Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Economy

Is the nation state under siege? A common answer is that globalization poses two fundamental threats to state sovereignty. The first threat concerns the unleashing of centrifugal and centripetal forces such as increasing market integration and the activities of institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and WTO- that imperil state sovereignty from "outside" the nation state. The second threat emanates from self-determination movements that jeopardize state sovereignty from "inside" the nation state.

This book rigorously analyzes popular hypotheses regarding...

That natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the "resource curse" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically...

Entering the shady world of what he calls "violent entrepreneurship," Vadim Volkov explores the economic uses of violence and coercion in Russia in the 1990s. Violence has played, he shows, a crucial role in creating the institutions of a new market economy. The core of his work is competition among so-called violence-managing agencies criminal groups, private security services, private protection companies, and informal protective agencies associated with the state which multiplied with the liberal reforms of the early 1990s. This competition provides an unusual window on the dynamics of...

The State of Working America, prepared biennially since 1988 by the Economic Policy Institute, includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, taxes, unemployment, wealth, and poverty-data that enable the authors to closely examine the effect of the economy on the living standards of the American people. This edition, like the previous ones, exposes and analyzes the most recent and critical trends in the country.

Praise for previous editions of The State of Working America

"The State of Working America remains unrivaled as...

The postcommunist transitions produced two very different types of states. The "contractual" state is associated with the countries of Eastern Europe, which moved toward democratic regimes, consensual relations with society, and clear boundaries between political power and economic wealth. The "predatory" state is associated with the successors to the USSR, which instead developed authoritarian regimes, coercive relations with society, and poorly defined boundaries between the political and economic realms. In Capital, Coercion, and Postcommunist States, Gerald M. Easter shows how...

The Great Recession and its aftershocks, including the Eurozone banking and debt crisis, add up to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although economic explanations for the Great Recession have proliferated, the political causes and consequences of the crisis have received less systematic attention. Politics in the New Hard Times is the first book to focus on the Great Recession as a political crisis, one with both political sources and political consequences.

The authors examine variation in crises over time and across countries,...

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, Michael A. McCarthy argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth.

Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War...