Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are becoming poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the 'mistakes' of such elites, this title contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.

This timely book sets out a shrewd and comprehensive policy programme, for both 'microeconomic' supply-side settings of tax and regulatory systems, and 'macroeconomic' policies for fiscal and monetary policies to regulate demand and support the supply-side growth agenda. Explaining the numerous benefits of free trade after Britain's exit from the EU, and challenging the anti-Brexit argument, Patrick Minford builds on his extensive research into economic modelling to quantify the effects of Brexit and propose policies for the aftermath. Laying out an agenda for replacing social interventionist EU regulation with a robust free market framework, Minford proposes a radical tax reform programme to broaden the tax base and flatten marginal rates. This incisive book looks to the future of the UK beyond Brexit, addressing the effects of coronavirus and proposing an avenue of policies for recovery. Featuring key empirical analysis and insightful arguments, this book will be crucial reading for economists and policymakers investigating and overseeing the future of UK economic policy. It will also benefit scholars of economics and political economy, particularly those interested in tax reform programmes.

Storable votes are a simple voting scheme that allows the minority to win occasionally, while treating every voter equally. Because the minority wins only when it cares strongly about a decision while the majority does not, minority victories occur without large costs and indeed typically with gains for the community as a whole.
The idea is simple: consider a group of voters faced with a series of proposals, each of which can either pass or fail. Decisions are taken according to the majority of votes cast, but each voter is endowed with a total budget of votes to spend freely over the multiple decisions. Because voters will choose to cast more votes on decisions that matter to them most, they reveal the intensity of their preferences, and increase their probability of winning exactly when it matters to them most. Thus storable votes elicit and reward voters' intensity of preferences without the need for any external knowledge of voters' preferences. By treating everyone equally and ruling out interpersonal vote trades, they are in line with common ethical priors and are robust to criticisms, both normative and positive, that affect vote markets. The book complements the theoretical discussion with several experiments, showing that the promise of the idea is borne out by the data: the outcomes of the experiments and the payoffs realized match very closely the predictions of the theory. Because the intuition behind the voting scheme is so simple: "vote more when you care more," the results are robust across different scenarios, even when more subtle strategic effects are not identified by the subjects, suggesting that the voting scheme may have real potential for practical applications.
Alessandra Casella has used the tools of economics to develop this idea both theoretically and experimentally in major economics journals, but this is the first book-length treatment of the subject.

'The Handbook of Diverse Economies offers a rich, beautiful, organic garden of ideas to nourish the project of ''doing economy'' differently. These sprouts and vines will, eventually, alter the institutional structures we inhabit.' - Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts Amherst, US 'Let us forget, just for a moment, ''capitalism'' and instead investigate the diversity of new forms of economic activities that are flourishing everywhere: this is the essential, energizing, message of J. K. Gibson-Graham, Kelly Dombroski and her colleagues. This innovative book must be absolutely put into all hands. It takes us on a long and rewarding journey around the world to explore ongoing experiences that all attempt to invent new ways of living together.' - Michel Callon, Centre de Socologie de l'Innnovation, Mines ParisTech, France Theorising and illustrating diverse, more-than-capitalist economies, this broad-ranging Handbook presents ways in which it is possible to imagine and enact other ways of being. It gathers together empirical examples of diverse economic practices and experiments from across the world, framed by in-depth discussions of key theoretical concepts. Organised into thematic sections, the Handbook moves from looking at diverse forms of enterprise, to labour, transactions, property, and finance as well as decentred subjectivity and diverse economies methodology. Chapters present a wide diversity of economic practices that make up contemporary economies, many of which are ignored or devalued by mainstream economic theory. Pushing the boundaries of economic thinking to include more than human labour and human/non-human interdependence, it highlights the challenges of enacting ethical economies in the face of dominant ways of thinking and being. Economic geography, political economy and development studies scholars will greatly appreciate the empirical examples of diverse economic practices blended with theory throughout the Handbook. It will also benefit policy-makers and practitioners working within diverse economies, or looking to create more ethical ways of living.

What do Walter Sisulu, Paul Xiniwe, Bertha Mkhize and John Tengo Jabavu have in common? They were all Black South African business people, and only a few of the names of the elite who were able to build successful enterprises against all odds in industries such as agriculture, media, financial services, retail, real estate, transport, hoteliering and more during the colonial and apartheid eras.

In many cases, they were also political activists as necessitated by the oppressive conditions of the time in order to fight for equal rights to enterprise and markets. Here their stories as entrepreneurs as well as political actors are profiled, showing the inexplicable relationship between the two.

The history of Black South African enterprise pre- and post-colonially in areas like mining is also explored, showing that this was nothing alien or unexpected and instead, that oppression curtailed the majority of enterprise that was possible and blocked out competition through dispossession.

While the depth and sophistication of South Africa’s financial and capital markets are lauded by indices the world over, South Africa is also considered to be the most unequal society in the world. The Economy On Your Doorstep probes the reasons for this tragic paradox of South African life and tries to go through and beyond the graphs, margin calls, trading updates, indices and earnings reports to explain how economic ‘actions’ frame the lives of South Africans in a transitional society faced with the challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

The economy is and always has been primarily about ‘people’. How they live, what they produce, under what conditions and what social, political and environmental factors influence decisions of consumption, investment and distribution – and how they act under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, need and crisis. After all, economies are about people coming together to produce, exchange, distribute and consume goods and services that emerge from their communities and those of others. How and under what conditions can we ensure the expansion of our productive forces, while expanding access to the base of assets, services and support that allow for the social reproduction of our entire society and workforce?

Ayabonga Cawe outlines some key areas that can and should define a policy agenda towards a ‘people’s economy’ in South Africa and the long-term objectives of such a policy programme, and engages with the political economy of 21st century South Africa through an analysis of a few selected areas of the economy and the implications of this for policy action. This is what this book is about – an exposition of what we see around us and an explanation and discussion of possible ways beyond it.

In this well-researched book, Ayabonga Cawe, a development economist, columnist and broadcaster, makes sense of the post-apartheid political economy through the lives of the many people who live and survive in it every day.