This book is a collection of articles focusing on comparative analysis of the development trajectories in the semi-periphery countries of South America and Central and Eastern Europe. The book tries to approach the dilemmas of development in the semi-periphery as diversely as possible, always emphasising the variety of trajectories as a crucial factor. Therefore there are evaluations of the role of cognitive regimes produced by professional fields as elements of collective action coordination and as beacons that fix State-society relations. As opposed to the transitology studies that were...

Written by one of Italy's leading historians, this book analyses the context and legacy of Gaetano Filangieri's seven-volume Science of Legislation. The study engages with the unique history of Enlightenment Naples, the intellectual traditions upon which Filangieri drew, and the powerful repercussions of the American Revolution in eighteenth-century Italy to re-draw the map of Enlightenment republicanism and the early history of human rights and their political economy.

Particularly, the book elucidates Montesquieu's polyvalent influence on the development of Enlightenment political...

Almost all industrial countries have undergone strategies to maintain, or improve, competitiveness in order to improve the standard of living of their population, particularly during the last quarter-century or so. But how have they treated developing countries? 'Competitiveness and Development' explains how developing countries can attain competitiveness at a high level of development, examines the possibilities and constraints in achieving it, and proposes remedial measures at the national and international levels.

The author Mehdi Shafaeddin illustrates how developed...

This book argues that the current international intellectual property rights regime, led by the World Trade Organization (WTO), has evolved over the past three decades toward overemphasizing private interests and seriously hampering public interests in access to knowledge and innovation diffusion. While it is obvious that firm-level dynamics are changing - toward networks and peer production in technologically leading companies in the developed countries, and toward increasing integration into global and regional production and innovation networks in developing countries - academic...

After his death Thorstein Veblen was hailed as America s Darwin and Marx and is normally portrayed as the perennial iconoclast. He severely criticised traditional economics and attempted to create an alternative approach based on a much more complex view of human beings. He is one of the most celebrated economists of our age and has been the inspiration for many books; the predatory version of capitalism we now again experience, the phenomenon of studying cultures of consumption and the darker sides of gilded ages can be traced back to Veblen.

A conference in Veblen s ancestral...

This book has a double agenda. First, it is a series of free-standing essays dealing with the fraught question of regulation in its multiples guises: economic, social, political, cultural and psychological. At the same time, it serves as a companion volume to the re-edition of Kaplan s landmark Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, which first appeared in 1976. The chapters that unfold reveal how Kaplan s thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual, epistemological, historiographical and sociopolitical environment, and to some of the...

The book is a collection of nine quantitative studies - each probing one aspect of Renaissance Florentine economy and society. These are organized into three parts by topic, source material and analysis methods. Part one, on risk and return, contains two chapters. Chapter 1 studies Florentine plague outbreaks. Recent work has highlighted the incompatibility of evidence from written records with medical evidence. The chapter reconciles these approaches by using financial market evidence to interpret the written records. The next chapter examines a commonly used interest rate time series for...

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising millions around the world out of poverty. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing throughout the East. Japan, the four Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and China are all incorporating themselves into the global industrial world. India, Brazil and many others are expected to follow the same course. But as China, India and other industrializing giants grow, they confront an inconvenient truth: they cannot rely on the Western industrial development model of fossil-fueled energy...

Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising millions around the world out of poverty. Industrial capitalism is now diffusing throughout the East. Japan, the four Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) and China are all incorporating themselves into the global industrial world. India, Brazil and many others are expected to follow the same course. But as China, India and other industrializing giants grow, they confront an inconvenient truth: they cannot rely on the Western industrial development model of fossil-fueled energy...