Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Economic Conditions

What did it mean to run a large, commercialized agrarian polity according to the best Confucian principles?

This book is intended as a contribution to both intellectual and political history. It is partly a study of how Confucian-trained officials thought about the grain trade and the state's role in it, particularly the "ever-normal granaries," the stockpiles of grain maintained by every county government as protection against shortages and high prices. The author investigates the scope and limits of belief in market forces among those critical of government...

Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a "tyranny of the majority." Markets, by contrast, are believed to make products available to suit any individual, regardless of what others want. But the argument is not generally correct. In markets, you can't always get what you want. This book explores why this is so and its consequences for consumers with atypical preferences.

When fixed costs are substantial, markets provide only products desired by large...

Commonwealth, when first published in 1947, was a pioneer effort to investigate the historical role of government in the American economy. It revealed for the first time the importance of political action in the development of the American free enterprise system. The present edition has been revised by the authors to take into account the research of the past two decades. Focusing on Massachusetts as a key state, the Handlins describe the changes in the ways the government dealt with the economy from the period of independence to the Civil War, and they analyze the social groups...

Mentally ill people turned out of institutions, crack-cocaine use on the rise, more poverty, public housing a shambles: as attempts to explain homelessness multiply so do the homeless--and we still don't know why. The first full-scale economic analysis of homelessness, Making Room provides answers quite unlike those offered so far by sociologists and pundits. It is a story about markets, not about the bad habits or pathology of individuals.

One perplexing fact is that, though homelessness in the past occurred during economic depressions, the current wave started in the...

Most Americans strongly favor equality of opportunity if not outcome, but many are weary of poverty's seeming immunity to public policy. This helps to explain the recent attention paid to cultural and genetic explanations of persistent poverty, including claims that economic inequality is a function of intellectual ability, as well as more subtle depictions of the United States as a meritocracy where barriers to achievement are personal--either voluntary or inherited--rather than systemic. This volume of original essays by luminaries in the economic, social, and biological sciences,...

This is a comprehensive and detailed account of the economic
history of Puerto Rico from the period of Spanish colonial domination
to the present. Interweaving findings of the "new" Puerto Rican
historiography with those of earlier historical studies, and using
the most recent theoretical concepts to interpret them, James Dietz
examines the complex manner in which productive and class relations
within Puerto Rico have interacted with changes in its place
in the world economy.

Besides including aggregate data on Puerto Rico's economy, the
author offers...

Fiscal Disobedience represents a novel approach to the question of citizenship amid the changing global economy and the fiscal crisis of the nation-state. Focusing on economic practices in the Chad Basin of Africa, Janet Roitman combines thorough ethnographic fieldwork with sophisticated analysis of key ideas of political economy to examine the contentious nature of fiscal relationships between the state and its citizens. She argues that citizenship is being redefined through a renegotiation of the rights and obligations inherent in such economic relationships.

The...

New Wealth for Old Nations provides a guide to policy priorities in small or regional economies. It will be of interest to policymakers, students, and scholars seeking avenues to improved growth, greater opportunity, and better governance. Some of the world's leading economists combine their research insights with a discussion of the practicalities of implementing structural reforms. Scotland is the ideal case study: the recent devolution of government in the United Kingdom offers a natural experiment in political economy, one whose lessons apply to almost any small, advanced...

One of the core assumptions of recent American foreign policy is that China's post-1978 policy of "reform and openness" will lead to political liberalization. This book challenges that assumption and the general relationship between economic liberalization and democratization. Moreover, it analyzes the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization on Chinese labor politics.

Market reforms and increased integration with the global economy have brought about unprecedented economic growth and social change in China during the last quarter of a century. Contagious...