportunities and threats.
Although the majority of China s population is of the Han nationality (which accounts for more than 90% of China s population), the non-Han ethnic groups have a population of more than 100 million. Until now, China has officially identified, except for other unknown ethnic groups and foreigners with Chinese citizenship, 56 ethnic groups. In addition, ethnic groups vary widely in size. With a population of more than 15 million, the Zhuang have the largest ethnic minority, and the Lhoba, with only two thousand or more, the smallest. China s ethnic diversity has resulted in a special socioeconomic landscape of China itself. This book develops a complete socioeconomic picture and a detailed and comparable set of data for each of China s ethnic groups. There have not been any precise data on China s socioeconomic statistics from multi-ethnic dimension. The only official data released can be found in China Ethnic Statistical Yearbook (released by the State Commission of Ethnic Affairs (SCEA) of the People s Republic of China since 1994). However, as this Yearbook has only reported the socioeconomic statistics for the minority-based autonomous areas, a complete set of China s multi-ethnic data cannot be derived from it. This book provides a broad collection of data on China s 56 ethnic groups and profiles the demography, cultural, economy, and business climates for each of China s diverse ethnic groups.
The Annual Report objectively reflects the year's developments in terms of politics, the economy, society, culture, the environment, innovation and reform, and describes the problems, challenges and countermeasures in both traditional and new special economic zones. It provides an analysis of China's special economic zones, including a review of the year's developments in the form of experimental zones. It also presents new special economic zones and focuses on analyzing the transformation of these zones; the use of resources; sustainable, economic and social development; social security and technical innovation in the context of current developments. It also offers a comparative analysis and makes policy and development suggestions for each issue.
In this book Wayne Hope analyzes the double relation between time and global capitalism. In order to do this, he cross-relates four epistemes of time - epochality, time reckoning, temporality and coevalness - with four materializations of time - hegemony, conflict, crisis and rupture. Using this framework allows Hope to argue that global capitalism is epochally distinctive, riven by time conflicts, prone to recurring crises, and vulnerable to collective opposition. These critical insights are not easily thematized in a mediated world of real-time reflexivity, detemporalized presentism, and denials of coevalness associated with structural exclusions of the poor. However, the worldwide repercussions of the 2008 financial collapse and the resulting confluence of occupation movements, riots, protests, strike activity, and anti-austerity activism raises the prospect of a rupture within and beyond global capitalism.
'This theoretically informing book provides one of the strongest analyses of Turkish political economy. Bu ra and Sava kan decisively dispel myths regarding the new, allegedly self-made and 'small' entrepreneurs who form the backbone of Turkish success. Drawing on original documents, interviews, and statistics, they demonstrate that politics (as practiced by regimes, parties, and associations) has 'made' the Turkish pious business class. No one can think of markets and market actors in the same way after reading this book.' - Cihan Ziya Tugal, UC Berkeley, US 'This impressive work places Turkey firmly on the map of comparative politics and political economy. It adds intriguing facets to what we know about the relationship between the state, democracy and capitalist development in an age of neoliberalism. It also sheds new light on the role of religion in economic change and class formation in emerging countries on the periphery of contemporary capitalism. Moreover, in emphasizing the role of business associations in the politically sponsored rise of a post-Fordist model of globalized national capitalism, the book provides exciting new insights on a subject that has been regrettably neglected in recent years.' - Wolfgang Streeck, The New School for Social Research, US 'Power has shifted in Turkey over the last decade, both within business and the state, towards groups with religious-conservative rather than Kemalist-secular sensibilities. This book goes deep inside this transformation to analyze the role of Muslim business networks and their relationship with the state. You will not find a better guide to Turkey s emergent new capitalism.' - Dani Rodrik, Institute for Advanced Study, US New Capitalism in Turkey explores the changing relationship between politics, religion and business through an analysis of the contemporary Turkish business environment. This book focuses on the developments that have transformed the economic, political and cultural coordinates of business activity; led to new forms of interest representation; and changed the relationship between government and business in Turkey in the post-1980 period. Ay e Bu ra and Osman Sava kan argue that political action plays a crucial role in shaping the configuration of the business community, influencing the patterns of business development, and informing the emergence of rival models of capitalist development and political change endorsed by different groups of entrepreneurs. Moreover, the book explores the idea that whilst the use of religion as a strategic resource by some business associations serves to create bonds of trust and solidarity among their members, it also contributes to the polarization of the business community. This interdisciplinary book will be an invaluable resource for academics, graduate students and researchers interested in political economy, political science, sociology, economic history, and organization studies. It will also appeal to journalists and business people, especially those investing or planning to invest in Turkey or the Middle East. Contents: Introduction 1. Economic Development and Cultural Modernization in Republican Turkey: A Brief Overview 2. The Changing Place of the Economy and Religion in Turkish Society Since 1980 3. The New Political Economy of Capital Accumulation 4. Business Associations as Political Actors 5. Polarization at the Local Level Conclusion Index
The authors explore the complex dynamics of mining and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Latin America, including a reflection on the African continent, presenting arguments and case studies based on new research on a set of urgent and emerging questions surrounding mining, development and sustainability.
This is a sequel to the book by Dr. A. Ashimov and his colleagues, Macroeconomic Analysis and Economic Policy Based on Parametric Control. The authors have expanded both the developed mathematical apparatus and the scope of problems and applications stemming from the practice of steering a national economy of a small country in the dynamic environment of the international economic order. The developed theoretical foundation is used in Chapter 1 to suggest a decision support system operating in the framework of state economic policy making. Chapter 2 presents various mathematical models built on the basis of the available statistical data and provides quality assessment of these models. Parametric control problems are being formulated on the basis of these models as problems of mathematical programming, and the obtained solutions are subjected to analyses and interpretations. This is demonstrated by the analysis of the effect of uncontrollable factors on the problem solutions. Chapter 3 is aimed at the modelling and analysis of cyclic phenomena in economics and their structural stability. Chapter 4 presents solutions of specific problems of national economy and analysis and interpretation of their solutions. In summary, the authors formulate comprehensive mathematical models of some critical mechanisms in micro economics previously known only on a qualitative level. They provide vigorous mathematical analysis of the models that justifies their applicability for the formulation of parametric control problems, and the existence of model-based solutions. The complexity of the resultant problems is addressed by the formulation of the appropriate algorithms. The described methodology leads to the development of computer-based decision support systems. |
You may like...
Eight Days In July - Inside The Zuma…
Qaanitah Hunter, Kaveel Singh, …
Paperback
(1)
Rogue - The Inside Story Of SARS's Elite…
Johann van Loggerenberg, Adrian Lackay
Paperback
(2)
The Big Con - How The Consulting…
Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington
Paperback
Eskom - Electricity And Technopolitics…
Sylvy Jaglin, Alain Dubresson
Paperback
(2)
South Africa's Corporatised Liberation…
Dale T. McKinley
Paperback
(1)
|