Download or read book An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations written by Adam Smith and published by . This book was released on 1822 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Problem of Bureaucratic Rationality written by Junko Kato and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994-10-31 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a detailed account of the political battles over Japanese tax reform during the last two decades, Junko Kato draws an unconventional portrait of bureaucratic motivation, showing how fiscal bureaucrats exploit their unique technical knowledge to influence policymaking. Rejecting the notion that the monopolization of policy expertise leads to bureaucratic domination, Kato contends that bureaucrats seek to increase their influence upon politicians by strategically sharing information. She also explores the reason for the relative strength of the bureaucratic organization in comparison to the governing party, whose interest in reelections and intra-party politics may pose dilemmas for individual politicians. In 1989, the Japanese Diet enacted a broad-based consumption tax after two failed attempts and in the face of widespread public disapproval. Its passage was all the more remarkable for coming just as a series of dramatic financial scandals had begun to undermine popular support for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, fore-shadowing its fall from power four years later. Kato argues that skillful maneuvering by the Ministry of Finance, determined to ensure stable long-term revenues, was decisive in persuading a majority of legislators to oppose their constituents in endorsing an unpopular program of tax reform. Her careful analysis of the Japanese case holds important implications for the study of bureaucratic power and public policy in advanced industrial democracies elsewhere in East Asia and the West.
Download or read book Bounded Rationality and Policy Diffusion written by Kurt Weyland and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do very different countries often emulate the same policy model? Two years after Ronald Reagan's income-tax simplification of 1986, Brazil adopted a similar reform even though it threatened to exacerbate income disparity and jeopardize state revenues. And Chile's pension privatization of the early 1980s has spread throughout Latin America and beyond even though many poor countries that have privatized their social security systems, including Bolivia and El Salvador, lack some of the preconditions necessary to do so successfully. In a major step beyond conventional rational-choice accounts of policy decision-making, this book demonstrates that bounded--not full--rationality drives the spread of innovations across countries. When seeking solutions to domestic problems, decision-makers often consider foreign models, sometimes promoted by development institutions like the World Bank. But, as Kurt Weyland argues, policymakers apply inferential shortcuts at the risk of distortions and biases. Through an in-depth analysis of pension and health reform in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru, Weyland demonstrates that decision-makers are captivated by neat, bold, cognitively available models. And rather than thoroughly assessing the costs and benefits of external models, they draw excessively firm conclusions from limited data and overextrapolate from spurts of success or failure. Indications of initial success can thus trigger an upsurge of policy diffusion.
Download or read book Modern Political Economy written by Jeffrey S. Banks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-08-25 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political economy has been an essential realm of inquiry and has attracted myriad intellectual adherents for much of the period of modern scholarship. The discipline's formal split into the distinct studies of political science and economics in the nineteenth-century, while advantageous for certain scientific developments, has biased the way economists and political scientists think about many issues, and has placed artificial constraints on the study of many important social issues. This volume calls for a reaffirmation of the importance of the unified study of political economy, and explores the frontiers of the interaction between politics and markets. This volume brings together intellectual leaders of various areas, drawing upon state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical analysis from each of the underlying disciplines. Each chapter, while beginning with a survey of existing work, focuses on profitable lines of inquiry for future developments. Particular attention is devoted to fields of active current development.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy written by Barry R. Weingast and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 1112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over its lifetime, 'political economy' has had different meanings. This handbook views political economy as a synthesis of the various strands of social science, treating it as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behaviour and institutions.
Download or read book Rationality in Politics and its Limits written by Terry Nardin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word ‘rationality’ and its cognates, like ‘reason’, have multiple contexts and connotations. Rational calculation can be contrasted with rational interpretation. There is the rationality of proof and of persuasion, of tradition and of the criticism of tradition. Rationalism (and rationalists) can be reasonable or unreasonable. Reason is sometimes distinguished from revelation, superstition, convention, prejudice, emotion, and chance, but all of these also involve reasoning. In politics, three views of rationality – economic, moral, and historical – have been especially important, often defining approaches to politics and political theory such as utilitarianism and rational choice theory. These approaches privilege positive or natural law, responsibilities, or human rights, and emphasize the importance of culture and tradition, and therefore meaning and context. This book explores the understanding of rationality in politics and the relations between different approaches to rationality. Among the topics considered are the limits of rationality, the role of imagination and emotion in politics, the meaning of political realism, the nature of political judgment, and the relationship between theory and practice. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.
Download or read book Principles of Political Economy written by John Stuart Mill and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The National System of Political Economy written by Friedrich List and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Political Economy written by Javier Santiso and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-05-09 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Latin America's recent economic performance calls for a multidisciplinary analysis. This handbook looks at the interaction of economics and politics in the region and includes a number of contributions from top academic experts who have also served as key policy makers (a former president, ministers of finance, a central bank governor), reflecting upon the challenges of reform.
Download or read book Utility and Probability written by John Eatwell and published by Springer. This book was released on 1990-02-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an excerpt from the 4-volume dictionary of economics, a reference book which aims to define the subject of economics today. 1300 subject entries in the complete work cover the broad themes of economic theory. This extract concentrates on utility and probability.
Download or read book The Means to Prosperity written by Per Gunnar Berglund and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While recent developments in monetary theory have been fast to spread to policy analysis and practice and the media, the same is not true of fiscal policy, and a void has emerged. Issues such as timing, cyclical adjustments, long-term sustainability, and social implications are often seen as detached from discussions in the public arena. This book fills this gap. It delivers a keen assessment of the role and scope of current fiscal policy. New contributions and critical reviews of state of the art research analyze fiscal policy in terms of viability, potency, consequences and sustainability, and also shed light on its relation to economic and political ideas. The general tone of this volume is cautiously favourable of fiscal activism, although the emphasis is placed more on medium-term adjustments than on short-term ‘fine-tuning’. The authors believe that the legacy of the last fiscal revolution has been an excessively negative view of deficits and debt, and believe that this volume will contribute to open a dialogue on fiscal issues, and bring back a more balanced view of fiscal policy. With contributions from leading authorities including Barbara Bergmann, Jeffrey Frankel and David Colander, this is a major new contribution to the field.
Download or read book Complex Economics written by Alan Kirman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The economic crisis is also a crisis for economic theory. Most analyses of the evolution of the crisis invoke three themes, contagion, networks and trust, yet none of these play a major role in standard macroeconomic models. What is needed is a theory in which these aspects are central. The direct interaction between individuals, firms and banks does not simply produce imperfections in the functioning of the economy but is the very basis of the functioning of a modern economy. This book suggests a way of analysing the economy which takes this point of view. The economy should be considered as a complex adaptive system in which the agents constantly react to, influence and are influenced by, the other individuals in the economy. In such systems which are familiar from statistical physics and biology for example, the behaviour of the aggregate cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the average, or "representative" individual. Just as the organised activity of an ants’ nest cannot be understood from the behaviour of a "representative ant" so macroeconomic phenomena should not be assimilated to those associated with the "representative agent". This book provides examples where this can clearly be seen. The examples range from Schelling’s model of segregation, to contributions to public goods, the evolution of buyer seller relations in fish markets, to financial models based on the foraging behaviour of ants. The message of the book is that coordination rather than efficiency is the central problem in economics. How do the myriads of individual choices and decisions come to be coordinated? How does the economy or a market, "self organise" and how does this sometimes result in major upheavals, or to use the phrase from physics, "phase transitions"? The sort of system described in this book is not in equilibrium in the standard sense, it is constantly changing and moving from state to state and its very structure is always being modified. The economy is not a ship sailing on a well-defined trajectory which occasionally gets knocked off course. It is more like the slime described in the book "emergence", constantly reorganising itself so as to slide collectively in directions which are neither understood nor necessarily desired by its components.
Download or read book Quasi Rational Economics written by Richard H. Thaler and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1994-01-04 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standard economics theory is built on the assumption that human beings act rationally in their own self interest. But if rationality is such a reliable factor, why do economic models so often fail to predict market behavior accurately? According to Richard Thaler, the shortcomings of the standard approach arise from its failure to take into account systematic mental biases that color all human judgments and decisions.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Taxation in Latin America written by Gustavo Flores-Macias and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a comprehensive, region-wide analysis of the politics of taxation in Latin America to make reforms politically palatable and sustainable.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance written by Jeffrey Neil Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate law and corporate governance have been at the forefront of regulatory activities across the world for several decades now, and are subject to increasing public attention following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance provides the global framework necessary to understand the aims and methods of legal research in this field. Written by leading scholars from around the world, the Handbook contains a rich variety of chapters that provide a comparative and functional overview of corporate governance. It opens with the central theoretical approaches and methodologies in corporate law scholarship in Part I, before examining core substantive topics in corporate law, including shareholder rights, takeovers and restructuring, and minority rights in Part II. Part III focuses on new challenges in the field, including conflicts between Western and Asian corporate governance environments, the rise of foreign ownership, and emerging markets. Enforcement issues are covered in Part IV, and Part V takes a broader approach, examining those areas of law and finance that are interwoven with corporate governance, including insolvency, taxation, and securities law as well as financial regulation. The Handbook is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource placing corporate law and governance in its wider context, and is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the field.
Download or read book Inequality written by Mikayla Novak and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘This book is a thoroughly researched and well written exploration of one of the most divisive topics in modern democratic discourse. Novak brings careful and clear thinking to a topic too often clouded in emotion and guided by moral intuition. ‘ —Peter Boettke, Professor of Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University, USA ‘Inequality has bred a climate of hostile political discourse reminiscent of the cold war. In this lucid book, Novak explains how we can transcend that hostility by recognizing the deeply entangled character of politics and economics within modern societies.’ —Richard E. Wagner, Hobart R. Harris Professor of Economics, George Mason University, USA ‘Mikayla Novak has provided a bold new intellectual foundation for social policy analysis.’ —Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University, Australia In recent years the degree of income and wealth inequality within developed countries has been raised as a central issue in economic and social policy debates. Numerous figures across diverse ideological affinities have advocated policy measures to significantly alter income and wealth distributions, while the inequality debate has become infused with other subjects such as social justice and identity politics. This book presents an account of economic inequality from a contemporary classical liberal perspective. Inequality is seen as a by-product of entangled relationships within society, bringing to the fore key ideas from complexity, evolutionary and network sciences. Novak illustrates that inequality is problematic insofar as it generates pro-rich redistribution and constrains progress by the less well off. Economic inequality has important links with issues such as fiscal and regulatory policies, discrimination and social exclusion, and institutional design. This unique book is important reading for social science academics, policy makers and people interested in exploring the dimensions and solutions to inequality, a critical issue of our time.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Non Territorial Exit written by Trent J. MacDonald and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Territorial political organisation forms the backbone of western liberal democracies. However, political economists are increasingly aware of how this form of government neglects the preferences of citizens, resulting in dramatic conflicts. The Political Economy of Non-Territorial Exit explores the theoretical possibility of ‘unbundling’ government functions and decentralising territorial governance.
