Privatization has been one of the most important elements of public policy in the last decade and there have been massive transfers of ownership from the public to the private sector on a national and international level. This book combines thematic papers with country case studies to discuss the mechanisms which have enabled this to occur, and to assess privatization's mixed achievements.
The authors, international academics, practitioners and consultants and the process of privatization is discussed in East Germany, Nigeria, Pakistan, Guyana, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and Great...

Why did financial keiretsu develop in Japan, but not in Germany and the United States? Why is bank intermediation more dominant in Germany and Japan than in the United States? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each system?
Capital Markets and Corporate Governance in Japan, Germany and the United States answers these and related questions. Helmut Dietl explains capital market intermediation, holding companies, multidivisional organizations, financial keiretsu, and LBO associations as organizational responses to capital market inefficiencies. Country-specific responses...

Since the explosion of multimedia, the creation and promotion of multimedia clusters has become a target for regional development strategies across the globe. This work offers the first inter-regional comparison of the multimedia industry.
Analysing thirteen American, European and Asian regions, leading academics examine factors which drive the emergence of multimedia clusters and processes by which they are formed,

The diffusion of information and communication technologies is rapidly changing the structure of advanced economies and the fear of mass technological unemployment has emerged. On the other hand, advocates of full employment equilibrium strongly believe that any labour-saving bias can be easily counterbalanced by market forces. This book addresses this controversy integrating the economic theoretical debate with detailed empirical evidence and economic policy proposals.

Drawing on interviews with the UK government's Panel of Independent Forecasters, the author shows how economic models, forecasts and policy analysis depend crucially upon the judgements of economists.

This book analyses the wave of competition-oriented reform by comparing "internal market reform" (proposed in publicly-funded health care systems) with "managed competition reform" (proposed in systems with a mixture of public/private financing) and the role of "managed care" in each of these reform theories.
International Health Care Reform clearly explains the arguments in economics and justice for intervention by governments in health care markets; the structure and dynamics of health care systems; and the features of competition-oriented reform models. The book will appeal to...

Since the end of the 1970s, the economies of North America and Western Europe have undergone massive industrial-geographical transformations. This book focuses on three of the most important: on the heightened importance of the region as a generator of both technological innovation and economic wealth; on the contingent effects of new local, national and international forms of regulation; and on the emergence of new institutions, and the reworking of old ones.

In nearly all OECD countries, the labour market has been in flux in recent decades. This book examines the labour markets and the institutional frameworks that condition their functioning in four different countries: Canada, the United States, Denmark and Sweden. Through a comparative study of these cases, the book discusses the nation-specific patterns that exist in a world that seems to become increasingly subject to common social and economic development.

When can a country be said to benefit from free trade?
This question has obsessed economists for more than 200 years, and a definitive answer has never been provided. Continuing the influential work begun in The Gains from Trade and the Gains from Aid, (Routledge 1995), Murray Kemp here presents the recent progress he and his co-workers have made in tackling this important question.

This remarkable new work reconciles two distinct disciplinary fields; the study of culture and the study of markets, to expand our understanding of the world of markets and business enterprise.