New technology is revolutionizing broadcasting markets. As the cost of bandwidth processing and delivery fall, information-intensive services that once bore little economic relationship to each other are now increasingly related as substitutes or complements. Television, newspapers, telecoms and the internet compete ever more fiercely for audience attention. At the same time, digital encoding makes it possible to charge prices for content that had previously been broadcast for free. This is creating new markets where none existed before. How should public policy respond? Will competition lead...

This book is an accessible and authoritative analysis of the widespread use of barter in the countries of the former Soviet Union--one of the most dramatic, but least understood, aspects of the region's tortuous transition from planned to market economy. Written by a distinguished team of economists and other social scientists with minimal use of mathematics, the book is designed to appeal not just to area studies scholars with an interest in the transition process but also to economists and anthropologists interested in the role of money and social networks in modern societies.