Download or read book The Magical State written by Fernando Coronil and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-11-10 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1935, after the death of dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela consolidated its position as the world's major oil exporter and began to establish what today is South America's longest-lasting democratic regime. Endowed with the power of state oil wealth, successive presidents appeared as transcendent figures who could magically transform Venezuela into a modern nation. During the 1974-78 oil boom, dazzling development projects promised finally to effect this transformation. Yet now the state must struggle to appease its foreign creditors, counter a declining economy, and contain a discontented citizenry. In critical dialogue with contemporary social theory, Fernando Coronil examines key transformations in Venezuela's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. The result is a timely and compelling historical ethnography of political power at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary reflections on modernity and the state.
Download or read book Doing Business 2019 written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 1734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteenth in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2019 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity: • Starting a business • Dealing with construction permits • Getting electricity • Registering property • Getting credit • Protecting minority investors • Paying taxes • Trading across borders • Enforcing contracts • Resolving insolvency These areas are included in the distance to frontier score and ease of doing business ranking. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation, which is not included in these two measures. This edition also presents the findings of the pilot indicator entitled 'Contracting with the Government,' which aims at benchmarking the efficiency, quality and transparency of public procurement systems worldwide. The report updates all indicators as of May 1, 2018, ranks economies on their overall 'ease of doing business', and analyzes reforms to business regulation -- identifying which economies are strengthening their business environment the most. Doing Business illustrates how reforms in business regulations are being used to analyze economic outcomes for domestic entrepreneurs and for the wider economy. It is a flagship product produced in partnership by the World Bank Group that garners worldwide attention on regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. Almost 140 economies have used the Doing Business indicators to shape reform agendas and monitor improvements on the ground.
Download or read book Crude Nation written by Raúl Gallegos and published by Potomac Books. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath Venezuelan soil lies an ocean of crude—the world’s largest reserves—an oil patch that shaped the nature of the global energy business. Unfortunately, a dysfunctional anti-American, leftist government controls this vast resource and has used its wealth to foster voter support, ultimately wreaking economic havoc. Crude Nation reveals the ways in which this mismanagement has led to Venezuela’s economic ruin and turned the country into a cautionary tale for the world. Raúl Gallegos, a former Caracas-based oil correspondent, paints a picture both vivid and analytical of the country’s economic decline, the government’s foolhardy economic policies, and the wrecked lives of Venezuelans. Without transparency, the Venezuelan government uses oil money to subsidize life for its citizens in myriad unsustainable ways, while regulating nearly every aspect of day-to-day existence in Venezuela. This has created a paradox in which citizens can fill up the tanks of their SUVs for less than one American dollar while simultaneously enduring nationwide shortages of staples such as milk, sugar, and toilet paper. Gallegos’s insightful analysis shows how mismanagement has ruined Venezuela again and again over the past century and lays out how Venezuelans can begin to fix their country, a nation that can play an important role in the global energy industry. This paperback edition features a new introduction by the author.
Download or read book Venezuela the Present as Struggle written by Cira Pascual Marquina and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the revolutionary power of the Chavista grassroots movement Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chavez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people – especially the Chavista masses – do and think in these times of social emergency. Denying us their stories comes at a high price to people everywhere, because the Chavista bases are the real motors of the Bolivarian revolution. This revolutionary grassroots movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chavez refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives. Comprised of a series of compelling interviews conducted by Cira Pascual Marquina, professor at the Bolivarian University, and contextualized by author Chris Gilbert, the book seeks to open a window on grassroots Chavismo itself in the wake of Chavez’s death. Feminist and housing activists, communards, organic intellectuals, and campesinos from around the country speak up in their own voices, defending the socialist project and pointing to what they see as revolutionary solutions to Venezuela’s current crisis. If the Venezuelan government has shown an impressive capacity to resist imperialism, it is the Chavista grassroots movement, as this book shows, that actually defends socialism as the only coherent project of national liberation.
Download or read book Extraordinary Threat written by Justin Podur and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US foreign policy decisions behind six coup attempts against the Venezuelan government – and Venezuela's heightening precarity In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the US administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur argue in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the US policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening US sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by US-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela. This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism or its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty-first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the US empire must not allow to succeed.
Download or read book Monetary Regimes and Inflation written by Peter Bernholz and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the characteristics of inflations and comparing historical cases from Roman times up to the modern day, this book provides an in depth discussion of the subject. It analyses the high and moderate inflations caused by the inflationary bias of
Download or read book Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money written by Milton Friedman and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Venezuela Before Ch vez written by Ricardo Hausmann and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-13 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.
Download or read book Venezuela s Hyperinflation How to counter it Can Petro become a game changer written by Onkar D. Jadhav and published by Onkar Jadhav. This book was released on 2019-04-21 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Venezuela has the world’s largest known oil reserves and as you guys know oil is a base of every economic activity and oil is called black gold which means it is a very profitable business with higher returns. So if oil is having colossal demand, then how can a country with vast reserves fail so badly? As inflation rose, the Venezuelan government made some decisions that backfired and escalated the problem rather than countering it. Now in Venezuela, there is not only a single problem which is hurting the economy, there are several issues in the economy of Venezuela. I will try to address most of them in this book.
Download or read book Survey of Literature on Demand for Money written by Mr.Subramanian S. Sriram and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1999-05-01 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stable money demand forms the cornerstone in formulating and conducting monetary policy. Consequently, numerous theoretical and empirical studies have been conducted in both industrial and developing countries to evaluate the determinants and the stability of the money demand function. This paper briefly reviews the theoretical work, tracing the contributions of several researchers beginning from the classical economists, and explains relevant empirical issues in modeling and estimating money demand functions. Notably, it summarizes the salient features of a number of recent studies that applied cointegration/error-correction models in the 1990s, and it features a bibliography to aid in research on demand for money.
Download or read book The Value of Money written by Prabhat Patnaik and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is money more valuable than the paper on which it is printed? Monetarists link the value of money to its supply and demand, believing the latter depends on the total value of the commodities it circulates. According to Prabhat Patnaik, this logic is flawed. In his view, in any nonbarter economy, the value we assign to money is determined independently of its supply and demand. Through an original and provocative critique of monetarism, Patnaik advances a revolutionary understanding of macroeconomics that highlights the "propertyist" position of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Unlike the usual division between "classical" economists (e.g., David Ricardo and Marx) and the "marginalists" (e.g., Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras), Patnaik places "monetarists," including Ricardo, on one side, while grouping propertyist writers like Marx, Keynes, and Rosa Luxemburg on the other. This second group subscribes to the idea that the value of money is given from outside the realm of supply and demand, therefore making money a form in which wealth is held. The fact that money is held as wealth in turn gives rise to the possibility of deficiency of aggregate demand under capitalism. It is no accident that this possibility was highlighted by Marx and Keynes while going largely unrecognized by Ricardo and contemporary monetarists. At the same time, Patnaik points to a weakness in the Marx-Keynes tradition namely, its lack of any satisfactory explanation of why the value of money, determined from outside the realm of supply and demand, remains relatively stable over long stretches of time. The answer to this question lies in the fact that capitalism is not a self-contained system but is born from a precapitalist setting with which it interacts and where it creates massive labor reserves that, in turn, impart stability to the value of money. Patnaik's theory of money, then, is also a theory of imperialism, and he concludes with a discussion of the contemporary international monetary system, which he terms the "oil-dollar" standard.
Download or read book Dragon in the Tropics written by Javier Corrales and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since he was first elected in 1999, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías has reshaped a frail but nonetheless pluralistic democracy into a semi-authoritarian regime—an outcome achieved with spectacularly high oil income and widespread electoral support. This eye-opening book illuminates one of the most sweeping and unexpected political transformations in contemporary Latin America. Based on more than fifteen years' experience in researching and writing about Venezuela, Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold have crafted a comprehensive account of how the Chávez regime has revamped the nation, with a particular focus on its political transformation. Throughout, they take issue with conventional explanations. First, they argue persuasively that liberal democracy as an institution was not to blame for the rise of chavismo. Second, they assert that the nation's economic ailments were not caused by neoliberalism. Instead they blame other factors, including a dependence on oil, which caused macroeconomic volatility; political party fragmentation, which triggered infighting; government mismanagement of the banking crisis, which led to more centralization of power; and the Asian crisis of 1997, which devastated Venezuela's economy at the same time that Chávez ran for president. It is perhaps on the role of oil that the authors take greatest issue with prevailing opinion. They do not dispute that dependence on oil can generate political and economic distortions—the "resource curse" or "paradox of plenty" arguments—but they counter that oil alone fails to explain Chávez's rise. Instead they single out a weak framework of checks and balances that allowed the executive branch to extract oil rents and distribute them to the populace. The real culprit behind Chávez's success, they write, was the asymmetry of political power.
Download or read book The Inter American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Why Nations Fail written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Currency. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
Download or read book The Silence and the Scorpion written by Brian A. Nelson and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 11, 2002, nearly a million Venezuelans marched on the presidential palace to demand the resignation of President Hugo Chvez, Led by Pedro Carmona and Carlos Ortega, the opposition represented a cross-section of society furious with Chvez's economic policies, specifically his mishandling of the Venezuelan oil industry. But as the day progressed, the march turned violent, sparking a military revolt that led to the temporary ousting of Chvez. Over the ensuing, turbulent 72 hours, Venezuelans would confront the deep divisions within their society and ultimately decide the best course for their country - and its oil - in the new century. An exemplary piece of narrative journalism, The Silence and the Scorpion provides rich insight into the complexities of modern Venezuela.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History written by Randall E. Parker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to introduce readers to the important macroeconomic events of the past two hundred years. It explains what went on and why during the most significant economic epochs of the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and how where we are today fits in this historical timeline.
Download or read book Economic Security Neglected Dimension of National Security written by National Defense University (U S ) and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2011-12-27 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On August 24-25, 2010, the National Defense University held a conference titled “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security?” to explore the economic element of national power. This special collection of selected papers from the conference represents the view of several keynote speakers and participants in six panel discussions. It explores the complexity surrounding this subject and examines the major elements that, interacting as a system, define the economic component of national security.
