During recessions state government fiscal crises are widespread, as states find their revenues inadequate to meet their expenditure demands. This volume shows that state fiscal crises have only one significant cause: revenue downturns associated with recessions. Other analysts have argued that fiscal crises are the result of an interaction of many complex causes, including inadequate tax bases, increasing expenditure demands, and limits placed on state governments by voters. This analysis examines these other factors and shows that while they present significant challenges to state...

This guide to the available literature on sports in American culture during the last two decades of the 20th century is a companion to Jack Higg's Sports: A Reference Guide (Greenwood, 1982). The types of individual or team sports included in this volume include those that are viewed as physical contests engaged in for physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological fulfillment. With a focus on books alone, chapters review the available literature regarding sports and each concludes with a bibliography. Academic journals likely to contain articles on the topics discussed are listed...

Key metaphors in world-system analysis are profoundly spatial, but there have been few attempts to understand how space, location, and topography affect world-system organization and process. To fill this gap, this book examines case studies of the restructuring of space and transport in core, semiperipheral, and peripheral economies. It addresses such topics as the role of ocean transport in linking terrestrially based units of the capitalist world economy, the role of land transport systems in the construction and restructuring of relationships between raw materials peripheries and core...

In the aftermath of the stock market crash, Irving Fisher pointed to the electrification of the U.S. industry as one of the underlying causes of the stock market boom. Earlier, in 1927, Brookings Institution economists had lamented the scant attention energy had received from economists. Today, some 60 years later, power remains the forgotten factor input. In this book, the author incorporates energy into the corpus of economic analysis. Unlike previous attempts, which were mostly theoretical, this work generates testable predictions. The result is a model of production based on the two...

Attempting to reveal the real causes of the 1929 stock market crash, Bierman refutes the popular belief that wild speculation had excessively driven up stock market prices and resulted in the crash. Although he acknowledges some prices of stocks such as utilities and banks were overprices, reasonable explanations exist for the level and increase of all other securities stock prices. Indeed, if stocks were overpriced in 1929, then they more even more overpriced in the current era of staggering growth in stock prices and investment in securities. The causes of the 1929 crash, Bierman argues,...

Challenging the stereotype of premodern China as an agricultural nation, this book examines the development of the maritime sector, maritime institutions, and sea power in the premodern era. Initially discussing topics related to China's exports, such as ship design and construction, goods produced solely for export, capital accumulation and investment in the maritime sector, and trade networking, the volume goes on to consider the impact of maritime institutions, governmental trade and non-trade policies, and Confucian attitudes toward maritime activities.

Finally, the book shows how...

The five parts of this collection of essays systematically and thoroughly examine the two competing theories of balance of payments and adjustment, namely the Keynesian and the Monetary approaches. Each part deals with specific aspects of the two approaches. Part I surveys the theories behind these two approaches, looking at the presuppositions, main theory, and policy recommendations which they include. Part II examines the empirical literature and describes the numerous models which have been proposed. Part III critiques the two theories on their assumptions, policy advice and empirical...

An account of the history, structure, and operation of the First and Second Banks of the United States, this study examines how the banks performed as national and central institutions, and what happened to the economy when the charter of the Second Bank was allowed to expire in 1836. Historians have paid little recent attention to the early history of central banking in the United States, and many Americans believe that the Federal Reserve, created in 1913, was our first central bank. The economic crisis during the American Revolution actually led to the founding of a national bank,...

Taking a forward-looking approach, this book critically examines the issues and dynamics central to Africa's problematic development and situates these issues within the contents unique cultural, political, economic, and social milieu. Moving away from a simple litany of problems bedeviling Africa's economy, the book is the culmination of several scholars' efforts to identify specific causative factors. Each chapter delineates a specific issue, demonstrates the role it plays in overall development, and speculates on probable ways to meet the challenges it poses. The major conceptual and...

The past ten years for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region countries have registered an extreme deterioration in at least one measure of social and economic welfare: earnings inequality, unemployment, and poverty. The combination of slow economic growth, population explosion, and decline in labor productivity led to the reversal of the economic gains achieved during the economic boom in the 1970s. In contrast to that period, growth per capita (GDP) in 1980-1991 for Arab countries was -0.2%. Several indicators point to the extent of the problems faced today by the region's...