In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the biggest event of worldwide proportion was the 2008 global financial crisis, which was caused primarily by ineffective governance, failed surveillance systems, and implementation flaws. While fiscal and monetary policies succeeded in pulling many countries out of a financial freefall, most economies have performed beneath pre-recession levels as governments continued to struggle with their finances.

Examining the financial crisis from the viewpoint of intangible assets provides a different perspective from traditional economic...

The public debt crisis that Eurozone countries have experienced since 2010 has been accompanied by a resurgence of sovereign risk. Greece was obliged to restructure its debt in 2012. The credit position of even the wealthy countries is shakier than at any time since the Great Depression. Now more than ever it is essential to understand sovereign risk because the default of a country, or even its lack of credibility, is bound to jeopardize political stability and weaken the credit standing of all other economic actors. This book reviews and analyzes the different means used to forestall and...

This work points to the youth experience gap as a key concept to explain the meager employment opportunities and earnings many young people face.The transition from education to work remains a long dark tunnel around the world. However, this book shows that there are striking differences between countries: in Germany, the young people of today are no worse off than their adult counterparts, while in Southern European and Eastern European countries they fare 3 through 4 times worse.

The current economic and financial crisis has further exacerbated the situation for young people in...

This is the first book to report the details of the current status of interfirm relationships in Japan. Based on a unique data set of firms, the authors describe the characteristics of interfirm transactions in a manner unprecedented in the literature. Special emphasis is placed on the nature of payment/collection between firms. Payment for interfirm transactions is usually made on account, or by payment after delivery, rather than by immediate payment. Thus, most interfirm transactions are accompanied by a provision of credit (i.e., lending/borrowing) from a seller to a buyer, referred to...

This book investigates the existence of stochastic and deterministic convergence of real output per worker and the sources of output (physical capital per worker, human capital per worker, total factor productivity -TFP- and average annual hours worked) in 21 OECD countries over the period 1970-2011. Towards this end, the authors apply a large battery of panel unit root and stationarity tests, all of which are robust to the presence of cross-sectional dependence. The evidence fails to provide clear-cut evidence of convergence dynamics either in real GDP per worker or in the series of the...