College of Business (OER Hub): ECON 2000: Contemporary Economics

Africa's recent progress in economic growth has been uneven across countries, and has not translated into structural transformation. Although economic ties between China and Africa have made a positive contribution this engagement has been uneven, shaped by variations in strategic approach, policy ownership, and implementation capacity among African governments. As China undergoes major economic rebalancing to upgrade to an innovation-driven economy, this is bound to affect China-Africa relations, offering both opportunities and challenges. Authored by leading scholars on Africa, China, and China-Africa relations, this volume brings together stimulating and thought-provoking perspectives, and insightful analyses. Focusing on Africa's economic development, it looks at core areas of structural transformation: productive investment and industrialization, international trade, infrastructure development, and financing. China-Africa relations are considered in the context of the global division of labour and power, and through the history and contexts of both China and Africa, a very diverse continent. This volume seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature, steer policy and scholarly debate on the progress and trajectory of China-Africa cooperation, and analyze China's development path as a source of learning for Africa.

This comprehensive textbook applies economic analysis to public law. The economic analysis of law has revolutionized legal scholarship and teaching in the last half-century, but it has focused mostly on private law, business law, and criminal law. This book extends the analysis tofundamental topics in public law, such as the separation of government powers, regulation by agencies, constitutional rights, and elections. Every public law involves six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The book devotestwo chapters to each process, beginning with the economic theory and then applying the theory to a wide range of puzzles and problems in law. Each chapter concentrates on cases and legal doctrine, showing the relevance of economics to the work of lawyers and judges. Featuring lucid, accessiblewriting and engaging examples, the book addresses enduring topics in public law as well as modern controversies, including gerrymandering, voter identification laws, and qualified immunity for police.

An Economic Philosophy of Production, Work and Consumption presents a new transhistorical framework of defining production, work and consumption. It shows that they all share the common feature of intentional physical transformation of something external to the agent, at some point in time. The book opens with a discussion of various theoretical traditions within economics, spanning mainstream and heterodox perspectives, and problems with production definitions in use today. Next, the author outlines various definitions in a more formal manner and provides a discussion on measurement and the production boundary. Unproductive work is redefined as socially reproductive, i.e. such that would not be performed on a Robinson Crusoe Island. Finally, the volume applies the new conceptual framework to various historical cases and discusses the future of production, work and consumption. This essential volume will be of interest to scholars of economic philosophy and methodology, the history of economic thought, economic history and national accounting. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

International financial crises have plagued the world in recent decades, including the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the East Asian crisis of the late twentieth century, and the global financial crisis of 2007-09. One of the basic problems faced during these crises is the lack ofadequate preventive mechanisms, as well as insufficient instruments to finance countries in crisis and to overcome their over-indebtedness. Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System provides an analysis of the global monetary system and the necessary reforms that it should undergo to play anactive role in the twenty-first century and proposes a comprehensive yet evolutionary reform of the system.Criticising the ad hoc framework- a "(non)system"- that has evolved following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods arrangement in the early 1970's, Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System places a special focus on the asymmetries that emerging and developing countries face, analysing thecontroversial management of crises by the International Monetary Fund and proposing a consistent set of reform proposals to design a better system of international monetary cooperation. Policy orientated and structured to deal in a sequential way with the issues involved, it suggests provision ofinternational liquidity through a system that mixes the multicurrency arrangement with a more active use of the IMF's Special Drawing Rights; stronger mechanisms of macroeconomic policy cooperation, including greater cooperation in exchange rate management and freedom to manage capital flows;additional automatic balance-of-payments financing facilities and the complementary use of swap and regional arrangements; a multilateral sovereign debt workout mechanism; and major reforms of the system's governance.

Given the rising criticisms of and growing doubts about globalisation, this timely edited volume looks at globalisation and its economic impact on eight countries in Asia and the Pacific region, namely Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, the United States (US), and Vietnam. The eight selected countries are members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and yet the economies of these member countries have benefited differently from globalisation. This book summarises findings from existing academic literature in a coherent framework and reviews them critically to provide a balanced analysis. It also identifies the mechanisms through which globalisation impacts economies and explains how understanding of such mechanisms can be useful for formulating policies, which would benefit from globalisation while achieving inclusive economic growth in the context of rising nationalism and protectionism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com/books/10.4324/9781003138501, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

As the world economy emerges from the financial crisis, critics are announcing an end of the American era. The United States is said to be in an inexorable decline, and the expectation for the 21st century is for China to eclipse America and for the contours of global governance to blur. The loss of America's preeminent status will undercut our sway abroad and our safety and standard of living at home. But is America really done? Is the American era really over? In this provocative account, based on interviews with senior policymakers and cutting-edge research, Kati Suominen argues that talk of the end of Pax Americana is more smoke than fire. The international crisis did not fundamentally change the way the world is run. The G20 is but an American-created sequel to the G8, the US dollar still reigns supreme, and no country has resigned from the US-built, post-war financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This continuity reflects an absence of alternatives; there are no rival orders that would match the growth and globalization generated by leaving the United States at the helm. But Washington has no time for complacency. The American order is peerless, but it is also imperiled. To transcend this critical moment in history, the United States must step up and lead. Only America can uphold its order. In an interdependent world economy of rising powers, the US must stand for strategic multilateralism: striking deals with pivotal powers to tame destabilizing financial imbalances, securing free and fair markets abroad for US banks and businesses, and transforming the IMF and emerging Asian and European financial schemes into rapid responders to instability.

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about.The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor.Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country-substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other-black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.

Computational Economics is a multidisciplinary journal that integrates computational science with all branches in economics, to understand and solve complex economic problems.

Presents new research on computational methods in various areas: econometrics, agent-based modeling, machine learning, and dynamic systems optimization.
Also covers hardware and software developments, modeling languages, and more.

The purpose of the RAND Journal of Economics, formerly the Bell Journal of Economics, is to support and encourage research in the behavior of regulated industries, the economic analysis of organizations, and more generally, applied microeconomics. Both theoretical and empirical manuscripts in economics and law are encouraged.