Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Economics - General

Most of the world's people live in "developing" economies, as do most of the world's poor. The predominant means of economic development is economic growth. In this book Gary Fields asks to what extent and in what circumstances economic growth improves the material standard of living of a country's people. Most development economists agree that economic growth raises the incomes of people in all parts of the income distribution and lowers the poverty rate. At the same time, some groups lose out because of changes accompanying economic growth. Fields examines these beliefs, asking what...

Traditional growth theory emphasizes the incentives for capital accumulation rather than technological progress. Innovation is treated as an exogenous process or a by-product of investment in machinery and equipment. Grossman and Helpman develop a unique approach in which innovation is viewed as a deliberate outgrowth of investments in industrial research by forward-looking, profit-seeking agents.

As Chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in the late 1970s, Alfred E. Kahn presided over the deregulation of the airlines and his book, published earlier in that decade, presented the first comprehensive integration of the economic theory and institutional practice of economic regulation. In his lengthy new introduction to this edition Kahn surveys and analyzes the deregulation revolution that has not only swept the airlines but has transformed American public utilities and private industries generally over the past seventeen years.While attitudes toward regulation have changed several...

Currencies and Crises brings together Paul Krugman's work on international monetary economics from the late 1970s to the present, in an effort to make sense of a turbulent period that, in Krugman's words, "involved one surprise after another, most of them unpleasant." The eleven essays cover such key areas as the role of exchange rates in balance-of-payments adjustment policy, the role of speculation in the functioning of exchange-rate regimes, third world debt, and the construction of an international monetary system.

Humanity is risking the health of the natural environment through a myriad of interventions, including the atmospheric emission of trace gases such as carbon dioxide, the use of ozone-depleting chemicals, the engineering of massive land-use changes, and the destruction of the habitats of many species. It is imperative that we learn to protect our common geophysical and biological resources. Although scientists have studied greenhouse warming for decades, it is only recently that society has begun to consider the economic, political, and institutional aspects of environmental intervention....

The MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics is an up-to-date, authoritative reference designed primarily for students of business and other social sciences and ideal for anyone who wants a brief explanation of an economic concept or institution.In this fourth edition one entry in ten has been revised and one entry in twenty is new. Whereas the third edition increased the coverage of American institutions, this edition breaks new ground by including entries considered important from an Eastern European perspective. It also supplies comparative statistics on major economic variables for selected...

The authors of The Economic Effects of Constitutions use econometric tools to study what they call the "missing link" between constitutional systems and economic policy; the book is an uncompromisingly empirical sequel to their previous theoretical analysis of economic policy. Taking recent theoretical work as a point of departure, they ask which theoretical findings are supported and which are contradicted by the facts. The results are based on comparisons of political institutions across countries or time, in a large sample of contemporary democracies. They find that...

Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge.Larry Samuelson has been one of the main contributors...

Economists have traditionally taken two very different approaches to studying market structure. One looks to "industry characteristics" to explain why different industries develop in different ways; the other looks to the pattern of firm growth within a "typical" industry to describe the evolution of the size distribution of firms. In his new book, John Sutton sets out a unified theory that encompasses both approaches, while generating a series of novel predictions as to how markets evolve. Using statistical analysis and a detailed examination of industry histories, he rigorously tests...

Sunk Costs and Market Structure bridges the gap between the new generation of game theoretic models that has dominated the industrial organization literature over the past ten years and the traditional empirical agenda of the subject as embodied in the structure-conduct-performance paradigm developed by Joe S. Bain and his successors.The new theoretical literature has engendered pessimism in recent years because many results turn out to depend on detailed features of the market that are difficult to measure. This has led many observers to argue that the new literature offers little basis...

Much of what government does depends on money. From the nation's founding until today, conflicts over the powers to tax, spend, and borrow have been at the heart of American politics. Why Budgets Matter is a comprehensive account of how these conflicts over budget policy have shaped national politics by determining the size and role of the federal government.

The history of budget policy provides a unique perspective on political change in the United States and helps explain how and why the federal government has grown over time. Dennis Ippolito reviews the different stages of this...

Since the beginning of scholarly writing about the informal economy in the mid-1970s, the debate has evolved from addressing survival strategies of the poor to considering the implications for national development and the global economy. Simultaneously, research on informal politics has ranged from neighborhood clientelism to contentious social movements basing their claims on a variety of social identities in their quest for social justice.

Despite related empirical and theoretical concerns, these research traditions have seldom engaged in dialogue with one another. Out of the...

This collection of essays explores the fundamental sources of U.S. economic performance, and the public policies that sustain or weaken that performance. Revitalizing the U.S. Economy explores such issues as stimulating and channelling private investment, modifying rules of competition, and reconceptualizing the economy and economic policy. This book surveys industrial policy from a national perspective, examines development policies at the subnational level, analyzes issues in human resources policy, and critiques the policy making process.

This book analyzes the causes underlying the decline of the United States steel industry and the impact of that decline on our institutions of procedural democracy. It locates steel's economic demise in the logic of an economy organized for profit maximization and demonstrates how the industry's economic policies helped open the U.S. market to foreign imports while simultaneously forcing steel officials to turn to the government for assistance.

"The Economic Feasibility of Recycling: A Case Study of Plastic Wastes" is the first book to provide a general overview of the major issues at the heart of the recycle/disposal question. Analyzing in nontechnical language the incentives for and barriers to recycling, this new work examines a broad range of topics, including: the various recycle processes, how the various disposal methods affect the environment, what role the public and private sectors play in the decision-making process.

In his 1982 State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan vowed to return power to the states. Rather than take the more traditional route, he chose to instill the new federalism through intergovernmental regulatory relief. This book assess the policy's success and the problems it has caused. The book is based on several cases studies from different policy areas. Intergovernmental relations, nuclear energy policy, and environmental policy are discussed in detail. The authors have drawn extensively on public documents as well as interviews with members of congress, executive department...

Established by the Mexican government in 1965 to provide employment for Mexican citizens in the cities along the U.S. border, the maquiladora program is now one of the fastest growing industries in that area. This pioneering volume presents an in-depth examination of the maquiladora phenomenon written by experts on the subject. The contributors focus on three vital dimensions of the maquiladora issue: the impact of the maquilas on workers and economic development in both the United States and Mexico; the success or failure of the maquilas on an industry by industry basis; and the strategic...

Throughout the global community, the challenges of finite resources, budget deficits, and growing interdependence and complexity have forced governments and the private sector to do more with less. In the foreign assistance realm, this has translated into a donor mandate to promote self-sustaining development in the Third World, a key component of which is the institutional framework that conceives, plans, funds, implements, and manages activities. This book, based on the results of a multi-year applied research project, focuses on institutional sustainability and its role in agriculture...