Today's wide economic gap between the postindustrial countries of the West and the poorer countries of the third world is not new. Fifty years ago, the world economic order--two hundred years in the making--was already characterized by a vast difference in per capita income between rich and poor countries and by the fact that poor countries exported commodities (agricultural or mineral products) while rich countries exported manufactured products. In Trade and Poverty, leading economic historian Jeffrey G.
China is now the world’s second largest economy and may soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest. Despite its adoption of some free-market principles, China considers itself a “socialist-market economy,” suggesting that the government still plays a major role in the country’s economic development. This book offers a systematic analysis of four factors in China’s rapid economic growth: exchange rate policy, savings and investment, monetary policy and capital controls, and foreign direct investment (FDI).
Full employment used to be an explicit goal of economic policy in most of the industrialized world. Some countries even achieved it. In Back to Full Employment, economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States–today faced with its highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression–should put full employment back on the agenda.
The European Union began with efforts in the Cold War era to foster economic integration among a few Western European countries. Today’s EU constitutes an upper tier of government that affects almost every level of policymaking in each of its twenty-seven member states. The recent financial and economic crises have tested this still-evolving institutional framework, and this book surveys key economic challenges faced by the EU.
We do little more than state the obvious when, trying to come to terms with the politico-institutional earthquakes traversing our times, we say that language is the key to politics. --from Capital and Affects
Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman once noted that free immigration cannot coexist with a welfare state. A welfare state with open borders might turn into a haven for poor immigrants, which would place such a fiscal burden on the state that native-born voters would support less-generous benefits or restricted immigration, or both. And yet a welfare state with an aging population might welcome young skilled immigrants.
Governments around the world are deeply divided about the proper role of industrial policy, with some politicians arguing for hands-off governance and others supporting government intervention to promote "national champions"-- firms that receive government support for both political and economic reasons. In this volume, prominent economists present the pros and cons of government support for national champions.
Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at the Fed’s Board of Governors for more than thirty years and after that in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy.With Inside the Fed, he offers his unique perspective on the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System during the last fifty years—writing about personalities as much as policy—based on his knowledge and observations of every Fed chairman since 1951.
In recent years governments have paid increasing attention to weighing the socioeconomic benefits of regulations against their costs. Rules and regulations governing economic activity are typically formulated with a view to their benefits. Their effects on the costs and inefficiencies, in particular the possible chilling effects on competition and innovation, have received limited attention.
Volatility in commodity prices has been accompanied by perpetual renegotiation of contracts between private investors in natural resource production and the governments of states with mineral and energy wealth. When prices skyrocket, governments want a larger share of revenues, sometimes to the point of nationalization or expropriation; when prices fall, larger state participation becomes a burden and the private sector is called back in.
