Browse by title

This unique book uses a transaction cost perspective to illustrate how hierarchies influenced the structure of markets and behaviour of individual businesses and cartels in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and present-day Russia.

This timely book brings fresh analysis to the important issue of trade policy reform in emerging markets.

The book is based on original data and field studies from Brazil, Thailand, India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on the issue of universal and free access to treatment (a goal now taken to heart by the international community), it assesses the progress made and presents a rigorous diagnosis of the obstacles that remain, especially the constraints imposed by TRIPS and the poor state of most public health systems in Southern countries. In so doing, the book renews our understanding of the political economy of HIV/AIDS in these vast regions, where it continues to spread with devastating social and economic consequences.

This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are analyzed in depth, namely: tax assignment, equalization grants – i.e. redistribution of money from the wealthy regions or the national government to poorer regions, and the role of local governments in the administration of taxes.

This book is an objective analysis combining both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ (most notably US) perspectives of Northeast Asian regionalism. It also usefully applies regional integration theories to the realities of the Northeast Asian situation and presents policy options for regional integration.

The purpose of this book is to reconsider economic liberalism from the viewpoint of political liberalism. The author argues that advocates of economic liberalism largely overlook empirical political preferences which, in many societies, go far beyond a limited role of the state. Recent difficulties of reforming the welfare state provide evidence that political preferences are at odds with liberal economic policy in numerous cases. This fact challenges a political conception which demands a limited state role but also claims that citizens’ preferences ‘as they are’ should determine the content of policies. Using an evolutionary perspective on economic liberalism, the book develops new arguments about how economic liberalism can be brought into line with political liberalism.

Özgür Orhangazi brings together a comprehensive analysis of financialization in the US economy that encompasses the historical, theoretical, and empirical sides of the issues. He explores the origins and consequences of the dramatic rise of financial markets in the US economy and focuses on the impacts of this process of ‘financialization’ on the operations of the non-financial corporate sector.

Eduardo Wiesner’s book makes an important contribution to the understanding of development by blending together the interdependent issues of (i) macroeconomic performance and volatility, (ii) equity and distributive justice, (iii) fiscal deficits and the redistributive effectiveness of social public expenditures, and (iv) the demand for the ‘right’ institutions and for policy reform in Latin America. It does this by examining recent macroeconomic crises from a political economy perspective, and finds that information is the critical algorithm that links together the demand for macroeconomic stability, macroeconomic performance and, ultimately, distributive justice.

Until now there have been few attempts to examine the different models of federalism appropriate in Asia, let alone to trace the extent to which these different perspectives are compatible, converging, or mutually influencing each other. This book redresses the balance by demonstrating the varieties of Asian federalism.