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Venal Origins is a comparative and historical study of the roots of spatial inequalities in Spanish America. The book focuses on the Spanish colonial administration and the 18th-century practice of office-selling-where colonial positions were exchanged for money-to analyze its lasting impact on local governance, regional disparities, and economic development. Drawing on three centuries of rich archival and administrative data, it demonstrates how office-selling exacerbated venality and profit-seeking behaviors among colonial officials, fostering indigenous segregation, violent uprisings, and the institutionalization of exploitative fiscal and labor systems. The enduring legacies from their rule remain visible today, in the form of subnational authoritarian enclaves, localized cycles of violence, and marginalized indigenous communities, which have reinforced and deepened regional inequalities. By integrating perspectives from history, political science, and economics, Venal Origins provides a nuanced and empirically grounded analysis of how colonial officials shaped-and still influence-subnational development in Spanish America.
In this revised and updated edition, An Economic History of Europe re-establishes itself as the leading textbook on European economic history. With an expanded scope, from prehistory to the present, it will be invaluable source for students, educators and researchers seeking to better understand Europe's long-run economic development. The authors cover key themes including the rise of institutions, technological advancements, globalization, and the Industrial Revolution, with a fresh emphasis on the wider impact of economic policies on welfare reflecting a broader understanding of societal well-being. The chronological structure, clear explanations, case studies, and minimal use of complex mathematics make this an accessible approach that allows students to apply economic theories in historical practice. The new edition also connects historical development to urgent contemporary issues such as modern-day sustainability goals. This comprehensive guide provides students with both a historical narrative of Europe's economic transformation, and the essential tools for analysing it.
Drawing on insights from sociology and new institutional economics, Extralegal Governance provides the first comprehensive account of China's illegal markets by applying a socio-economic approach. It considers social legitimacy and state repression in examining the nature of illegal markets. It examines how power dynamics and varying levels of punishment shape exchange relationships between buyers and sellers. It identifies context-specific risks and explains how private individuals and organizations address these risks by developing extralegal governance institutions to facilitate social cooperation across various illegal markets. Adopting a multiple-case study design to sample China's illegal markets, this book utilizes four cases - street vending, small-property-rights housing, corrupt exchanges, and online loan sharks - to examine how market participants foster cooperation and social order in illegal markets.
North America's Indigenous inhabitants operated effective governments long before European arrival. Tribes built cities, developed laws, and participated in transcontinental trade networks. European arrival, however, brought many hardships for Indians. Although tribes were guaranteed the right to self-govern on reservations, the United States imposed severe restraints on tribal autonomy resulting in socioeconomic maladies, such as poverty and crime. Today, federal policies continue to inhibit tribal self-governance. As a result, tribes continue to suffer from these social ills. Becoming Nations Again argues empowering tribal governments is the key to solving tribal problems. It moves to liberate tribes from the antiquated regulations that apply only to tribal lands and allow tribes to exercise jurisdiction over all people on their land. Once this occurs, tribes will be free to implement their own laws and participate in the federalist system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Investigating climate-controlled agriculture and alternatives to animal proteins, John Wilkinson shows that trade and investment in agrifood is reorienting to the Global South. He skilfully illustrates the connections between social movements and technological innovation - and the need for consumer acceptance of new food habits.
Out of Poverty provides a comprehensive defence of Third World sweatshops that does not put economic efficiency over people, but instead explores methods of improving the welfare of those in Third World countries. The author explains how sweatshops provide the best opportunity for workers; and how they play an important role in development, leading to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, empirical evidence, and historical investigation, Powell argues that the anti-sweatshop movement would harm the very workers it intends to help by creating less-desirable alternatives and undermining development. Including a new chapter on the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, this revised and expanded second edition also explores how sweatshop wages have changed and how poverty alleviation has progressed in countries with sweatshops in the late 1990s and early 2000s and how boycotting Uyghur forced labor in China differs other sweatshop boycotts.
Economics without Preferences lays out a new microeconomics – a theory of choice behavior, markets, and welfare – for agents who lack the preferences and marginal judgments that economics normally relies on. Agents without preferences defy the rules of the traditional model of rational choice but they can still systematically pursue their interests. The theory that results resolves several puzzles in economics. Status quo bias and other anomalies of behavioral economics shield agents from harm; they are expressions rather than violations of rationality. Parts of economic orthodoxy go out the window. Agents will fail to make the fine-grained trade-offs ingrained in conventional economics, leading market prices to be volatile and cost-benefit analysis to break down. This book provides policy alternatives to fill this void. Governments can spur innovation, the main benefit markets can deliver, while sheltering agents from the upheavals that accompany economic change.
Cities are seen as essentially 'good': innovative, pro-growth, poverty-reducing. In a challenging corrective to this common portrayal, Christof Parnreiter argues that the same urban properties which make cities so extraordinarily proficient at producing the 'good' innovations - agglomeration economies, network externalities and a massive built environment - also provides fertile ground for the development of the 'bad' ones, on which urban elites have syphoned off wealth from other localities and regions.
The book scrutinizes the interconnections between wealth creation and poverty generation by putting cities centre stage as a fundamental explanatory category for understanding how the wealth of nations is produced as well as for grasping how the poverty of nations is created. It seeks to correct the developmentalist enthusiasm, commonplace in urban and regional studies, for cities' efficiency, which has displaced interest in cities' role in uneven development.
The subdiscipline of economic geography has a long and varied history, and recent work has pushed the field to diversify even further. This collection takes this agenda forward by showcasing inspiring, critical and plural perspectives for contemporary economic geographies. Highlighting the contributions of global scholars, the thirty chapters showcase fresh ways of approaching economic geography in research, teaching and praxis. With sections on thought leaders, contemporary critical debates and future research agendas, this collection calls for greater openness and inclusivity.
The early pioneers of development attributed the poor economic and social conditions in less developed nations to cultural and environmental elements. Some argued that their small size was also a contributing element. In the latter decades of the twentieth century proponents of the neoclassical counterrevolution shifted the focus to the dirigiste policies of governments. Taking a heterodox approach, however, this study argues that the persistent low level of development in CARICOM nations is due to their being utilized as global agricultural and manufacturing production platforms, their enduring colonial economic and social structures that have slowed down economic transformation, the negative attitudes of classes, the anti-development policies of some governments and, since the human element provides the motor forces that ultimately drive development, their failure to accumulate an adequate pool of knowledge skills that are now dominating production processes in the new global economy.
German industry had survived Allied bombing largely unscathed. Currency reform was necessary to provide incentives for capital owners and labor to produce. The abundance of old Reichsmarks had to be curtailed to a scarce supply of Deutschmarks that users would expect to retain value. It was Edward A. Tenenbaum, currency expert of US military government in Berlin since 1946, who managed the exceptionally successful currency reform in West Germany 1948, which was implemented by the legislative powers of the three Western Allies against opposition from West German financial experts. It was the foundation of West Germany's 'economic miracle.' The West German currency conversion is part of the founding myth of the Federal Republic of Germany. Yet Tenenbaum's pivotal role is largely unknown among the German public. Besides providing a full-blown biography of the true father of the currency reform, this book elevates Tenenbaum to his proper place in German history.
The Lure of Economic Nationalism addresses the continued appeal of economic nationalism. It places economic nationalism in both historical and contemporary contexts, from mercantilism and the writings of Friedrich List to Brexit in the United Kingdom and the Trump Administration in the United States. It also considers the alternative to economic nationalism in the form of a rules-based, multilateral trading system and the World Trade Organization. The book argues that going beyond zero-sum outcomes is better suited to address current problems, including rising tides of ethnonationalism in many countries and pandemics. The book is written in an accessible manner and draws deeply from research in economics and political science. It will be of interest to policymakers, economists, political scientists and the informed public.
Inflation, hyperinflation and deflation have all had profound effects on societies, especially during periods of war and crisis. Today's approach to managing inflation has been shaped by these episodes and informed by debates between different schools of economic thought from Fisher and Hayek to Keynes and the monetarists. This accessible and authoritative overview explores the role of inflation in the modern economy, from its place in monetary policy and in money supply to its effects on everyday business.
In a compelling analysis, the book shows that since the financial crisis in 2008-09, inflation rates have remained persistently higher than interest rates worldwide, which is the inverse of our basic understanding of how inflation normally affects markets. The result of this inversion has been that the effective real return on investment has become negative, and consequently, the investment rate has dropped across western economies. At a time when inflation once again challenges the world's leading economies, the book offers valuable insight into the monetary policy of central banks.
Although the asset management industry has come under increasing scrutiny since the financial crisis it still remains poorly understood and investment scandals continue to headline in the financial press. Whereas most literature on the industry focuses on the technical end - how managers invest and what tips others can glean - this book explores the way these businesses operate as businesses and how they make their money.
The book explains how the industry is organized, how firms generate revenues through various types of fund, fees and charges and what cost pressures they face. It investigates the nature of their client relationships, the role played by star investors and the requirement for firms to integrate non-financial considerations into their investment process. The inherent tensions and potential conflicts of interest within asset managers that seek to keep both clients and shareholders happy is also examined. The book concludes by considering how the industry is evolving, the role of regulation and where it is struggling to change.
Suitable for students of business and finance, those working in allied areas of the finance sector, and for anyone with a general interest in how financial institutions and markets operate, the book offers readers a balanced and incisive guide to the economics of an industry that globally controls more than $100 trillion of financial assets and a critical appraisal of the sector's future.
This bold new book offers an exhaustive diagnosis of global capitalism. Proposing a novel system of economic and political coordination based on a combination of market socialism and state planning, it offers crucial insights for thinking about alternatives to capitalism.
This book conducts an in-depth investigation of one of the largest and longest-established insurance industries in Europe: British life insurance. The author draws on over forty oral history interviews to trace how the sector is changed since the 1970s, a period characterised by rampant financialisation and neoliberalisation.
The airline industry is fundamental to the workings of the global economy. Yet, ironically for an industry of such sheer scale and economic muscle, profit margins are razor thin and many airlines struggle to break even. The precarious economics of the sector were fully revealed when Covid-19 grounded flights across the world prompting many national carriers to seek government bailouts, while smaller airlines collapsed.
In this updated and expanded new edition Volodymyr Bilotkach explains the economic realities of the airline industry and the challenges that the sector now faces after the seismic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact of such a large-scale external shock on the industry is considered across each of its sectors and for each of its primary economic determinants. The book also includes new material on changes to cost structures, the pricing of add-on services, cargo, airport slot allocation and the impact of climate change.
The book remains a comprehensive introduction to the economics of airlines, how carriers compete, how they develop their business, and how demand and cost structure, coupled with the complex regulatory regime, produces the industry we see today.
Power is a broad and complex concept that cuts across all fields in humanities and social sciences. Written by a leading historian of economic thought, Power and Inequality presents a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary analysis of power as an economic and social issue. Its aim is not to formulate a new abstract theory of power but rather to illustrate the different ways in which power is used to exacerbate social and economic inequality. Issues such as division of labour and its evolution, different forms of capitalism up to the money-manager economy, the role of networks (from the family to mason lodges and the mafia), the state and the international arena, culture and the role of the masses are considered. The analysis of these elements, causing inequalities of various kinds, is a prerequisite for devising progressive policy strategies aiming at a reduction of inequalities through a strategy of reforms.
The fishing industry's critical dependence on the natural environment makes it very different from other economic sectors. How it can optimally exploit a common resource while ensuring its sustainability raises many economic challenges. This book, suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on fisheries economics and management, provides an introduction to the economics of the fishing industry and the role of fisheries in the world economy.
The book's primary focus is on capture fisheries, although the discussion brings in wider aquaculture for comparative analysis. The key economic concepts that drive the industry, most notably sustainable yield, are explained in detail, before examining how the industry puts them into practice in a complex regulatory environment. The variability of fish stocks is considered and case studies of some spectacular stock crashes are discussed. The law of the sea is explained and how the movement of fish stocks across ocean boundaries has created regulatory bodies to manage international fisheries. At the heart of this management lies the quota system and the book outlines how it works and how, controversially, such quotas have become transferable.
The book offers readers a comprehensive and rigorous guide to the economic considerations motivating the industry and highlights the environmental challenges facing the sector as global consumption of fish continues to rise.
The cultural industries and their products and services make a significant contribution to the global economy and are seen as strategic sectors for sustainable economic growth. However, industries such as art, design, film, music, performing arts, publishing, television and radio, present particular challenges for economic analysis. They can be goods or services that are both public and private, protected by copyright and freely available, consumed and created, as well as susceptible to fashion and technological development.
In this fascinating introduction to the cultural economy, Christiane Hellmanzik examines the market for creative work and reveals the economic relationships between human creativity, intellectual property and technology. Through the careful use of case studies, the book explores the core economic considerations such as supply and demand, competition and pricing, alongside macro trends such as globalization, digitalization and the internet, which are changing the industry's business models.