Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 18 - May 2018): Economics

Publisher : Routledge

When the Chinese economic reforms began in 1978, Marxist economics infused all the institutions of economic theory in China, from academic departments and economics journals to government departments and economic think tanks. By the year 2000, neoclassical economics dominated these institutions and organized most economic discussion. This book explains how and why neoclassical economic theory replaced Marxist economic theory as the dominant economics paradigm in China. It rejects the idea that the rise of neoclassical theory was a triumph of reason over ideology, and instead, using a sociology of knowledge approach, links the rise of neoclassical economics to broad ideological currents and to the political-economic projects that key social groups inside and outside China wanted to enable. The book concludes with a discussion of the nature of economic theory and economics education in China today.

Publisher : World Scientific

Crisis and Recovery: Learning from the Asian Experience is a collection of selected articles related to the Asian experience with two crises — the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 and the global financial crisis of 2007-08 — written by Dr Jong-Wha Lee, former chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. These papers are grouped into three broad topics: Anatomy of Asian Growth and Crises, Asian Financial Crises: Responses and Lessons, and Global Financial Crisis and Challenges to Asia's Sustained Growth.The topics include the relation of the East Asia's development strategies with the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the causes of the Asian financial crisis, the desirability of IMF programs, the assessment of recovery and structural reforms, the process of spillovers of the global financial crisis to Asia, regional and global economic linkages, the role of China and the renminbi, and the long-term growth projections of Asian economies.The research collected in this book will be very useful for policymakers who want to learn from the Asian experience with the crises and it is a key contribution to ongoing research and policy debates on the future of Asian economies.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Panel data is a data type increasingly used in research in economics, social sciences, and medicine. Its primary characteristic is that the data variation goes jointly over space (across individuals, firms, countries, etc.) and time (over years, months, etc.). Panel data allow examination ofproblems that cannot be handled by cross-section data or time-series data. Panel data analysis is a core field in modern econometrics and multivariate statistics, and studies based on such data occupy a growing part of the field in many other disciplines.The book is intended as a text for master and advanced undergraduate courses. It may also be useful for PhD-students writing theses in empirical and applied economics and readers conducting empirical work on their own. The book attempts to take the reader gradually from simple models and methods inscalar (simple vector) notation to more complex models in matrix notation. A distinctive feature is that more attention is given to unbalanced panel data, the measurement error problem, random coefficient approaches, the interface between panel data and aggregation, and the interface betweenunbalanced panels and truncated and censored data sets. The 12 chapters are intended to be largely self-contained, although there is also natural progression.Most of the chapters contain commented examples based on genuine data, mainly taken from panel data applications to economics. Although the book, inter alia, through its use of examples, is aimed primarily at students of economics and econometrics, it may also be useful for readers in socialsciences, psychology, and medicine, provided they have a sufficient background in statistics, notably basic regression analysis and elementary linear algebra.

Publisher : Princeton university press

From Nobel Prize-winning economist Jean Tirole, a bold new agenda for the role of economics in society When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good. Economists are rewarded for writing technical papers in scholarly journals, not joining in public debates. But Tirole says we urgently need economists to engage with the many challenges facing society, helping to identify our key objectives and the tools needed to meet them. To show how economics can help us realize the common good, Tirole shares his insights on a broad array of questions affecting our everyday lives and the future of our society, including global warming, unemployment, the post-2008 global financial order, the euro crisis, the digital revolution, innovation, and the proper balance between the free market and regulation. Providing a rich account of how economics can benefit everyone, Economics for the Common Good sets a new agenda for the role of economics in society.

Publisher : World Scientific

The Economic Transformation of China is a collection of essays written by an eminent observer of the Chinese economy. The book covers the Chinese transformation beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the second decade of the twenty-first century. It includes an analysis of the forces that held China back before 1949, the nature of the economy as it operated under the Soviet model of development, and the transformation since 1978 into a "socialist market economy." The essays of the post-1978 era reflect the author's view of the state of the reform effort at the time the essay was written and carries the story up to the 2012 - 2013 slowdown in economic growth.

Publisher : World Scientific

""China and India, the two largest developing countries, are developing rapidly both inside themselves and towards global markets. Are these two economies dual or dueling? This 3-volume set tries to answer this question by providing comprehensive analyses scoping varied economic issues. This volume set covers both China's and India's strategies and objectives in international governance, their bilateral and multilateral trade agreement negotiations, financial liberalization, growth prospects, rural development and agriculture, income distribution, labor market mechanism, manufacturing and competitiveness upgrading, as well as environmental and other social issues. The set collects papers (most unpublished until now) written by Chinese and Indian researchers who have rich experiences and strong backgrounds in policy analyses and are well connected to Chinese and Indian policy makers. Thus, these papers contain valuable first-hand information about China's and India's development strategies. This makes this volume set an essential source of reference for China-India comparisons and studies.""

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Paul Samuelson was at the heart of a revolution in economics. He was "the foremost academic economist of the 20th century," according to the New York Times, and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. His work transformed the field of economics and helped give it the theoretical and mathematic rigor that increased its influence in business and policy making. In Founder of Modern Economics, Roger E. Backhouse explores the central importance of Samuelson's personality and social networks to understanding his intellectual development. This is the first of two volumes covering Samuelson's extended and productive life and career. This volume surveys Samuelson's early years growing up in the Midwest to his experiences at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, where leading scholars in economics and other disciplines stimulated and rewarded his curiosity. His thinking was influenced by the natural sciences and he understood that a critical, scientific approach increased insights into important social and economic questions. He realized that these questions could not be answered through rhetorical debate but required rigor. His "eureka" moment came, he said, when "a good fairy whispered to me that math was a skeleton key to solve age old problems in economics." Backhouse traces Samuelson's thinking from his early days to the publication of his groundbreaking book Foundations of Economic Analysis and Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which influenced generations of students. His work set the stage for economics to become a more cohesive and coherent discipline, based on mathematical techniques that provided surprising insights into many important topics, from business cycles to wage and unemployment rates, and from how competition influences trade to how tax rates affects tax collection. Founder of Modern Economics is a profound contribution to understanding how modern economics developed and the thinking of a revolutionary thinker.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Global capitalism is affected by the malaises of stagnation, financial fragility, increased income inequality, growing wealth concentration at the top, and a vanishing fair social contract. This book focuses on the incidence of these phenomena in the US, UK, Greece, Spain, Chile, South Africa,Australia, China, and other countries. The book looks at the effects of IMF-ECB led austerity policies in Europe. The book examines concrete country and global conditions combining theory, country studies, historical evidence, and international comparative analysis. The book also proposes new policypriorities to restore stability, reduce inequality, and consolidate democracy in 21st century capitalism.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Well-functioning financial markets are crucial for the economic well-being and the justice of contemporary societies. The Great Financial Crisis has shown that a perspective that naively trusts in the self-regulating powers of free markets cannot capture what is at stake in understanding andregulating financial markets. The damage done by the Great Financial Crisis, including its distributive consequences, raises serious questions about the justice of financial markets as we know them. This volume brings together leading scholars from political theory, law, and economics in order to explore the relation between justice and financial markets. Broadening the perspective from a purely economic one to a liberal egalitarian one, the volume explores foundational normative questionsabout how to conceptualize justice in relation to financial markets, the biases in the legal frameworks of financial markets that produce unjust outcomes, and perspectives of justice on specific institutions and practices in contemporary financial markets. Written in a clear and accessible language, the volume presents analyses of how financial markets (should) function and how the Great Financial Crisis came about, proposals for how the structures of financial markets could be reformed, and analysis of why reform is not happening at the speed thatwould be desirable from a perspective of justice.

Publisher : Oxford University Press

This book analyses the evolution of the French model of capitalism in relation to the instability of socio-political compromises.In the 2010s, France was in a situation of systemic crisis, namely, the impossibility for political leadership to find a strategy of institutional change, or more generally a model of capitalism, that could gather sufficient social and political support. This book analyses the various attempts atreforming the French model since the 1980s, when the left tried briefly to orient the French political economy in a social-democratic/socialist direction before changing course and opting for a more orthodox macroeconomic and structural policy direction. The attempts of governments of the right toimplement a radically neo-liberal structural policy also failed in the face of a significant social opposition. The enduring French systemic crisis is the expression of contradictions between the economic policies implemented by the successive left and right governments, and the existence of adominant, social bloc, that is, a coalition of social groups that would politically support the dominant political strategy. Since 1978, both the right and the left have failed to find a solution to the contradictions between the policies they implemented and the expectations of their respective social bases, which are themselves inhabited by tensions and contradictions that evolve with the structural reforms thatgradually transformed French capitalism.