Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Economic Conditions

Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex post selection and learning than on ex ante calculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.

Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change...

This book explores the growing tension between the requirements of employers for a flexible work force and the ability of parents and communities to nurture their children and provide for their health, welfare, and education. Global competition and the spread of information technology are forcing businesses to engage in rapid, worldwide production changes, customized marketing, and just-in-time delivery. They are reorganizing work around decentralized management, work differentiation, and short-term and part-time employment. Increasingly, workers must be able to move across firms and even...

For the most part, competition policy literature has focused on large economies. Yet the economic paradigms on which such policies are based do not necessarily apply to small market economies. This book demonstrates that optimal competition policy is very much dependent on the size of an economy. Whether and how firms compete is a matter of the natural conditions of the markets in which firms operate. A critical feature of small economies is the concentrated nature of many of their markets, which are often protected by high entry barriers. Competition policy must be designed to deal...

Russia's historic transition from communism in the 1990s sparked intense, often ideological debates. This book offers a firsthand glimpse into the intellectual challenges that Russia's turbulent transition generated. It deals with many of the most important reforms, from Gorbachev's half-hearted "perestroika," to the mass privatization program, to the efforts to build legal and regulatory institutions of a market economy. The essays in this book attempt to identify the driving forces of Russia's rapidly changing economic and social reality.

To understand Yeltsin's reforms, the book...

How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global "Body Shopping" explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions.

Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy...