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Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis
of an Ecologically Sustainable Future by C. A. Bowers (Rowman &
Littlefield) (Hardcover)
Bowers uses the phrase mindful conservatism as encompassing the two key
principles of philosophic conservatism, as well as the relational,
ecologically sensitive thinking needed to reduce our impact on natural
systems. The emphasis on mindfulness helps to highlight the role that
critical reflection needs to play in assessing which aspects of our
cultural practices contribute to long-term sustainability. Critical
reflection is also essential to clarifying relationships within the
human community and between human and natural communities. In using the
phrase mindful conservatism, Bowers further understands that the ways
of knowing and patterns of moral reciprocity will vary between
cultures. Because the life-forming and life-sustaining processes within
different communities are never static, it is necessary to avoid
reducing mindful conservatism to a rigid set of prescriptions. Rather,
it requires continual awareness of changes occurring in the environment
as a reflective approach to the question: What do we want to conserve?
It also requires a knowledge of the nonmonetized activities and
relationships that are the basis of community self-sufficiency.
Finally, it requires a knowledge of the economic, political, and
technoscientific forces that subvert reflection and thus subvert
democratic decision making about the impact of innovations on the
well-being of the human and biotic community. In effect, the challenge
of rectifying our language is as ongoing as is the process of
reconciling change with traditions that strengthen the community and
the prospects of future generations.
This culturally and
experientially grounded way of understanding mindful conservatism, as
well as the rapid changes in the sustaining capacity of the Earth's
ecosystems, forces us to ask, What is it that the groups who now call
themselves "conservatives" want to conserve? To put the question another
way: Are environmentalists and groups working to renew community the
genuine "conservatives"? And if so, what is a more accurate way of
understanding the ideological orientation of corporations, moneyed
elites, technoscientists, and groups who view themselves as
anti-environmentalists? In order to shed light on the implications that
surround the current misuse of our political language, the following
chapters attempt to answer these questions.
Chapter 1 contrasts
the earlier Republican support of environmental legislation with the
anti-environmental stance of post-Nixon Republicans. The chapter also
examines the ideological underpinnings of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, which the
Clinton administration supported), as well as the impact of these
international agreements on the well-being of communities and on
cultural diversity. The purpose of highlighting the connections between
the anti-environmental policies of the post-Nixon Republicans and the
international trade agreements is to bring out that their ideological
roots are not in philosophical conservatism, but in the classical
liberal tradition that goes back to John Locke, Adam smith, John Stuart
Mill, and Herbert Spencer. In effect, the promoters of globalization and
other anti-environmental policies are carrying forward the
nineteenth-century political agenda that masks colonization as the
process of modernization and the degradation of the environment as
technological development. It is important to be aware that the focus
here is on how the term conservative is misused in the media and in the
public discourse. Thus, the primary focus of this chapter is on the
current misuse of political categories at the highest levels of
government and not on the debates between academics. The current state
of conceptual and moral confusion, now being exacerbated by presidents
and reporters, has helped solidify in the public mind the idea that to
be a conservative means being against environmentalists and being in
favor of NAFTA and the WTO. Perhaps this more limited focus will help to
rectify the public's understanding of which groups and policies should
be held accountable for degrading the environment and for undermining
the self-sufficiency of local communities and other cultures.
Chapter 2 examines the
ideas and values that motivate anti-environmental groups, such as Wise
Use and the organizers of the anti-Earth Day rally recently held in
Montana. Anti-environmental authors are also considered. Bowers examines
the ideas of William F. Buckley Jr., as well as the contributors to the
National Review, in terms of whether their self-proclaimed conservatism
has its ideological roots in the ideas of Burke or the classical liberal
thinkers. The anti-environmentalism of Rush Limbaugh and contributors to
such supposedly conservative think tanks as the Heritage Foundation and
the CATO Institute are also be considered. These men and institutions
are icons that a large segment of the general public associate with
conservatism. Indeed, they have mentored many Americans on how to
recognize what a conservative stands for. Unfortunately, many critics of
so-called conservative values and policies have also allowed themselves
to be part of this mentoring process, which has led them to identify
with the core liberal values and thus to turn a blind eye to the
historical connections between these values and the spread of an
industrial-based lifestyle. The success of Buckley, Limbaugh, and the
free market-oriented think tanks has become a major factor in making
more difficult the task of rectifying the public's use of political
language, and thus the ability to rectify our relationships with each
other and with the environment.
Chapter 3 involves an
examination of the key assumptions of classical liberal thinking that
underlies modem technology and science. These assumptions include the
efficacy of competition and the "invisible hand" that ensures that the
best and strongest prevail, the over-coming of the constraints of
tradition on technoscientific progress, the individual rather than the
cultural nature of intelligence, and the mechanistic and
anthropocentric way of thinking. Bowers considers the historical
connections among modem science, technology, and the Industrial
Revolution, as well as the current merging of science with corporate
values. What is also given special attention is the thinking of E. O.
Wilson that is so widely shared within the scientific community—that the
implications of his efforts to turn the theory of evolution into an
ideology justifies a world monoculture. This chapter brings out the
paradox of modem science and technology that is seldom acknowledged.
Like the Roman god Janus, which has two faces looking in opposite
directions, modem science and technology have made important
contributions in the areas of human understanding and technological
innovation, but at the same time they have marginalized
intergenerational knowledge of communities and undermined the
cultural/linguistic diversity that is a repository of knowledge of
biodiversity.
Chapter 4 is the first
of three chapters making the argument that environmentalists are the
genuine conservatives—in the twin sense of attempting to preserve the
long-term well-being of communities and natural systems. In it, Bowers
addresses the environmentally and community-destructive impact of
globalization by focusing on three arguments. First, the conserving
nature of cultural languages is now being threatened by modern
technology and policies promoting globalization. He gives special
attention to how languages are the basis of sharing intergenerational
knowledge of plants, animals, and other characteristics of the
bioregion; in addition, Bowers concentrates on how the loss of
linguistic diversity contributes to undermining biodiversity. Second,
examples of cultures that are more ecologically centered and thus
self-reliant. Third, we can learn from these traditional, ecologically
centered cultures, and we can also accept that learning is different
from borrowing. The chapter also addresses the difference between
reactionary traditions that are the source of continued social
injustices within a culture, and traditions that contribute to patterns
of moral reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and ecological responsibility.
Chapter 5 focuses on
issues related to conserving community, cultural, and biodiversity in
North America. It involves examining the ideas and practices of cultural
groups that are not centered on a consumer-dependent lifestyle or a
technology-dependent lifestyle. These ideas include religiously based
communities, as well as communitarian-oriented individuals who are
practicing voluntary simplicity. The purpose of the chapter is to
highlight the diverse range of efforts to create more self-supporting
and interdependent communities, more technologies that incorporate the
principles of ecological design, and more agricultural practices that
are ecologically sustainable. Providing an exhaustive account of the
groups and activities that have a conserving effect on communities and
the environment will not be the main objective of the chapter. Rather,
it is to bring the reader back to the basic issue, which is that
community and environmental activism takes many forms that are
essentially conservative in nature. Perhaps an overview of the
conserving nature of daily cultural practices, as well as how it is a
basic aspect of biological regeneration, will help overcome the
stereo-typed thinking expressed in such statements as "Conservatism sees
inequality as natural and desirable" and "Law and order are the
principal concerns of conservatives." The problem that stereotyped
thinking about conservatism cannot address is why such environmentalists
as Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, Vandana Shiva, and Wes Jackson should be
regarded as conservative thinkers.
Chapter 6 examines the
connections between so-called conservative and progressive educational
reforms, classical liberal assumptions, and the forces now promoting
globalization. Attention will also be given to curricular reforms'
contributing to the traditions of different communities that reduce
dependence on consumerism and other environmentally destructive
practices. It will be argued that these reforms should reorient students
so that the taken-for-granted concern is not with keeping up with the
latest changes introduced by experts and promoters of new technologies,
but with conserving skills, relationships, and activities that
strengthen their commitment to community and a sustainable future. A
curriculum that provides students with a more complex understanding of
how to conserve community and the environment will help overcome current
misconceptions that do not take account of how intergenerational
knowledge is both renewed and modified by each generation. It will also
help students hold social groups who label themselves as "conservatives"
accountable for what their policies and practices actually conserve.
How on earth can you call a book about
sustainability 'Mindful Conservatism', you might ask. Please don't let
your preconceptions and the current usage of the term 'conservatism'
make you turn away from this important and timely book.
C. A. Bowers opens up one of the most crucial debates that we should
lead if we are serious about an ecologically sustainable future. We
generally shy away from this discussion because of its potential
pitfalls, misunderstandings and a tradition of abuse of the term
'conservatism'.
I believe that Bowers' book is hugely important because it emphasises
throughout the concept of mindfulness, as opposed to preconceived
convictions. It challenges us 'to rethink our traditional political
categories' and to question what the media and politicians want to make
us believe. We have to learn to step out of the box because the
traditional political vocabulary simply is not fit to cope with the
sustainability challenge.
The central question of the book is 'What do we need to conserve in
order to have a more sustainable future and just world order?' This
clearly calls for a complex answer and is also arguably the most
important question to be asked if we want to turn our destructive,
exploitative, overdeveloped and overconsuming global world order into
something which can sustain itself within the limits of the ecosphere.
The Sociology of the Economy edited by Frank Dobbin (Russell Sage
Foundation Publications) The great promise of economic sociology is that
it can explain aspects of economic behavior and institutions that have
been resistant to explanation. The chapters assembled in this volume
represent the best empirical work being done in economic sociology
today, and the payoff is a series of empirically verified insights about
how economic behavior patterns come about—a sociology of the economy.
The social mechanisms underlying economic behavior that these twelve
studies document do not boil down to a single principle, such as the
principle of self-interest in neoclassical economics. But neither do
these chapters present a disorganized hodgepodge of ideas. They
demonstrate four social processes at work:
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The structure of political institutions
determines who will shape economic institutions and conventions and
what those institutions and conventions will look like.
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Firms and nations follow the rational strategies
of their role models, just as adolescents follow the behavior of
their role models, and hence much economic behavior looks more like
crowd behavior than like the result of pure rational calculation.
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Social networks shape economic practices in a
wide range of ways—by providing sanctions for malfeasance but also
by providing cues that shape prices, by providing business
strategies that industries can copy, and by shaping the competitive
environment.
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Ideas influence economic behavior and
institutions, and ideas embedded in economic customs often shape new
economic customs. For instance, the idea of market competition as
efficient arbiter is well institutionalized in the industrial sector
in the United States, and that idea has come to shape other sectors,
such as health care. In the modem world there is a wide range of
rational ideas—visions of how to rationalize things—and
understanding their origins and influence promises to help us to
under-stand why economic institutions and behaviors vary so
significantly.
Economic sociology is built on the premise that
narrow economic laws do not drive economic practices to become identical
across societies. There may be many efficient ways to organize a
transplant organ market, a market for corporate control, and the health
care sector, as suggested by Healy; Schneper and Guillén; and Scott,
respectively. Economic sociology has been reinvigorated since the 1980s
in large part because nations that did not fit the model that Britain
and later the United States seemed to epitomize grew at astonishing
rates in the postwar period—chiefly the East Asian economies, but
France, Germany, and Sweden as well. If there is more than one truly
efficient solution to any economic problem, then the explanations of
economic behavior that social scientists have been working with are too
limiting. Most are based on the assumption that history is efficient,
which suggests that economic practices evolve toward increasingly
efficient forms. This kind of efficiency is certainly what nations
oriented to growth strive for, and that striving has gone a long way
toward increasing efficiency in the aggregate. But explanations of
economic behavior have also been based on an assumption of optimality,
which suggests that economic practices evolve toward a single efficient
form. If economic practices are not evolving toward a single efficient
form, it would appear that the ideal of the "perfect market" is not
driving the evolution of economic practices and that we need to develop
explanations that root economic behavior in society rather than in
economic ideas that transcend society.
Taken together, these twelve chapters suggest that
markets are social structures first and foremost. They are incompletely
described by algorithms
that predict prices and output. As social
structures, they are composed of roles, conventions, and institutions,
and they are characterized by ongoing disputes over what those roles,
conventions, and institutions should look like. These disputes are
typically framed as scientific and managerial disagreements over the
most efficient means of organizing the world, and this characterization
of the disputes—their seeming orientation to divining the true "best
way" of organizing an economic sector—reinforces the notion that it is
economic laws that drive change in the system. Our determined efforts to
divine the character of those economic laws often blind us to the
mundane social origins of many economic behavior patterns.
Put another way, even if universal economic laws
select superior economic roles, conventions, and institutions for
survival and doom inferior ones, it is important to understand where the
great variety of roles, conventions, and institutions come from in the
first place. And even if economic laws shape the long-run evolution of
the economy, it is important to understand what shapes the short-run
social perturbations that spawn new market forms and often extinguish
them before economic laws have a chance to do their job of rewarding the
best and destroying the worst.
The chapters assembled in this volume show that
markets have the characteristics of other sorts of social structures,
like religions or clans. Like religions and clans, markets can take any
number of different forms. Some will not prosper, but history suggests
that many different forms of markets can prosper—that different logics
of efficiency exist. For economic sociologists, then, the most important
questions concern how markets emerge, stabilize, and change. It is these
processes that are explored by the chapters of this book. The chapters
on political institutions sketch the effects of the political on the
initial structuring of markets. The chapters on economic models show how
economic conventions travel from one place to another, producing change
in markets. The chapters on networks show how social relations modify
market behavior, and the final chapters show how ideas can revolutionize
markets or make them resistant to change.
If markets are social structures, on a par with
other social structures, rather than price functions, we need to know
more about their organization and why they change. The studies included
in this volume demonstrate the ability of economic sociology to explain
the emergence of various types of markets, their persistence, and
change. How can we understand, for instance, the stability of the model
of American corporate structure over the last one hundred years—the
tendency for large firms to dominate even in sectors where there are no
economies of scale? Economic theory alone does not explain the early
rise of huge firms in the United States, and so Charles Pen-ow traces
the initial political institutions that encouraged capitalists to shape
the regulations that they had to live by. Here, as in Bai Gao's chapter
on the rise of business associations in the Japanese economy, we see
that political institutions shaped early policymaking and thereby
affected industry structure. In both cases, new policy institutions and
corporate practices became cognitively embedded and thus resistant to
challenge.
How can we explain the fact that American banks set
up foreign branches in droves around 1970 but had stopped by 1980?
Conventional economic explanations fail here, and it is clear that two
important sociological forces were in play: a tendency to mimic role
models and a tendency to learn through social networks. Mizruchi and
Davis's study thus provides strong evidence that what goes by the name
of "rational calculation" is often based not on evidence but on mimicry
of role models, and that face-to-face networks are often the conduits
through which new putatively rational prescriptions diffuse.
How can we explain the fact that modern medical
care moved from professional domination to managed care? The change fits
the commonsense view that the world is being rationalized in the image
of neoliberalism, but it in fact represents the shift from one
ideological form of rationality, professional expertise, to an interim
form, bureaucratic expertise, to a third and fragile form, "managed
care." Underlying this story we find competing groups with different
rationales who have played different roles at different times. These
competing ideas of rationality seemed to give the health care industry
coherence and meaning for participants, and each seemed like the
ultimate and final ordering of the industry at the time. Ideas do
matter, and ideas of rationality have a certain finality about them.
That economic sociology has produced such a wealth
of empirical findings in the scant twenty years since its renaissance
bodes well for its future. That so many of those findings can be traced
directly to a handful of social processes that the first group of
economic sociologists, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, saw at
work a century or more ago also bodes well, because it suggests that a
finite number of social mechanisms typically shape economic behavior and
that those mechanisms are relatively stable across con-texts. The
structure of political institutions and decision-making processes
matters for the form taken by economic institutions and regulations. The
human tendency to copy behavior and to copy institutions seems to
operate in all social contexts, and it plays a large role in shaping
economic behavior (a role that is often attributed to rational
calculation). Social systems shape behavior of all sorts, both through
networks that diffuse new ideas and through net-works that constrain
malfeasance. And ideas influence all kinds of social behavior, including
economic behavior, despite the fact that the effects can be difficult to
see in a world where the proponents of new economic conventions and
institutions appeal to universal economic laws rather than human-made
conceptions of rationality.
Greece's New Political Economy: State, Finance and Growth from Postwar
to EMU by George Pagoulatos (Palgrave Macmillan) traces the course
of Greece from a postwar developmental state to its current
participation in the Euro-zone. Taking an innovative
comparative approach, George Pagoulatos examines the political economy
of financial interventionism and liberalization, banking politics,
relations between the government and central bank, the winners and
losers of financial reform, the effects of globalization and EMU, and
the implications of the new economic role of the state.
Greece's New Political Economy: State, Finance and Growth from Postwar
to EMU analyzes Greece's 50-year-long trajectory by keeping a
central focus on the state-finance connection and its development. In an
intellectual tradition that can be traced back to Marx, Hilferding, and
Polanyi (1944: 250), the market (and by the same token, the exact nature
of the state's role in the economy, including the financial regime) is
not a `state of nature' phenomenon. It is an institutional configuration
resulting from a particular sociopolitical structure comprising power
relations both at the domestic and the international level. In that
vein, this book looks at: the international political economy regime,
from which structural dependencies, obligations, and constraints
emanate; the economic ideology and policy paradigm, a source of
normative blueprint, policy inspiration, and pivotal peer pressure; the
institutional arrangements (regarding the political system, financial
and market institutions, the state and the central bank) which
facilitate and constrain policy action; the sociopolitical and economic
interests operating at the domestic and international level.
Chapter 2 examines the regime dependencies
underlying Greek post-war economic and financial policies until 1973-74,
dependencies emanating both from an international cold war environment
and the Bretton Woods economic order. The applied economic 'model' is
analyzed in detail, emphasizing the international ideological and policy
influences that defined it. The chapter looks at the domestic
sociopolitical factors, their interrelation with economic and financial
policies, the applied policy pattern, and the political implications of
credit interventionism.
Chapter 3 takes a detailed look at the institutions
and policies of post-war developmental finance. The chapter places the
Greek case in a comparative policy context and evaluates the influence
exerted by foreign financial and industrial policy models. The
developmental character of the Greek postwar state and financial
interventionism is assessed, with afocus on the role of banking
institutions and the implications for industrial development.
Chapter 4 deals with the international economic
crisis of the 1970s, and its effects on Greek economic and financial
policies. These are examined in the context of the post-1974
sociopolitical democratization, which had a crucial impact on economic
policies and the way in which financial interventionism was employed.
The chapter explores the institutional, economic, and ideological
transformations in the international and European environment over the
1970s and 1980s, and their significance regarding the international
allocation of power. These factors are regarded as an external context
from which pressures for domestic policy adjustment emanate. Greek
economic and financial policies, and the decline of developmental credit
interventionism, are considered in conjunction with their sociopolitical
implications.
Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the politics, policies,
policymaking, and political economy of Greek domestic financial
liberalization in the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s. The
institutional attributes and the central role of the Bank of Greece in
the policymaking process are examined and assessed, focusing on the
question of central bank independence. An analytical framework of
central bank 'policy strength' is adopted for analyzing the central
bank's relations with government, the banking sector, and socioeconomic
interests affected by credit deregulation. Economic and monetary
adjustment and Europeanization from the second half of the 1980s and
through the 1990s are discussed. The stakes, the winners and losers of
financial liberalization are examined in detail, with special emphasis
on the banking sector. Finally, a broader analysis of interest
organizational patterns and state-society relations throughout the
postauthoritarian period concludes Chapter 6.
Chapter 7 is devoted to the new political economy
of financial liberalization and globalization, including the economic
and financial implications of EMU. The chapter discusses the
implications of increased capital mobility and financial deepening on
the international allocation of power, on the national economy and
financial system, on the business-labor balance, on political party
ideology and policies, and on the political preferences of the public.
Chapter 8 reflects on the state-finance connection,
arguing that the (loosely defined) developmental state has been
transformed into a stabilization state. The chapter summarizes and
elaborates on the main theoretical and empirical findings of the book,
and extends them to some broader conclusions.
Greece's postwar boom was not a case of Keynesian
prosperity but the take-off of a developing country. Greece's equivalent
of les trentes glorieuses was a time of deferred welfare though
steadily decreasing poverty, and sociopolitical deprivation, both of
which leave no grounds for postwar era nostalgia. Then Greece's own
belated experience with Keynesianism in the 1970s and 1980s was flawed
and far from having been crowned with success. In fact, it may have
offered a potent argument for the wisdom of surrendering some economic
policy control to external technocracy agents less susceptible to the
vagaries of electoral politics. (It may also, even more wisely, have
suggested an institutional reform path of rendering electoral politics
less debilitating in their economic impact.) With the hindsight of the
relatively successful economic adjustment of the 1990s, a major lesson
to be drawn is that in the era of increasing globalization and
interdependence unilateral divergence comes at a heavy financial price.
Independent policy efforts to contravene the dictates of
global-capital-imposed economic orthodoxy by substantially raising
social spending and tightening social regulation are highly likely to
meet with rising inflation, faltering economic growth, and higher
unemployment down the road.
However, this admission of 'gloomy' pragmatism
should far from imply an uncritical in toto acceptance of the 'sound
finance' orthodoxy. Quixotic expansionary attempts doomed to fail as
they seek to defy the overwhelming power of global financial markets are
the best match for the Panglossian belief in the superior
self-regulating efficiency of unfettered financial liberalization.
Certain items of the orthodox agenda retain their robustness as policy
prescriptions. These include the merits of open trade, the overhaul of
insurance and pension systems, the need to ground social redistribution
on sound public finance, the divestiture of at least some state-owned
business firms (followed by bold reregulation), the rationalization and
marketization of a certain range of state-controlled activities,
followed by a clear delineation of the public—private boundary. Other
items of the currently orthodox agenda, however, have been laid bare to
compelling dispute. While the dismantling of barriers for cross-border
investment capital has spread growth opportunities, the total
deregulation of restrictions on the movement of purely speculative
short-term capital has left many economies under the Damoclean sword of
a financial collapse, transferring unprecedented power to the hands of
collectively irrational global financial market players. Inasmuch as
unilateral national opt-outs from this global financial disorder are
hardly viable, the degree of absurdity of this particular dimension of
financial globalization has rightfully intensified calls for
global-level universally coordinated action oriented toward 'governing'
and taxing short-term capital movements. Regaining democratic control
over economic policy inevitably passes through multilateral and
supranational cooperation, aimed at establishing a substantial degree of
global control over short-term capital movements, that is enforcing a
global governance over financial globalization.
All that said, today's antiglobalization backlash,
comprising as it does anything from rationalist proponents of
global-level institutional reform to zealots of antimarket Ludditism,
parochial anti-Americanism, and cultural nationalism risks throwing away
the baby with the bath-water. A dangerous paradox has been noted, among
others, underlying the reaction to globalization: that is a tendency of
blaming social dislocations caused by what is today a largely
self-regulating international market on excessive international
regulatory intervention and encroachment in national policy sovereignty.
This 'democracy illusion' fails to comprehend the exact nature of
supranational interdependencies, seeking instead refuge in an
affirmation of national interest. It thus ends up obstructing precisely
those multilateral supranational-level procedures necessary for the
emergence of effective regulatory reform and global-level governance.
East Asian Economic Regionalism by Edward J. Lincoln (The Brookings
Institution) Something new is happening across East Asia. A region
notable for its lack of internal economic links is discussing regional
cooperation on trade, investment, and exchange rates. Because of
negotiations elsewhere around the globe on regional trade—such as those
that led to the consolidation of the European Union, the formation of
the North American Free Trade Area, and the rapid proliferation of
bilateral free trade areas—the talk is not surprising. Nevertheless,
East Asia’s past inertia with regard to forming a regional partnership
raises many questions about its emerging regionalism. Why has the region
suddenly shifted from taking a global approach to economic issues to
discussing a regional bloc? How fast and how far will the new
regionalism progress? Will the region become a version of the European
Union, or something far less? What is the probable impact on American
economic and strategic interests—are the likely developments something
that the U.S. government should encourage or discourage? Edward Lincoln
takes up these questions, exploring what is happening to regional trade
and investment flows and what sort of regional arrangements are the most
sensible.
Lincoln argues that an exclusive grouping is
unlikely. Free trade negotiations have brought some economies in the
region together, but they also have led to links with nations outside
the region. Some regional governments most notably Japan, continue to
have difficulty embracing the concept of free trade, even with favored
regional partners. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis,
governments also have looked at cooperating on exchange rates, but they
have done little to move forward.
The U.S. government must decide how to respond to
these developments in East Asia. An exclusively Asian form of
regionalism could run counter to American economic interests, and the
U.S. government has reacted negatively to some of these proposals in the
past. Because trade and investment links between the countries of the
Asia Pacific region and the United States remain very strong, Lincoln
argues that the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum remains the
appropriate institution for pursuing regional trade and investment
issues.
The Encyclopedia of Public Choice edited by Charles Kershaw Rowley,
Friedrich Schneider (Kluwer Academic) offers a detailed and
comprehensive account of the subject that deals with the intersection of
economics and political science. Its fruitful exchange among ethics,
moral and political philosophy, and law, as well as economics and
political science, examines the image of man as a purposive and rational
actor. Its balanced coverage, which reflects the various public choice
methodologies and approaches, is thoughtful, comprehensive, lively, and
original. It will be the definitive reference source for decades to
come.
Volume I includes biographies of the major figures in public choice,
those who set the scene for the disciplines and those who have made
major contributions to its development and essays written by leading
senior public choice scholars. Their important, and occasionally
controversial, themes offer in-depth analysis and reflection beyond the
scope of standard works. Volume II defines in detail the core concepts
associated with the discipline.
Advisory board:
James M. Buchanan, George Mason University; Bernard
Grofman, University of California, Irvine; Arye L. Hillman, Bar-Ilan
University; Martin Paldam, Aarhus University; William F. Shughart II,
University of Mississippi; Robert D. Tollison, University of
Mississippi; Dennis C. Mueller, University of Vienna; Michael C. Munger,
Duke University; Peter C. Ordeshook, California Institute of Technology;
Gordon Tullock, George Mason University; Hannelore
Weck-Hannemann, Universität Innsbruck.
The Encyclopedia of Public Choice will surely prove to be a major
sourcework for students and scholars working in public choice and
related areas. Professors Rowley and Schneider are major contributors to
the public choice literature, and they have combined their talents and
insights in this project to produce a work on public choice that will
rank as a classic in the field. The coverage of subject matter is
extensive and excellent, the individual contributors are well known
scholars in the field, and these men and women have framed their papers
not simply as surveys of a particular aspect of public choice theory or
practice but as original contributions in their own right. My hat is off
to the editors for a job well done.' Robert D. Tollison, Professor of
Economics, University of Mississippi
The Encyclopedia of Public Choice is a welcome addition to a
literature that has grown by leaps and bounds over the past half
century. Containing scores of carefully chosen concept entries, longer
essays and autobiographies contributed by and about the field's founding
fathers as well as several generations of younger scholars who have
guided public choice into the intellectual mainstream, the Encyclopedia
not only summarizes the major strides already taken by researchers
working at the intersection of economics and political science, but
breaks new ground in applying public choice reasoning to current events
as diverse as corporate accounting scandals, globalization and
terrorism. Monumental in conception and written in a lively and
accessible style, the Encyclopedia is an authoritative and comprehensive
point of entry into a fertile research program that illuminates human
behavior in a variety of non-market settings, such as committees,
bureaucracies, legislatures and clubs, where collective action
necessarily displaces individual action.
The Encyclopedia of Public Choice promises to become a reference
work of lasting value for students of economics, sociology and political
science, academicians, policymakers and observers of the public policy
process. At long last, in the editorial team of Charles Rowley and
Friedrich Schneider, public choice has its Samuel Johnson.' William F.
Shughart II, University of Mississippi, senior editor of
The Elgar Companion to Public Choice by William Shughart II, Laura
Razzolini (Edward Elgar, 2001)
Intellectual Property Rights and Global Capitalism: The Political
Economy of the Trips by Donald G. Richards (M.E.Sharpe) Author
Donald G. Richards examines the origins and impact of the agreement on
Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) negotiated during the
Uruguay Round of talks of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT). The principal theme is that the TRIPS agreement is not in the
best social welfare interest of poorer countries, and that its effective
imposition on them by richer countries has far more to do with the
exercise of political and economic power than it does with the positive
economic benefits the agreement's supporters claim it can deliver.
Empirical evidence is provided on the impact of intellectual property
rights (IPRs) on important economic variables such as export
performance, foreign investment, and economic growth. Case studies
illustrate two important industries where the struggles over
intellectual property are especially fierce: the pharmaceutical and
agricultural biotechnology sectors. In each of these cases, Richards
specifies the IPR issues and demonstrates how the TRIPS operates to
define and extend capitalist social relations of production on a global
scale.
Written for advanced
undergraduate and graduate courses in international political economy
and international relations theory, Intellectual Property Rights and
Global Capitalism is an important work focusing on particular aspects of
what is increasingly referred to as "the process of globalization."
Donald G. Richards is
professor of economics at Indiana State University where he teaches
primarily international economics and political economy. He is the
author of numerous articles on the international political economy of
poorer countries. He has a particular interest in Latin America and
especially the Southern Cone region of South America; he has worked as
economic development policy consultant in Paraguay.
The purpose of this
book is to examine of the origins and impact of the agreement on
trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) negotiated
during the Uruguay Round of talks of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT). The principle theme of the book is that the TRIPS
agreement is not in the best social welfare interest of the poor
countries and that its effective imposition on them by the rich
countries has far more to do with the exercise of real political and
economic power than it does with the positive economic benefits the
agreement's supporters claim it can deliver. To support this assertion,
Richards provides a critical examination of the theoretical literature
and empirical evidence as they pertain to the impact of intellectual
property rights (IPRs) on such important economic variables as export
performance, foreign investment, and economic growth. This examination
demonstrates the overall weakness of the positivist economic case in
favor of a strong international IPR regime, at least as it applies to
the poor countries)
The book then proceeds
to provide a political and economic analysis that explains why the poor
countries acceded to the TRIPS agreement notwithstanding the lack of
positivist economic evidence in favor of its benefits. The analysis here
is driven by a theory of the state in the global system which is itself
the product of a method Richards describes as "critical eclecticism." By
this term Richards means that the approach to state theory as inspired
by several well-established traditions in radical political economy and
international relations theory that speak to, or carry implications
for, the relations between the state and civil society. The constituent
approaches are (1) world systems theory, (2) Gramscian hegemony, and (3)
internationalization of capital. Richards’s method is critical in two
senses of the word. First, it is critical in the same sense that these
constituent traditions are critical. That is, it calls into question the
dominant institutional infrastructure by which the global system is
administered, and it advocates fundamental reforms to benefit the
world's marginalized majority. Second, it is critical in the sense that
it does not attempt to include or reconcile all aspects of each of the
three component radical research traditions. It recognizes that each
tradition has differences of emphasis and strength and draws on these as
they advance the analysis at hand. Richards argues that the three
approaches are in fact mutually consistent at a fundamental level. he
does not pretend to settle old debates among and between the schools
that have often taken on a polemical character in the past.
Having advanced the
general political and economic analysis of the TRIPS agreement, the book
then proceeds to illustrate with a pair of case studies of two important
industries where the struggle over IP is especially strongly waged.
These are the pharmaceutical and agricultural biotechnology sectors. In
each of these cases, an attempt is made to specify the IPR issues and
demonstrate how the TRIPS agreement operates to define and extend
capitalist social relations of production on a global scale. It does
this in part, Richards argues, by operating as a mechanism of
(Gramscian) consensual hegemony. At the same time, it is recognized
that ideological struggle is not strictly determined and that the door
is open for counterhegemonic efforts. These cases reveal the conditions
under which counterhegemony is more likely to succeed.
TRIPS is a relatively
recent phenomenon and the literature devoted to its analysis is still
relatively undeveloped. Most of the work that has been done in this area
by scholars from the developed countries tends to promote the benefits
of a strong international IPR regime. Richards knows of no work in this
area that approaches the general case of the TRIPS agreement from a
radical perspective of political and economic international relations of
the type he develops here.
Richards provides a
critical review of the traditional philosophical approaches to the
concept of property right. It includes a discussion of the Lockean labor
theory of property, the Hegelian personality justification, and the
utilitarian justification (both in its familiar Benthamite version and
its less familiar, but useful, Godwinian interpretation). The approaches
inspired by Locke and Hegel are found to fail to offer compelling
justifications for private property
in ideas. The
utilitarian philosophies, especially that associated with Bentham, also
have difficulties. Parallels may be drawn between the applicability of
these philosophic approaches to IPRs and to proposals calling for an
international agreement on minimum labor standards for workers. One
might well ask why there is no such agreement on trade-related
international labor standards (TRILS) that would provide for workers a
degree of the protection such as that offered by the TRIPS for those who
claim ownership of intellectual property. The answer is that advocates
for a TRILS agreement have not been able to mobilize nearly as
effectively to imprint the emerging international regulatory
infrastructure as have the proponents for stronger IPRs.
Richards examines the
institution of intellectual property from the perspective of positivist
economic science. By positivist economic science Richards refers to the
research tradition that places primary emphasis on the formulation and
tests of hypotheses drawn from abstract models of economic processes. It
is well known that this is the dominant research tradition among
academic and professional economists. In the examination of this
literature, he does not pretend, however, to endorse the positivist
approach as a preferred one. To the contrary, I tend to believe that it
often results in a very selective and ideologically biased presentation
of evidence. It does, however, present evidence of a type nonetheless
with which critical social science should con-tend rather than ignore.
By critical social science, including critical economics, Richards
refers to those research traditions that challenge both the substantive
assertions and the methodological premises of the dominant discourse. As
opposed to the ahistorical and methodological individualism of
positivist economics, critical social science has typically emphasized
the importance of historical context and the central role played by
groups, including classes.
In this chapter
Richards reviews recent theoretical treatments of the effect of patents
on various measures of economic welfare and/or important economic policy
targets. The findings are generally ambiguous, though the general
conclusions seem to suggest that poor nations are better off if left to
their own devices in forming an optimal national IPR regime. He also
reviews the available econometric evidence on the impact of the strength
of IPR regime on certain target variables, such as exports, direct
foreign investment (DFI), and the rate of economic growth. Included in
this review is my own respecification and test of an empirical model
presented in an often cited paper by Lee and Mansfield (1996) that
purports to show the beneficial effects of strong IPRs on DFI. These
results overturn Lee and Mansfield's findings. In general, the
empirical evidence is shown to be too weak to support the contention
that the TRIPS agreement offers adequate short- or medium-term benefits
to justify its accession by poor countries.
The central argument
advanced in Chapter 4 is that a political economicanalysis of IPRs
requires corresponding theories of the state, class, and capital as they
operate in the global economy. Several candidate theories from
international political economy and international relations theory are
available. Three in particular provide useful insights for the
analytical task at hand. These are world systems theory, associated with
writers such as Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), Samir Amin (1974), and
Arghiri Emmanuel (1972); hegemony theory, inspired by Antonio Gramsci
(1971) and developed by Giovanni Arrighi (1993), Robert Cox (1996), and
Stephen Gill (1993) among others; and internationalization of capital,
theorized by Christian Palloix (1977) and more recently developed by
Dick Bryan (1995). For some social scientists the sort of theoretical
eclecticism represented by the selective use of elements from this
collection of theories may be initially off-putting. Richards hopes to
convince the reader, however, that a critical eclecticism is both
appropriate and even necessary to the issues at hand.
Richards applies
the findings of the preceding chapter to provide an explanation for the
establishment of the TRIPS agreement as part of the inter-national
institutional infrastructure governing the capitalist world system. This
explanation appeals equally to the concepts of Gramscian (consensual)
hegemony and direct (bilateral) coercion. Where the latter is concerned,
the role of U.S. trade policy is given emphasis. In this explanation,
however, the United States is represented not as an aspiring hegemonic
state in the spirit of hegemonic stability theory, but as the
representative of a transnational capitalist class. The limitations of
other competing interpretations (Van Grasstek 1990; Ryan 1998) are
discussed.
Next Richards presents
one of two case studies of the application of the TRIPS agreement to
specific industrial contexts. The pharmaceutical industry is chosen
because it is among the most important to discuss from the perspective
of global human welfare and because of the disproportionate influence
that transnational drug producers had in influencing the negotiations
leading to the establishment of the agreement. The failure of the
international pharmaceutical industry to address the health problems of
poor countries is discussed, as is the likely (negative) consequences
for the ability of poor countries to devise indigenous solutions to
those problems in the face of the TRIPS. The pharmaceutical industry is
also presented as a case for which the prospects for counterhegemonic
organization and struggle are very good, as evidenced by the recent
Doha Declaration.
The second of the two
case studies concerns the impact of a strengthened global IPR regime on
biotechnology and agriculture. This case study is included because
agricultural biotech has important environmental implications as well as
tremendous implications for the ability of the world's impoverished to
provide themselves with the basic necessities of life. The case makes a
useful contrast to the pharmaceutical case study for at least a couple
of reasons. First, ag biotech in its IPR dimensions involves not just
new commodities, but also new production processes. This fact has
important implications for the process of internationalization of
capital discussed in other chapters. A second, and perhaps related,
reason concerns the apparently reduced prospects for successful,
counterhegemonic resistance to the power of transnational capital.
Conclusions and
lessons for action are considered in the final chapter. This chapter
provides a brief discussion of the future of the TRIPS agreement. It
then concentrates on drawing general lessons from the two case studies.
These lessons are of two sorts. The first set attempts to show how the
cases provide support for the general political economic interpretation
of the TRIPS agreement. The second set concerns the conditions and
limitations of counterhegemonic action and organization.
Information Technology Policy and the Digital Divide: Lessons for
Developing Countries edited by Mitsuhiro Kagami, Masatsugu Tsuji,
Emanuele Giovannetti (Edward Elgar) The proliferation of new information
technologies throughout the world has raised some important questions
for policymakers as to how developing countries can benefit from their
diffusion. This important volume compares the advantages and
disadvantages of the IT revolution through detailed studies of a variety
of developed and developing nations and regions: Argentina, Estonia, the
EU, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand and the USA.
The authors address a number of challenging issues
such as standardization, IT in the mass media,
Public Key Infrastructure, upstream connectivity and pricing, and draw
out important policy implications for late-comers in this field -
predominantly developing countries. They highlight the negative aspects
of IT policy such as the digital divide and monopoly of ownership, but
also illustrate the potential benefits such as ‘leapfrogging’ the
industrialization process and the expansion of broadband capabilities.
This
impressive volume will be essential reading for academics and
researchers with an interest in development economics, utility
regulation and technology policy. It will also be of great practical
value to international policymakers and governments in the developing
world who wish to learn more about the costs and benefits of regulation
and deregulation in the IT industry.
Deregulation and
liberalization during the 1990s brought about competition in the
telecommunications sector. Relaxation of market ownership restrictions
and the lowering of entry barriers resulted in cross-market entry and
made many combined business activities possible. Coupled with computer
and wireless technologies, especially, digitization produced convergence
among telecommunications, computer, and broadcasting industries. As a
result, telephony (fixed and mobile), CATV, satellite, computer, and
even home appliances have been connected through the Internet. Such
services as voice, packet- or circuit-switched data, movies/videos,
images (photos), TV, and e-business can be enjoyed by Internet users.
Particularly, broadband access services have been expanding and they
will be the mainstream in the future network society.
From our joint study
we can draw some lessons from the rapidly changing state of the IT
revolution, especially from the developing countries' point of view.
Negative aspects are: (i) digital divide and universal service; (ii)
monopoly and hegemony; and (iii) demand considerations, while the
positive sides are: (iv) leapfrogging the industrialization process; and
(v) broadband expansion.
This study notices
disparities in Internet access among socio-economic groups are growing
in all countries. It is observed that higher income groups can better
utilize the Internet than other income groups. Education and ethnicity
also affect Internet diffusion. In particular, large cities are unevenly
distributed in Internet use and the urban poor have very limited access.
In addition, the gap between rural and urban areas is also expanding. An
even more serious issue from our point of view is the disparity among
developing countries.
It is clearly detected
that Latin America as a region lags far behind East Asia in terms of
Internet penetration. According to the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU), Chile, the leading regional country in Internet use (1155
per ten thousand inhabitants in 2000) is less than Malaysia (1590), the
sixth ranked (after Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan) in
East Asia. Why is Internet penetration in Latin America delayed? There
are mainly four reasons though the situation varies country by country.
First, there exist enormous income disparities that cause low
penetration. Low income groups cannot have Internet access even in
advanced countries, so this tendency is strengthened in Latin America.
Moreover, as broadband access develops, these deficiencies will further
intensify.
Second, the lack of
basic infrastructure is crucial. Telephone networks are bases for
Internet connection. DSL/ADSL also use these telephone lines. Prompt and
secure mail delivery services are very important for e-business for
distributing ordered online products. Stable electricity supply is also
essential for computers and IT-related equipment. It is said that basic
infrastructure and services remain weak in Latin America.
Third, privatization
of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) did not necessarily bring about
efficient Internet diffusion. During the 1980s and 1990s state-owned
telephone companies were privatized in the region but these incumbent
companies still have monopolistic power and interconnection charges were
not lowered as had been initially thought.
Fourth, Latin America
lacks interconnection between major network access points within the
region. More concerted investment efforts for interconnection are
required.
Regarding universal
service or universal access, more efforts should be made to increase
public/private access centres to underserved and disadvantaged groups.
Although some countries in Latin America have their own plans to
establish telecentres and discount Internet rates, examples from other
countries such as `E-rate grants' and the Technology Opportunity Program
(TOP) in the US, `telecottages' in Hungary, the `Village Road Programme'
in Estonia, and `PC-bangs' in Korea are useful.
Generally speaking,
new entrants in Internet access businesses have two options: to build
new networks or to lease lines from incumbent carriers. As mentioned
above, incumbent telecommunications companies have monopolistic power
due to their huge sunk cost and influential stakeholders such as the
government and powerful politicians, so access prices failed to decline
as expected in developing countries (they have gradually decreased due
to competition and new entrants such as cable and satellite TV as
compared with ten years ago, for example). However, an even more
complicated problem has emerged regarding interconnection charges.
Simply put, Internet
connection has three tiers of groups: final users, Internet service
providers (ISPs), and Internet backbone providers (IBPs). In this
geographical classification, price structure is basically divided into
two: retail prices which users pay for ISPs (prices for the `last
mile'), and wholesale prices which ISPs pay for IBPs (sometimes called
`upstream' connectivity prices). IBPs are generally global conglomerates
such as AT&T and Sprint. Because of technical reasons it is difficult to
trace packet-data information routes. Moreover, confidential contracts
among carriers make wholesale price structures ambiguous. Recent trends
of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) among large IBPs have made this
problem more complex. Potential anti-competitive activities should be
monitored. In this volume tracing the information routes (number of
hops) was examined and these trials will help with efforts to understand
prices in upstream connectivity.
Standards and
intellectual property rights are another issue. International standards
have often been used as a global strategy, or hegemony, to sell own
products by multinational corporations (MNCs) or even governments of
advanced countries. In the high-tech world, innovations become very
complex and difficult to understand, backed by enormous R&D investment.
Recent examples include third-generation cellular phones, digital TV
methods, and encryption for online networks. Some measures are necessary
to control these hegemonic movements and to bring transparency in
decision-making of de jure standards. In this context, it is worth
mentioning that the US government offered the advanced encryption
standard (AES) for e-government use for public subscription in 1997. By
the same token, industrial ownership or intellectual property rights
have also sometimes been misused for latecomer developing countries.
Recent WTO decisions to produce generic HIV drugs at a lower cost than
the original royalty payment is a good example of a situation where
modifications to the present system can be carried out if necessary.
High-tech products are
sometimes too high-tech. People do not want to deal with overly complex
equipment or contents that are too sophisticated. Multi-functional
equipment with a high price tag all too often does not correspond with
the wishes of consumers who want simple functions. It is very important
to read consumers' preferences and people's real demands, something that
suppliers or producers often forget. Sometimes IT machines seem to exist
for themselves, not for users.
Japan's failures
illustrate this point. NTT invested heavily in ISDN but users ignored it
because of its slow download time. NHK's invention of analogue-type high
definition TV was also left on the shelf after digital TV appeared.
Both giant companies
invested heavily in the wrong products and their investments were never
recovered.
Governments also fail
in discerning real demand and allocate limited budgets for bad projects.
Too many over-the-top IT plans such as the Multimedia Super Corridor in
Malaysia have been promoted far outstripping people's demands. In this
regard, hasty and expensive terrestrial digital TV projects in Japan and
Brazil seem to be under scrutiny from the demand point of view.
It is interesting that
the growth and dissemination of mobile phones in developing countries
that generally have very limited traditional telephone copper-line
networks have been so rapid. Basically in this situation the wireless or
cellular phone networks leapfrog the fixed line system. This sort of
leapfrogging ('digital jump') can be observed in other high-tech
industries such as IT.
Analysis in this
volume of the Indian software industry suggests that certain developing
countries may follow a different, not the traditional path, to
successful industrialization. It concludes that Indian domestic firms
may follow an alternative route in overcoming the difficulties of
promotion and join the high value club after comparing profiles of three
types of software entities in India: foreign firms; domestic firms with
foreign subsidiaries; and domestic firms. The software sector has two
distinct characteristics. One advantage is its absence of backward
linkages, or what we call an `island of competitiveness'. The other is
its small initial investment due to knowledge intensity. Due to these
characteristics we can set up software businesses anywhere.
However, a
pre-condition may be relatively high education levels in English,
mathematics and computer sciences. Moreover, location – a place where
knowledge is agglomerated such as proximity to universities or national
research centres, or where satellite links are easily facilitated – is
also important.
We have to carefully
watch the Indian case further and hope that some developing countries
can use the software sector as leverage for development.
Basic trends can be
observed in the IT revolution in terms of structural changes. That is:
(a) from fixed to mobile telephone; (b) from telephony to the Internet;
and (c) from narrowband to broadband. Particularly, the growth of high
speed Internet or broadband access (DSL/ADSL, CATV, FTTH, and FWA) is
unprecedented. Demand is expected to increase further, if access prices
go down and content quality improves. Therefore, for further broadband
expansion the following points must be addressed.
First, new entry and
competition should be promoted to reduce access prices. Second,
distribution of quality contents needs to be promoted. The arrival of
easily accessed broadband can act as a `big bang' to get away from the
present IT recession.
In the near future
multimedia convergence will take place and TVs and PCs will have the
same function in the digital age. Third-generation mobile phones can be
used as a high speed information terminal communicating voice, data, and
pictures. Portable PCs with wireless LAN cards can work as small
intelligent offices if handy wireless LAN boxes are facilitated in
nearby shops like restaurants and coffee stands in towns. We hope that
technological progress will find astonishing breakthroughs for enriching
our lives at lower cost. However, as we progress into this `Brave New
World' we should not forget about the disadvantaged groups of people in
developing countries and in pockets of developed countries who are
excluded from benefiting from such achievements.
The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing E.
Michael Jones (St. Augustine’s Press) By now, it should be obvious that
the government-sponsored initiative to renew this country's large cities
which began in the 1930s and continued largely unabated in the East and
Midwest through the 1960s and beyond has been a profound and devastating
failure. More homes were destroyed than were ever built; once-great
metropolises like Detroit lay in ruins; once-thriving neighbor-hoods
were overwhelmed with drugs and crime; buildings that were built to last
centuries fell to the wrecking ball mere decades after they were built;
an entire generation of young people, both those who came to the cities
and those who were driven from the cities into the suburbs, have grown
up rootless, in a Hobbesian state in which man's life was "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The traditional
explanation, the one which no one believes anymore, is that all this was
done to eliminate "blight." A more recent explanation, only slightly
less implausible, is that it all came about because of faulty design, as
if a nation of 260 million people, one which had already produced the
Columbian Exhibition of 1893, couldn't come up with any-thing more
inspiring that the average strip mall. The real story, it turns out, is
different from both previous explanations. What began as the World War
II intelligence community's attempt to solve America's "nationalities
problem" and provide workers for the nation's war industries degenerated
by the early post-war period into full-blown ethnic cleansing.
E. Michael Jones has
followed the advice of Christopher Wrenn. Looking around, he saw
monuments, but monuments to the folly and malice of social engineering
and a government that had declared war on large segments of itsown
people. In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban
renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design
or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the
WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of
its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to
be driven out of their neighbor-hoods into the suburbs, where they were
to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods
they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the
South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government
elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration,"
the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into
something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the
actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control.
The Slaughter of
Cities proposes a new take on familiar territory, e.g., to give just one
example, the civil rights movement. Does anyone, for example, really
know why Martin Luther King abandoned his southern strategy and came to
Chicago during the summer of 1966? Does anyone really know who brought
him there? Does anyone know who told him which ethnic neighborhoods he
would march through? Hint: it was a religious denomination usually
associated with Philadelphia that had been at work trying to
"integrate" Chicago's neighbor-hoods since 1951.
Jones concentrates on
four cities — Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago — in a book
whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial. The destruction of
the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of
these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned
plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.
Excerpt: The scale of the devastation which the
Philadelphia City Planning Commission pre-pared for Philadelphia was
simply breathtaking in scope. All of North Philadelphia from Diamond
(the border would later be moved north to Lehigh) to Spring Garden
Street and from Broad to 5th was scheduled to be torn down. The same
fate awaited all of "East" Philadelphia from Vine Street north of Market
to Tasker in the south, and from 8th Street to the Delaware River. All
of what is traditionally known as South Philadelphia from South Street
to Dickinson and from Broad to the famous 9th Street Market was also
scheduled to be torn down, even though the best housing stock in South
Philadelphia, owned by the Italian elite, doctors, lawyers, etc., was to
be found along Broad Street.
The most shocking part
of the map, however, lay in the gray-hatched patch off to the northeast
well outside of the intensive-use central area where some of the city's
oldest housing stock existed. That part of town was known as Bridesburg.
It was, like Kensington, which lay to the south, industrial and
residential combined, which was the pattern of industrial 19th-century
Philadelphia. What Bridesburg did not have was run-down houses. What
Bridesburg did have was ethnic homogeneity. It housed the overwhelming
majority of the Polish population of Philadelphia. Ask those who know
the history of urban renewal in Philadelphia today why Bridesburg was
targeted for destruction, and you will get no answer. That is so for one
simple reason: according to the criteria which the renewers themselves
established, Bridesburg was not blighted, if by blight one means
deteriorated housing stock. Bridesburg was a mixed-use neighborhood, but
so was just about all of the rest of old Philadelphia. The trouble with
Bridesburg lay not in its buildings.
When I asked one of
the priests at St. John Cantius parish, which serves the Polish
population there, why the planned destruction didn't happen, he couldn't
come up with an answer either. But the answer in both instances has to
do with ethnicity. Bridesburg survived because the Poles refused to move
from the neighborhood. Unlike their Irish co-religionists, they were
not seduced by the siren song of assimilation. The same thing can be
seen in Polish neighborhoods like Hamtramck near Detroit. The Poles who
were successful didn't move to the suburbs when they made money.
Instead, they tore down the conventional housing stock and built a
brick palace in its place.
Bridesburg was not
blighted, but it was Polish. The Philadelphia Planning Commission, like
the Philadelphia Housing authority, the agencies which plotted this
destruction had no Poles on their boards or planning commissions. As a
result, what went by the name of urban renewal was, in effect, one
ethnic group, namely the WASPs from Germantown and Chestnut Hill, coming
up with a plan for destroying the neighborhood of another ethnic group,
without that group's consultation or permission, even when the obvious
indicators of blight were missing. Taken as a whole the Planning
Commission Map of 1948 was a recipe for ethnic cleansing on a massive
scale. The Jews were to be moved from Philadelphia's "East Side" to make
way for Society Hill, the residential enclave where the city's
Nomenklatura were to be housed; the Italians were to be moved from large
areas of South Philadelphia, the Irish from large areas of North
Philadelphia. The fact that blacks were to be removed from areas around
Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania would mean more
ethnic cleansing for the Catholic ethnics as well, as wave after wave of
displaced blacks would have to seek housing in adjacent, which is to
say, Catholic and ethnic, areas. Each instance of urban renewal and
redevelopment was like a rock dropped into a pool. The number of units
of public housing which got built never equaled the number of units
which got torn down, and as a result, more blacks got displaced than
got housed by government efforts. As a result, Catholic ethnics were
either removed directly, when their houses got torn down to make way for
the projects, or indirectly by the waves of blacks who had to move to
neighborhoods adjacent in price and geography when the houses they were
living in were torn down and never replaced.
This book tells the
story of housing policy and social engineering in four large cities in
the period during and following World War II. Since housing was just one
focus of social engineering, this book tells other related stories as
well, all of which had an impact on these cities. There was a time when
the Western World, and many Americans, believed in progress. As anyone
who has seen the rebirth of cities in Europe after their destruction
during the war can say, that progress is not a mark of American cities.
This book is an attempt to explain why. The fundamental fact, however,
is available to anyone who takes the time to go beyond the showcase
buildings at the center of downtown Detroit or Philadelphia and look at
the poverty and destruction that surround them in what were once
thriving neighborhoods. If you require a monument to the folly of the
social engineering that brought about that devastation, just look
around.
Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies by Timothy Earle
(Westview) has set out to offer the most comprehensive view now
available of the economic foundations of early societies, and it may
well be that he has succeeded.
Bronze Age Economics is a pioneering contribution to archaeological
theory." -Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge
"This important collection brings together many of
Timothy Earle's key contributions, thus comprising a coherent guide to
Earle's materialist approach to the evolution of those
intermediate-level societies classically called `chiefdoms.' Earle has
made a significant mark on the field, and his anthology deserves to be
in the library of every serious student and professional." -Patrick V
Kirch, University of California, Berkeley
"An outstanding example of the power and promise of
processual archaeological approaches to understanding prehistoric
cultural variability." Jeffrey Parsons, University of Michigan
This integrated collection of new and newly revised
essays by archaeologist Timothy Earle represents both a personal journey
and a growing synthesis of how political economies emerged in human
societies. Drawing in detail on the cases of chiefdoms in Hawaii, the
Andes, and Denmark,
Bronze Age Economics documents how intensification of economies,
surplus mobilization, and controlled distribution of both staple and
prestige goods fundamentally drove the political evolutionary processes
that prefigured states. Representing as it does the trajectory of
Earle's lifework, this book fairly encapsulates the history of
processual archaeology and social evolutionary theory over the past
quarter century.
Contributions to Financial Econometrics: Theoretical and Practical
Issues by Michael McAleer (Blackwell) This is the fifth volume in
the series Surveys of Recent Research in Economics. The series is
intended to help busy academics and practitioners keep abreast of
important developments that relate to, without necessarily being
narrowly focused on, their more specific interests. This particular
volume should be of interest to academic economists, as well as
practitioners engaged in finance and econometrics. The contributions are
accessible to advanced undergraduates and provide useful supplementary
reading for a wide variety of courses in both Economics and Finance.
For researchers who
are intending to undertake applied research in financial econometrics,
it is important to reflect upon a number of questions: (i) Which
theoretical model is to be chosen, and why? (ii) What restrictions are
to be imposed or tested? (iii) Which hypotheses are to be tested, and
why? (iv) What method of estimation is to be used? (v) What are the
theoretical properties of the estimation method used? and (vi) Which
statistical and econometric softwares are to be used, and how accurate
and efficient are they? If the intending researcher does not know the
answers to some or all of these questions, the papers presented in this
volume will provide state-of-the-art guidance as to how to proceed. A
failure to address these issues seriously will lead to the presentation
of unconvincing empirical results, as well as to the criticism of
`measurement without (structural, statistical and econometric) theory'.
The first survey paper
by W. K. Li (University of Hong Kong), Shiqing Ling (Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology) and Michael McAleer (University of
Western Australia) is `Some Recent Theoretical Results for Time Series
Models with GARCH Errors'. Following the pathbreaking work on developing
the autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model by Engle
(1982), which is clearly one of the most widely-cited papers in
econometrics over the last few decades, the area of time-varying
conditional volatility has had many theoretical contributions in recent
years. There have been many extensions of ARCH, including: the highly
popular symmetric and asymmetric (namely, GJR) GARCH; logarithmic,
exponential, quadratic, power and other non-linear representations;
fractional, threshold and smooth transition variants; and multivariate
versions, including constant and variable dynamic correlation GARCH
models, among many others. Some of these models, particularly ARCH and
GARCH, have been analysed in detail with respect to the regularity (or
structural) conditions underlying the strict stationarity and ergodicity
of the process, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the
existence of moments, and the sufficient conditions for the (typically)
least squares, quasi-maximum likelihood or adaptive estimators to be
consistent and asymptotic normal. The authors review some of the more
recent and important theoretical results for time-varying conditional
volatility models with (symmetric) GARCH errors. In view of the
straightforward analytical conditions that have been derived, the survey
is directed towards practitioners. Starting with the simple univariate
ARCH model and proceeding to the multivariate GARCH model, some
structural and statistical results for stationary and non-stationary
ARMA-GARCH models are summarised. Various new ARCH-type models,
including double threshold ARCH and GARCH, fractional ARIMA, CHARMA, and
a class of symmetric vector ARMA-GARCH, are also reviewed. Some new and
powerful unit root tests based on quasi-maximum likelihood estimators
are also discussed and compared with existing procedures.
Esther Ruiz
(Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and Lorenzo Pascual (Universidad
Carlos III de Madrid) follow a theoretical contribution by considering
`Bootstrapping Financial Time Series'. As time series of high frequency
financial returns are often characterized by fat-tailed non-Gaussian
distributions (that is, volatility clustering and excess kurtosis),
usually of unknown form, bootstrap techniques are especially suited for
empirical analysis in such cases. However, when bootstrap procedures are
applied to financial data, it must be realised that, although returns
are usually serially uncorrelated, they are not independent. The
volatility of returns evolves over time, so that squared returns are
dependent. There are two main types of bootstrap methods designed to
replicate this dynamic dependence: (i) it is possible to use parametric
bootstrap procedures, based on resampling from the estimated residuals
of a conditionally heterocedastic model; (ii) non-parametric
bootstrapping can be performed without assuming a particular model for
returns. This paper critically reviews the application of both bootstrap
methods for the empirical analysis of financial time series data, with
an emphasis on inference and prediction. Several empirical and simulated
examples are presented to illustrate these methods. The main
applications can be classified into methods that try to estimate the
sample distribution of a given statistic and methods to estimate the
density of returns. In the first group, the main application analyzes
the predictive power of technical trading rules. Within the second
class, the main application obtains measures of the Value at Risk (VaR)
of a given asset. One of the main problems encountered in the surveyed
papers is that quite a few apply the bootstrap procedure incorrectly by
resampling directly from the raw returns. Finally, the authors note that
there are very few results regarding the theoretical properties of
bootstrap methods in the context of non-linear models and, in
particular, for heterocedastic models, which are of particular relevance
in the analysis of financial returns.
`Some Recent
Developments in Futures Hedging' by Donald Lien (University of Texas at
San Antonio) and Y. K. Tse (Singapore Management University) reviews
some recent developments in the literature of futures hedging. It is
assumed that hedgers are faced with a given spot position to hedge, so
that the problem of hedging quantity uncertainty is not discussed.
Various theories of futures hedging are discussed. An optimal hedge
strategy is traditionally based on the expected-utility maximization
paradigm, a simplification of which leads to the minimum-variance
criterion. Although this paradigm is quite well accepted, alternative
approaches have been proposed, particularly the questionable use of
variance as a measure of risk. It is argued that as far as hedging is
concerned, a one-sided measure such as the downside risk is more
relevant, which leads to the use of lower partial moments as an
alternative criterion to variance. In addition, the application of the
theories of stochastic dominance has resolved some of the restrictions
in the expected-utility maximization framework. Given the parallel
developments in the stochastic dominance literature, the mean-Gini
approach also facilitates the implementation of a hedge strategy. All of
these alternative theories are discussed and compared. At the empirical
level, research on futures hedging has benefited from developments in
the econometrics literature. As more has become known about the
statistical properties of financial time series, more sophisticated
estimation methods have been proposed. For example, the classical
regression method, which assumes a time-invariant hedge ratio, has been
replaced by time-varying estimates. The cointegration literature
suggests that futures and spot prices are cointegrated and that better
estimates can be obtained by exploring this relationship. Moreover, the
conditional volatility literature has provided many models to capture
the time-varying variance and covariance of the spot and futures prices.
Finally, the use of nonparametric methods has freed researchers from
making assumptions that may not be justifiable, such as normality in
asset returns.
Tom Engsted (Aarhus
School of Business) surveys the literature on econometric time series
methods and approaches for evaluating the fit of rational expectations
models in `Measures of Fit for Rational Expectations Models'. Since the
inception of rational expectations econometrics in the 1970s, the
standard approach to estimate and formally test rational expectations
models has been either: (i) the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and
its associated J-test; or (ii) the full-information methodology with
explicit specification of stochastic processes for the forcing variables
and derivation and testing of the implied cross-equation restrictions.
However, this approach has been criticized because formal statistical
tests of over identifying restrictions are not very informative about
the accuracy of the underlying model. A model that is statistically
rejected at a 5% level may be able to explain important aspects of the
data, just as a model that is not statistically rejected may not have
much economic content. The author describes
and illustrates three
alternatives for evaluating rational expectations models that have been
suggested in the literature as a response to this criticism: the
Campbell-Shiller, Durlauf-Hall, and Hansen-Jagannathan approaches. A
characteristic feature of these methods is that they are much less
focused on formal statistical testing, but examine the degree to which a
particular model provides a useful approximation to reality. All three
methods have become very popular and widely used in empirical research.
The author summarizes the many empirical studies that have used these
methods in areas such as stock price determination and asset pricing,
interest rates and the term structure, exchange rate determination,
consumption and saving, the balance of payments, tax-smoothing,
hyperinflation, and linear quadratic adjustment cost models of
inventories, labour demand, and money demand. An illustration of the
methods using data from the Danish stock market is also provided. The
survey pays particular attention to the meannonstationarity that
characterizes many financial and macroeconomic time series.
Asset pricing is
analysed by P. N. Smith (University of York) and M. R. Wickens
(University of York) in `Asset Pricing With Observable Stochastic
Discount Factors'. The stochastic discount factor (SDF) model is rapidly
emerging as the most general and convenient way to price assets. By a
suitable specification of the discount factor, the SDF model can be
shown to encompass most of the theories currently in use, including the
capital asset pricing model (CAPM), the general equilibrium
consumption-based intertemporal CAPM, and the Black-Scholes theorem for
pricing options. The SDF model has been based on the use of single and
multiple factors, and on latent and observed factors. In most
situations, and particularly for the term structure, single factor
models are inappropriate, while latent variables require the somewhat
arbitrary specification of generating processes, which can also be
difficult to interpret. Focusing primarily on the absolute rather than
relative approach to asset pricing, the authors survey the principal
different implementations of the SDF model for FOREX, equity and bonds.
They propose a new approach, which is based on the use of multiple
factors that are observable, and on modelling the joint distribution of
excess returns and the factors using a multivariate GARCH-in-mean
process. In comparison, much of the research to date that has made
explicit use of the SDF model has been based on latent factors. The
authors argue that, in general, single equation and VAR models, although
widely used in empirical finance, are inappropriate as they do not
satisfy the no-arbitrage condition. As risk premia arise from
conditional covariation between the returns and factors, both a
multivariate context and the use of conditional covariances in the
conditional mean are essential. The authors explain how apparent
exceptions, such as the CIR and Vasicek models, meet these requirements,
but at a price. The new approach is explained, its implementation is
discussed, and some empirical evidence is presented. For purposes of
comparison, the paper also includes recent evidence using more
traditional approaches.
In the final
contribution, which is not a standard survey paper, `GARCH 2.2: An Ox
Package for Estimating and Forecasting Various ARCH Models', Sebastien
Laurent (Universite de Liege, Universite Catholique de Louvain and
Maastricht University) and Jean-Philippe Peters (Universite de Liege)
discuss and
document GARCH 2.2, an
Ox package for estimating and forecasting various univariate ARCH-type
models. There is a focus on asymmetric and long-memory models as the
package provides GARCH, EGARCH, GJR, APARCH, IGARCH, FIGARCH, HYGARCH,
FIEGARCH and FIAPARCH specifications of the conditional variance, and
an AR(FI)MA specification of the conditional mean. Two versions of this
package are available, namely a menu-driven interface for OxPack users
(the `Full' version) and a simple code version for Ox console users (the
`Light' version). These models can be estimated by an approximate
(quasi) maximum likelihood method under four different assumptions:
normal, Student-t, GED, or skewed Student-t errors. In addition,
estimated parameters can be bounded between or fixed at some predefined
values, while positivity constraints and conditions for the existence of
moments can be checked for several of the models. Explanatory variables
can enter both the conditional mean and the conditional variance
equations. Moreover, h-step-ahead forecasts of both the conditional mean
and the conditional variance are available, as well as a number of
mispecification tests and various graphical possibilities. The authors
propose an overview of the features of the package, with a presentation
of the different specifications of the conditional mean and conditional
variance. Further explanations are given about the estimation methods.
Measures of the accuracy of the procedures are presented for both short
and long memory models. The GARCH features provided by the GARCH package
are compared with those of nine other well-known econometric software
packages. Finally, a practical application of GARCH 2.2 using the CAC40
stock index is provided and presented as a short, accessible and helpful
user guide.
Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies
for Innovation by Stefan H. Thomke (Harvard Business Schooll Press)
Experimentation matters because it fuels the discovery and creation of
knowledge and thereby leads to the development and improvement of
products, processes, systems, and organizations. Put concretely, without
experimentation, we might all still be living in caves and using rocks
as tools. Anything we use today arrives through a process of organized
experimentation, over time; improved tools, new processes, and
alternative technologies all have arisen because they have been worked
out in various structured ways.
But experimentation
has often been expensive in terms of the time involved and the labor
expended, even as it has been essential to innovation. What has
changed, particularly given new technologies available, is that it is
now possible to perform more experiments in an economically viable way
while accelerating the drive toward innovation.
Experimentation Matters emphasizes not only why experimentation
matters in the largest sense of its connection to innovation, but why
and how new technologies are transforming its economics. Not only can
more experiments be run today, the kinds of experiments possible are
expanding. Never before has it been so economically feasible to ask
"what-if" questions and generate preliminary answers. New technologies
enable organizations to both challenge presumed answers and pose more
questions. They amplify how innovators learn from experiments, creating
the potential for higher research and development (R&D) performance and
new ways of creating value for firms and their customers. At the same
time, this book discusses companies that do not fully unlock that
potential because how they design, organize, and manage their approach
to innovation gets in the way. That is, even deploying new technology
for experimentation, these organizations are not organized to capture
its potential value-in experimentation or in innovation. Like any
effective experiment, this book will reveal what does and does not work.
Experimentation
encompasses success and failure; it is an iterative process of
understanding what doesn't work and what does. Both results are equally
important for learning, the goal of any experiment and of
experimentation overall. Thus, a crash test that results in
unacceptable safety for drivers, a software user interface that
confuses customers, or a drug that is toxic can all be desirable
outcomes of an experiment-provided these results are revealed early in
an innovation process and can be subsequently reexamined. Because few
resources have been committed in these early stages, decision making is
still flexible, and other approaches can be experimented with quickly.
In a nutshell, experiments that result in failure are not failed
experiments, although they frequently are considered so when anything
deviating from what was intended is deemed "failure."
Every company's
ability to innovate depends on a process of experimentation whereby new
products and services are created and existing ones improved. But the
cost of experimentation often limits innovation. New
technologiesincluding computer modeling and simulationpromise to lift
that constraint by changing the economics of experimentation. Never
before has it been so economically feasible to ask "what-if" questions
and generate preliminary answers. These technologies amplify the impact
of learning, paving the way for higher R&D performance and innovation
and new ways of creating value for customers.
In
Experimentation Matters, Thomke argues that to unlock such
potential, companies must not only understand the power of
experimentation and new technologies, but also change their processes,
organization, and management of innovation. He explains why
experimentation is so critical to innovation, underscores the impact of
new technologies, and outlines what managers must do to integrate them
successfully.
Drawing on a decade of
research in multiple industries as diverse as automotive,
semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and banking, Thomke
provides striking illustrations of how companies drive strategy and
value creation by accommodating their organizations to new
experimentation technologies. As in the outcome of any effective
experiment, Thomke also reveals where that has not happened, and
explains why. In particular, he shows managers how to:
- Implement "front-loaded" innovation processes that identify
potential problems before
- resources are committed and design decisions locked in
- Experiment and test frequently without overloading their
organizations
- Integrate new technologies into the current innovation system
- Organize for rapid experimentation
- Fail early and often but avoid wasteful "mistakes"
- Manage projects as experiments
Pointing to the custom
integrated circuit industry-a multibillion dollar market-Thomke also
shows what happens when new experimentation technologies are taken
beyond firm boundaries, thereby changing the way companies create new
products and services with customers and suppliers.
Probing and
thoughtful,
Experimentation Matters should influence how both executives and
academics think about experimentation in general and innovation
processes in particular. Experimentation has always been the engine of
innovation, and Thomke reveals how it works today.
Econometric Analysis (5th Edition) by William H. Greene (Prentice
Hall) is intended for a one‑year graduate course in econometrics for
social scientists. The prerequisites for this course should include
calculus, mathematical statistics, and an introduction to econometrics
at the level of, say, Gujarati's Basic Econometrics (McGraw‑Hill, 1995)
or Wooldridge's Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach
[South‑Western (2000)]. Self‑contained (for our purposes) summaries of
the matrix algebra, mathematical statistics, and statistical theory used
later in the book are given in Appendices A through D. Appendix E
contains a description of numerical methods that will be useful to
practicing econometricians. The formal presentation of econometrics
begins with discussion of a fundamental pillar, the linear multiple
regression model, in Chapters 2 through 8. Chapters 9 through 15 present
familiar extensions of the single linear equation model, including
nonlinear regression, panel data models, the generalized regression
model, and systems of equations. The linear model is usually not the
sole technique used in most of the contemporary literature. In view of
this, the (expanding) second half of this book is devoted to topics that
will extend the linear regression model in many directions. Chapters 16
through 18 present the techniques and underlying theory of estimation in
econometrics, including GMM and maximum likelihood estimation methods
and simulation based techniques. We end in the last four chapters, 19
through 22, with discussions of current topics in applied econometrics,
including time‑series analysis and the analysis of discrete choice and
limited dependent variable models.
This book has two objectives. The first is to
introduce students to applied econometrics, including basic techniques
in regression analysis and some of the rich variety of models that are
used when the linear model proves inadequate or inappropriate. The
second is to present students with sufficient theoretical background
that they will recognize new variants of the models learned about here
as merely natural extensions that fit within a common body of
principles. Thus, I have spent what might seem to be a large amount of
effort explaining the mechanics of GMM estimation, nonlinear least
squares, and maximum likelihood estimation and GARCH models. To meet the
second objective, this book also contains a fair amount of theoretical
material, such as that on maximum likelihood estimation and on
asymptotic results for regression models. Modern software has made
complicated modeling very easy to do, and an understanding of the
underlying theory is important.
I had several purposes in undertaking this
revision. As in the past, readers continue to send me interesting ideas
for my "next edition." It is impossible to use them all, of course.
Because the five volumes of the Handbook of Econometrics and two of the
Handbook of Applied Econometrics already run to over 4,000 pages, it is
also unnecessary. Nonetheless, this revision is appropriate for several
reasons. First, there are new and interesting developments in the field,
particularly in the areas of microeconometrics (panel data, models for
discrete choice) and, of course, in time series, which continues its
rapid development. Second, I have taken the opportunity to continue
fine‑tuning the text as the experience and shared wisdom of my readers
accumulates in my files. For this revision, that adjustment has entailed
a substantial rearrangement of the material‑the main purpose of that was
to allow me to add the new material in a more compact and orderly way
than I could have with the table of contents in the 4th edition. The
literature in econometrics has continued to evolve, and my third
objective is to grow with it. This purpose is inherently difficult to
accomplish in a textbook. Most of the literature is written by
professionals for other professionals, and this textbook is written for
students who are in the early stages of their training. But I do hope to
provide a bridge to that literature, both theoretical and applied.
This book is a broad survey of the field of
econometrics. This field grows continually, and such an effort becomes
increasingly difficult. (A partial list of journals devoted at least in
part, if not completely, to econometrics now includes the Journal of
Applied Econometrics, Journal of Econometrics, Econometric Theory,
Econometric Reviews, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics,
Empirical Economics, and Econometrlca.) Still, my view has always been
that the serious student of the field must start somewhere, and one can
successfully seek that objective in a single textbook. This text
attempts to survey, at an entry level, enough of the fields in
econometrics that a student can comfortably move from here to practice
or more advanced study in one or more specialized areas. At the same
time, I have tried to present the material in sufficient generality that
the reader is also able to appreciate the important common foundation of
all these fields and to use the tools that they all employ.
There are now quite a few recently published texts
in econometrics. Several have gathered in compact, elegant treatises,
the increasingly advanced and advancing theoretical background of
econometrics. Others, such as this book, focus more attention on
applications of econometrics. One feature that distinguishes this work
from its predecessors is its greater emphasis on nonlinear models.
Computer software now in wide use has made estimation of nonlinear
models as routine as estimation of linear ones, and the recent
literature reflects that progression. My purpose is to provide a
textbook treatment that is in line with current practice. The book
concludes with four lengthy chapters on time‑series analysis, discrete
choice models and limited dependent variable models. These nonlinear
models are now the staples of the applied econometrics literature. This
book also contains a fair amount of material that will extend beyond
many first courses in econometrics, including, perhaps, the
aforementioned chapters on limited dependent variables, the section in
Chapter 22 on duration models, and some of the discussions of time
series and panel data models. Once again, I have included these in the
hope of providing a bridge to the professional literature in these
areas.
I have had one overriding purpose that has
motivated all five editions of this work. For the vast majority of
readers of books such as this, whose ambition is to use, not background
theory is extremely important. But, at the end of the day, my purpose in
writing this work, and for my continuing efforts to update it in this
now fifth edition, is to show readers how to do econometric analysis. I
unabashedly accept the unflattering assessment of a correspondent who
once likened this book to a "user's guide to econometrics."
Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy,
Leverage, and Clarity by David A. Aaker (Free Press) Renowned brand
guru Aaker demonstrates that assuring that each brand in the portfolio
has a clear role and actively reinforces and supports the other
portfolio brands will profoundly affect the firm's profitability. Brand
Portfolio Strategy is required reading not only for brand managers but
for all managers with bottom-line responsibility to their shareholders.
In this long-awaited book from the world's premier
brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands,
David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy
that will support a company's business strategy and create relevance,
differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. Building on case
studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony,
Dove, Intel, CitiGroup, and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful,
cohesive brand strategies have enabled managers to revitalize brands,
support business growth, and create discipline in confused, bloated
portfolios of master brands, subbrands, endorser brands, co-brands, and
brand extensions.
Aaker offers readers
step-by-step advice on what to do when confronting scenarios such as the
following:
- Brands are underleveraged
- The business strategy is at risk because of inadequate brand
platforms
- The business faces a relevance threat caused by emerging
subcategories
- The firm's brands are tired and bland
- Strategy is paralyzed by a lack of priority among the brands
- Brands are cluttered and confusing to both customers and employees
- The firm needs to move into the super-premium or value arenas to
create margin or sales volume
- Margin pressures require points of differentiation
Excerpt: Firms are
motivated to be concerned with brand portfolio strategy be-cause it
provides the structure and discipline needed to have a successful
business strategy. A brand portfolio strategy that is confused and
incoherent can handicap and sometimes doom a business strategy. One that
fosters organizational and market synergies, creates relevant,
differentiated and energized brand assets, and leverages those brand
assets, on the other hand, will support and enable business strategies.
The need to review
brand portfolio strategy tends to become acute when the business becomes
stressed because of scenarios such as the following:
- A business needs growth to achieve organizational vitality and to
realize the objectives of investors. Most growth directions involve
either leveraging an existing brand asset and/or creating new brand
assets. In either, tools and methods need to be employed to develop
and support the strategy.
- A business needs to stay relevant in a dynamic market. Subbrands
and endorsed brands can help reduce the risk and difficulty of
pursuing a new direction.
- A business is drifting toward being (or has basically become) a
commodity, with very few points of differentiation and an emphasis
on price. The challenge is to create a brand or brands that can
drive differentiation and fit that brand or brands into the brand
team.
- A brand has lost energy, perhaps because it is in a mature
category. There is a need for a branded program, product,
sponsorship, or some-thing to create interest and energy.
- An acquisition or the emergence of several strong brands forces a
firm to make tough choices to avoid confusion and waste.
- A firm's long-standing pride in being decentralized and
entrepreneurial has led to a proliferation of brands and subbrands
and, as a result, total confusion. Customers and employees alike
become frustrated trying to determine not only what the firm stands
for in the various product-market settings, but even how to order a
product or service. Serious pruning, restructuring, and
prioritizing are needed.
Brand management
simply cannot cope with the complexities of the marketplace with the
reality of multiple products, segments, geographies, and distribution
channels. In one sense, brand portfolio strategy is part of the problem,
because the explosion of brands, subbrands, and endorsed brands in
organizations spanning a variety of product-markets has inhibited the
ability of firms to articulate coherent strategies, much less implement
them. It is also part of the solution, though, because a reasoned,
articulated brand structure can support a business strategy by replacing
waste with synergy, confusion with clarity, and missed opportunities
with leveraged assets.
This book will be the
first to explicitly define the scope and structure of brand portfolio
strategy. It will identify underlying concepts and tools and structure
them into meaningful and related groupings. It will also illustrate how
brand portfolio strategy can solve very relevant problems facing
business strategists, including the following:
- How to grow by expanding the product-market scope through brand
extensions.
- How to participate in value and premium niches with vertical brand
extensions.
- How to keep your brand relevant while facing a dynamic market
where "what is being purchased" is changing.
- How to energize and differentiate your brand using brand portfolio
tools.
- How to make brand alliances work.
- How to leverage the corporate brand.
- How to manage the brand issues surrounding corporate
restructuring.
- How to improve the clarity of the offerings and provide focus to
the brand-building activities.
Developing brand
portfolio strategy is complex and situation specific. There are no
cookbook-style rules that are guaranteed to produce perfect strategies.
The purpose of this book is to introduce options and is-sues, rather
than easy answers.
This is my fourth book
on brands and brand strategy. The initial book, Managing Brand Equity,
was the first effort to define and structure the concept of brand
equity. The second book, Building Strong Brands, introduced brand
identity, the brand's aspirational associations, and encouraged managers
to look beyond product attributes to brand personality, organizational
associations, and brand symbols. The third book, Brand Leadership
(written with Erich Joachimsthaler), extended the brand identity
concept, discussed global brand management, and showed how to break out
of media clutter by developing brand-building programs that extend
beyond media advertising.
This book draws on the
material relevant to brand portfolio strategy from the other three
books. Most notably, Chapters 1 and 2 draw from Brand Leadership, and
Chapters 7 and 8 draw from Building Strong Brands and Managing Brand
Equity—but even these four chapters are updated with added case studies,
new concepts, and new or extended conceptual models. Providing an
integrated treatment of brand portfolio strategy has been a major reason
for me to write this book. The remaining chapters contain largely new
material; in total, there is about a 20 percent overlap with the other
three books.
As both a confession
and apology, I should note that the topic label has changed. In Building
Strong Brands, I wrote of "brand systems" to emphasize that the
portfolio brands must work together to form a coherent whole. However,
systems seemed to become an overused engineering term. In Brand
Leadership, we changed to "brand architecture," a nice metaphor that
suggested foundations, structures, roles, relation-ships, and even the
concept of upgrading and refurbishing. Brand architecture was an opaque
concept for some, though, and for others suggested the more limited
problem of naming brands and developing logos. Thus, in this book a new
label, brand portfolio strategy, is used. It is more holistic,
strategic, and compatible with the book's thrust—how to optimize and
leverage a brand portfolio to enhance and enable business strategy.
The book includes ten
chapters and an epilogue. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a description of the
scope of brand portfolio strategy. Chapter 3 examines some inputs that
will identify options and issues facing a brand portfolio. How to stay
relevant in increasingly dynamic markets is treated in Chapter 4. The
tools of branded differentiators and branded energizers are presented
for the first time in Chapter 5. Ways to harness
the power of brand
alliances are discussed in Chapter 6. Growing by leveraging brand assets
horizontally and vertically is explored in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 9
discusses why and how to leverage the corporate brand. Avoiding
complexity and confusion is presented in Chapter 10. The epilogue
provides a set of 20 takeaways.
Buyways: Automobility, Billboards and the American Cultural Landscape
by Catherine Gudis (Cultural Spaces: Routledge)
The highway has become the buyway.
Along the millions of miles the public travels, advertisers spend
billions on images of cola, cars, vodka, fast food, and swimming pools
that blur past us, catching our fleeting attention and turning the
landscape into a corridor of commerce.
A smart, succinct and visually compelling history of the billboard in
America, Buyways traces how the outdoor advertising industry changed the
face of American commercialism. Taking us from itinerant bill-stickers
of circus posters in the 19th century to the blinking, beeping, 3-D
eyesores of today, Gudis argues that roadside advertising has turned the
landscape itself into a commodity to be bought and sold as advertising
space.
Buyways vividly chronicles the battles between environmentalists and
businessmen as well as the response of artists, from New Deal
photographers who satirized the billboard-infested landscape to
commercial artists who embraced the kitsch of it all. It also shows how
advertisers tapped into the American mythology of the open road,
promoting mobile consumption as the American Dream on four wheels.
Entertaining and brilliantly illustrated, Buyways is a vibrant road map
of the new geography of consumption
Buyways: Automobility, Billboards and the American Cultural Landscape
is organized around the themes of production, distribution, and
consumption, in that order. After an overview of billposting before the
common use of cars, the first part of this book examines the rise in
billboard advertising after World War I by considering the production of
both mobile audiences and advertisements. America became "a nation on
wheels," and advertisers tried to imagine the new mobile audiences and
to communicate with them. Advertisers also attempted to produce the new
mobile audiences as commodities to be sold to big business, and to turn
the highways through which these audiences traveled into corridors of
consumption. As part of the project to foster mass consumption, outdoor
advertisers promoted a culture of mobility and tapped the traditional
American mythology of the freedom of the open road. They helped construe
automobility as the American Dream on four wheels, a key to the American
Way. Part one explores the formal and conceptual strategies advertisers
employed to foster the culture of mobility, and it describes the
development of an aesthetics of speed specific to the billboard and
aiming to appeal to fast-moving audiences without requiring much of them
by way of attention, literacy, or thoughtful consideration. The
development of the billboard and the diffusion of the marketplace–not to
mention the growing rapidity with which audiences in the age of cars,
movies, radio, cartoons, and tabloids now expected to receive
information and entertainment–ultimately urged the use in advertising
of both stereotypes and logos, both among the most important design
revolutions of twentieth-century propaganda and publicity.
By imprinting the
landscape with the signs of commercial exchange, out-door advertising
distinguished itself from other media, such as print and radio. The
second part of this book examines its unique distribution, the placement
of advertisements along highways. This section shows how outdoor
advertising helped to decentralize the city and fill the countryside
with national advertising campaigns as well as retail establishments
and potential customers. As the billboard industry evaluated its
distribution of billboards and the audiences for them, advertisers
realized that their market was not determined by political boundaries
such as city and county lines or central business districts. It is for
similar reasons that this study, too, cannot be bound by traditional
borders. Some readers may wish to learn more of regional history, but I
have concluded, along with outdoor advertisers themselves, that their
audiences were more flexible than traditional markers of space could
contain–they were markets in motion whose travel paid little heed to
older precincts of space and time. Recognizing this, advertisers
predicted and promoted new commercial developments far from traditional
business centers. They did this partly through theatrical displays and
an architecture of mobility that acclimated motorists to an exurban
culture of spectacle and an auto-oriented consumer landscape, where
drivers were encouraged to window shop right through the windshield.
Thus outdoor advertisers helped develop fringe areas, laying the
pavement for the birth of the commercial strip and the urban sprawl that
exploded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
That highways would
turn into buyways and country roads into "ribbons of gold" was the
utopian vision of outdoor advertisers. To others, however, this was a
dystopia and a nightmare. Critics felt that markets ought not mix with
Mother Nature. Thus, the third part of this book analyzes audience
responses to outdoor advertising–in a word, consumption. It focuses on
the roadside beautification attempts of civic reformers, and looks at
the deeply gender-divided "billboard war" that pitted female roadside
reformers against male out-door advertisers. While the "scenic sisters,"
as they were called by admen, wished to rid the public highway of the
signs of commerce, their billboard "brethren" asserted their private
right to commercial broadcasting across public space. Ultimately, their
war contested whether Americans ought to preserve certain spaces from
the domain of business and of markets. This section reviews the
philosophies and aesthetics of each side and analyzes their
competing–though often complementary–visions of the American pastoral
ideal. It portrays the billboard war as a battle over aesthetics,
access, economics, and the physical location of markets, and is as much
about class ideals as it is about cultural conflict. Part three
concludes by describing the swan song of the scenic sisters, Lady Bird
Johnson's efforts to pass the 1965 Highway Beautification Act (HBA),
which limited and called for the removal of many billboards, junk-yards,
and roadside stands along the newly constructed interstate expressways.
The HBA marked the legal culmination of the billboard war, but has not
resolved the continuing conflicts between advertisers and their
audiences.
The concluding chapter
shows some ways in which the mobile market and its concomitant trail of
advertising have influenced more recent decades. The asphalt paths of
highway systems and the speed of its automotive travelers raise
questions regarding changing forms of visual communication, access to
public space, and the aesthetic value of natural and built environments.
As the conclusion suggests, in the twenty-first century new electronic
telecommunications technologies, which often use the metaphor of the
highway to represent cyberaudience mobility, take the challenges of the
scenic sisters to new extremes as the lines between private and public
space blur along with what constitutes the public sphere and public
discourse, while issues of speed, decentralization, and mobility
intensify along the new virtual buyway, the Internet. Buyways thus
traces the century-long development of our spatially dispersed landscape
of concrete and electronic highways and the advertisements that wrap
around them, and ponders the implication of these landscapes, not so
much for markets, but for the people that markets are meant to serve.
Computer Security: Art and Science by Matt Bishop (Addison-Wesley)
This highly anticipated
book fully introduces the theory and practice of computer security. It
is both a comprehensive text, explaining the most fundamental and
pervasive aspects of the field, and a detailed reference filled with
valuable information for even the most seasoned practitioner. In this
one extraordinary volume the author incorporates concepts from computer
systems, networks, human factors, and cryptography. In doing so, he
effectively demonstrates that computer security is an art as well as a
science.
Computer Security is simply a superb textbook-- a comprehensive,
beautifully written introduction for information security students and
practitioners. Matt Bishop has decades of security-related contributions
to his credit and his book reflects his accumulated wisdom on all things
security. And for those of us who are laboring in the security vineyard,
Computer Security represents a rare opportunity to refine our
understanding of the fundamentals by tuning in to the thoughts of a
master teacher and practitioner.
Computer Security:
Art and Science includes detailed discussions on:
* The nature and challenges of computer security
* The relationship between policy and security
* The role and application of cryptography
* The mechanisms used to implement policies
* Methodologies and technologies for assurance
* Vulnerability analysis and intrusion detection
Computer Security
discusses different policy models, and presents mechanisms that can be
used to enforce these policies. It concludes with examples that show how
to apply the principles discussed in earlier sections, beginning with
networks and moving on to systems, users, and programs.
This
important work is essential for anyone who needs to understand,
implement, or maintain a secure network or computer system.
Secure Internet Practices: Best Practices for Securing Systems in
the Internet and e-Business Age by Patrick McBride, Jody Patilla, Craig
Robinson, Peter Thermos, Edward P. Moser (Auerbach Publications) Is your
e-business secure? Have you done everything you can to protect your
enterprise and your customers from the potential exploits of hackers,
crackers, and other cyberspace menaces? As we expand the brave new world
of e-commerce, we are confronted with a whole new set of security
problems. Dealing with the risks of Internet applications and e-commerce
requires new ways of thinking about security. Secure Internet Practices:
Best Practices for Securing Systems in the Internet and e-Business Age
presents an overview of security programs, policies, goals, life cycle
development issues, infrastructure, and architecture aimed at enabling
you to effectively implement security at your organization. In addition
to discussing general issues and solutions, the book provides concrete
examples and templates for crafting or revamping your security program
in the form of an Enterprise-Wide Security Program Model, and an
Information Security Policy Framework. Although rich in technical
expertise, this is not strictly a handbook of Internet technologies, but
a guide that is equally useful for developing policies, procedures, and
standards. The book touches all the bases you need to build a secure
enterprise. Drawing on the experience of the world-class METASeS
consulting team in building and advising on security programs, Secure
Internet Practices: Best Practices for Securing Systems in the Internet
and e-Business Age shows you how to create a workable security program
to protect your organization's Internet risk.
Information Security Risk Analysis by Thomas R. Peltier (Auerbach
Publications) Risk is a cost of doing business. The question is, "What
are the risks, and what are their costs?" Knowing the vulnerabilities
and threats that face your organization's information and systems is the
first essential step in risk management. Information Security Risk
Analysis shows you how to use cost-effective risk analysis techniques to
identify and quantify the threats--both accidental and purposeful--that
your organization faces. The book steps you through the qualitative risk
analysis process using techniques such as PARA (Practical Application of
Risk Analysis) and FRAP (Facilitated Risk Analysis Process) to:oEvaluate
tangible and intangible risksoUse the qualitative risk analysis
processoIdentify elements that make up a strong Business Impact
AnalysisoConduct risk analysis with confidenceManagement looks to you,
its information security professional, to provide a process that allows
for the systematic review of risk, threats, hazards, and concerns, and
to provide cost-effective measures to lower risk to an acceptable level.
You can find books that cover risk analysis for financial,
environmental, and even software projects, but you will find none that
apply risk analysis to information technology and business continuity
planning or deal with issues of loss of systems configuration,
passwords, information loss, system integrity, CPU cycles, bandwidth,
and more. Information Security Risk Analysis shows you how to determine
cost effective solutions for your organization's information technology.
Building an Information Security Awareness Program by Mark B. Desman
(Auerbach Publications) is a reference and self-study guide. It is
step-by-step guide through the methodology for developing, distributing,
and monitoring an information security awareness program. Softcover. In
his latest book, a pre-eminent information security pundit confessed
that he was wrong about the solutions to the problem of information
security. It's not technology that's the solution, but the human
factor-people. But even infosec policies and procedures are insufficient
if employees don't know about them, or why they're important, or what
can happen to them if they ignore them. The key, of course, is
continuous awareness of the problems and the solutions. Building an
Information Security Awareness Program addresses these concerns. A
reference and self-study guide, it goes step-by-step through the
methodology for developing, distributing, and monitoring an information
security awareness program. It includes detailed instructions on
determining what media to use and where to locate it, and it describes
how to efficiently use outside sources to optimize the output of a small
staff. The author stresses the importance of security and the entire
organizations' role and responsibility in protecting it. He presents the
material in a fashion that makes it easy for nontechnical staff members
to grasp the concepts. These attributes render Building an Information
Security Awareness Program an immensely valuable reference in the
arsenal of the IS professional.
Ecological Economics: Principles and Applicatons by Herman E. Daly,
Joshua Farley (Island Press) Part I of this book is an introduction to
the subject of ecological economics. Ecological economics seeks not
only to explain how the world works, but also to propose mechanisms and
institutions for making it work bet-ter. Chapter 1 explains the basic
subject matter of neoclassical and ecological economics, in order to
show the full scope of the new transdiscipline of ecological economics.
Having defined the territory, we first establish basic agreement on the
fundamental nature of the system we propose to analyze. Chapter 2 begins
by describing the core (preanalytic) vision of ecological economics,
that the economic system is a part or sub-system of a larger global
ecosystem that sustains it. This view is contrasted with the fundamental
vision of neoclassical economics, that the economic system is a
self-sufficient whole entity unto itself. If we seek to make a system
work better, we need to know the resources available to us—the means—and
the desired outcomes—the ends. Chapter 3 focuses on the ends-and-means
spectrum, an essential step for understanding a science that defines
itself as a mechanism for connecting scarce means to alternative ends.
Part II focuses on the
containing and sustaining Whole, the Earth and its atmosphere. In these
chapters, we delve deeper into the nature of the Whole—the global
ecosystem that sustains us by providing the resources that feed the
economic process and the sinks where we dispose of our wastes. Chapter 4
establishes the fundamental importance of low entropy (useful, ordered
matter-energy) in economic production, and the inevitability of its
conversion via the economic process to high-entropy, disordered,
useless waste. Chapter 5 addresses the tangible forms in which low
entropy manifests itself, the abiotic goods and services provided by
nature, and examines their specific market-relevant characteristics.
Chapter 6 does the same for biotic resources. Chapter 7 shows that many
of the goods and services provided by nature were formerly
superabundant, and it made little difference if an economic system
dedicated to allocating scarce resources ignored them. Now, however, as
we have discussed in this Introduction, these resources have become
scarce, and their allocation has become critically important.
Part III begins our
examination of the part of the whole in which we are most interested,
the economic subsystem. We draw out the useful elements of neoclassical
economic theory and integrate them into ecological economics.
Microeconomics, macroeconomics, or international trade each provides
sufficient material for years of study, and this text conveys no more
than the essentials.
Chapters 8 and 9
introduce microeconomics, the study of mechanisms for efficiently
allocating specific scarce resources among specific alternative ends.
They explain the self-organizing properties of a competitive market
economy, through which millions of independent decision makers, freely
acting in their own self-interest, can generate the remarkable outcomes
alluded to at the start of Chapter 1. These chapters also explain how
neoclassical production and utility functions must be modified to
address the concerns of ecological economics.
In Chapter 10, we take
a step back from the traditional microeconomic analysis of allocation to
examine the specific characteristics resources must have if they are to
be efficiently allocated by the market mechanism. We find that few of
the goods and services provided by nature exhibit all of them. Attempts
to allocate resources that do not have the appropriate characteristics
via the unregulated market result in inefficient, unfair, and
unsustainable outcomes. Rather than individual self-interest creating an
invisible hand that maximizes social well-being, market allocation of
such "nonmarket" goods creates an invisible foot that can kick the
common good in the pants. Careful analysis of these market-relevant
characteristics of scarce resources is an essential prelude to policy
formulation. Thus, Chapter 11 applies the concepts of market failures to
abiotic resources, and Chapter 12 applies them to biotic ones.
In Part IV, we turn to
macroeconomics. As we stated earlier, ecological economics views the
economy as a part of a larger finite system. This means that the
traditional goal of macroeconomic policy—unlimited economic growth in
the physical dimension—is impossible. Thus, in ecological economics,
optimal scale replaces growth as a goal, followed by fair distribution
and efficient allocation, in that order. Scale and distribution are
basically macroeconomic issues. Hence, in addition to the fiscal and
monetary policy tools that dominate the discussion in traditional texts,
we will introduce policies that can help the economy reach an optimal
scale.' Chapter 13 focuses on the basic macroeconomic concepts of GNP,
and welfare. It starts by examining economic accounting, or the
measurement of desirable ends ranging from gross national product to
human needs assessment. Chapter 14 discusses the role of money in our
economy. Chapter 15 focuses on the issue of distribution within and
between generations, and Chapter 16 briefly develops the basic
macroeconomic model of how saving and investing behavior combines with
the supply and demand of money to determine the interest rate and level
of national income. We then relate the macroeconomic model to policy
levers de-signed to achieve the ecological economics goals of
sustainable scale and just distribution.
Part V addresses
international trade. In Chapters 17 and 18, we discuss how different
economies interact and the troublesome issue of global economic
integration. We consider especially the consequences of global
integration for policy making. Chapter 19 looks at financial issues
such as balance of payments and exchange rates, and examines the
implications of globalization for macroeconomic policy.
Part VI focuses on
policy. Chapter 20 presents the general design principles of policy.
Chapter 21 reviews a number of specific policy options that primarily
affect scale, Chapter 22 reviews policies that primarily affect
distribution, and Chapter 23 reviews policies that primarily affect
allocation.
Our concluding
chapter, Looking Ahead, once again reflects on the ethical assumptions
of ecological economics. We call for a return to the beginnings of
economics as a moral philosophy explicitly directed toward raising the
quality of life of this and future generations.
In summary,
neoclassical economic theory arose primarily as an effort to explain the
market economy. Ecological economics takes a more inclusive, and
activist, position. We describe the nature of scarce resources and the
ends for which they should be used and proactively prescribe
appropriate institutions for their efficient allocation in a social
context of just distribution and sustainable scale. We have the basic
allocative institution of the market—it needs improvement, but at least
it exists. We have no institution for limiting scale, and our
institutions for governing distribution (antitrust, progressive
taxation) have been allowed to atrophy. We know that building
institutions is a political task and that "politics is the art of the
possible." That is a wise conservative counsel. Yet that dictum also
prohibits attempting true physical impossibilities in a vain effort to
avoid apparent political "impossibilities." When faced with the unhappy
dilemma of choosing between a physical or a political impossibility, it
is better to attempt the politically "impossible."
Environmental Justice in America: A New Paradigm by Edwardo Lao
Rhodes (Indiana University Press) examines the issue of environmental
justice as a public policy concern and recommends the use of a new
methodology for evaluating environmental justice problems. Rather than
argue the merits of growth versus environmental protection, Edwardo Lao
Rhodes makes the case that race and class were not a major concern of
environmental policy until the 1990s. Why this was so and why awareness
of social justice must be an important consideration in thinking about
environmental impact take up the first part of the book. Part II looks
more closely at public policy concerns and discusses the methodological
approaches that shed light on the problem of environmental justice.
Rhodes proposes the application of "data envelopment analysis" as a
more useful risk-assessment tool than the current methodologies. Part
III examines a complex case involving the disposal of hazardous
material in rural Noxubee County, Mississippi. The acknowledgment that
it was difficult to arrive at an "equitable" solution in Noxubee leads
to a discussion of recommendations to help ensure that sharing the
burden of risk will become a fundamental part of environmental policy.
Though the book is primarily concerned with justice issues in the United
States, it links these issues to international environmental justice
programs and to issues of national sovereignty, to the paternalism of
developed nations toward the underdeveloped world, and to notions of
economic necessity.
EDWARDO LAO RHODES is
Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at the Indiana University
School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
Summary: In the
chapters of Part 1, we explore the key dimensions of the
environmental-justice issues. Given their early stages of development,
a necessary exercise is establishing a working set of terms for
discussion. After the Chapter 1 introduction of the topic, Chapter 2
provides short expositions and illustrations defining key terms in this
debate, such as environmental racism, environmental equity,
environmental justice, and environmental protection rights. As Chapter 2
explains, much misunderstanding and misinterpretation of conditions in
this area directly result from participants hearing the same terms but
assigning them different meanings and significance. While the
definitions provided are neither definitive nor exhaustive, they do
establish a fixed starting point for subsequent discussion. A very
important feature of Chapter z will be specifying a matrix
classification of environmental-justice issues based on whether the
issues are geographically and location specific or population and
nonlocation specific. Confusion over "environmental-justice remedies,"
or even how to analyze a particular environmental-justice problem, often
springs from failing to appreciate the inherent difference between
types of environmental-justice issues.
Chapter 3 explores the
question, Why were race and other factors of societal stratification
left out of the original environmental agenda? Our initial focus in this
chapter will be on the early preservation/conservation roots of the
modern environmental movement and what those roots mean in terms of
modern attitudes and agendas. A case is made that a major reason for
the modern agendas' neglect can be traced backed to the foundation
philosophy and early beginnings of the modern environmental movement.
It is argued that many of the questioned behavior and policies
encountered in environmental organizations have less to do with some
deliberate racism or social elitism in the movement and more to do with
these organizations having evolved from an ethos that was indifferent to
the needs of the poor and minorities. Such indifference in part has led
to the evolution of organizational agendas that have either no clear
concept of social ethics or with social ethics skewed in such a way as
to make them appear almost callous.
However, as will
become more evident from what follows in this and several subsequent
chapters, no single factor can be identified as the prime culprit. The
reasons for the agenda omissions are many and interrelated. To a lesser
extent, the chapter also examines the impact of introducing race and
similar social dynamics into current environmental policy
considerations. But make no mistake: the issue is not just one of race.
The larger issue examined is the reason for the absence of almost any
concern in these agendas about the differentiated social/economic/health
effects of both environmental activities and policies.
The chapter explores
the idea that in many ways, concerns over social/ economic/health
conditions and the ramifications of environmental policies and
activities may have been simply beyond the threshold of perception of
these organizations. It is not a question of rejection, but rather one
of obliviousness to the existence or importance of such social ethics
issues in environmental policy. One policy analyst noted a lack of
concern and indifference exhibited when exploring with a group of
environmental science and policy students the economic ramifications of
a blanket imposition of a certain environmental policy that could have
a large negative impact on regional employment and economic well-being.
As he commented to one of the most vocal students, who felt nothing
should stand in the way of such a "sound" environmental policy, "I can
see you have never been hungry."
Chapter 4 follows up
on the exploration of Chapter 3 with an examination and argument for
why the environmental-justice movement has only recently become such a
public issue when the conditions of differentiated environmental impacts
have existed for so long. It observes that all social and economic
policy movements must go through an evolutionary process which for the
nascent environmental-justice movement did not coincide with the
mainstream environmental movement. This evolution has been described in
different ways, but typically, such descriptions begin with an
issue-recognition stage, followed by ever-increasing public awareness
and debate on the issue, culminating in the formulation of specific
legislative agenda items that may or may not be enacted.
The final two chapters
in Part 1 consider first the question of minority attitudes toward
environmental issues and then the problems of establishment agencies'
attitudes toward minority or class concerns. Chapter 5 summarizes a
series of national surveys conducted over a number of years on minority
attitudes toward several dimensions of environmental policy and
environmental conditions, and the relative importance of environmental
protection versus other socioeconomic conditions, such as crime,
employment, and education. These surveys reveal a level of minority
concern about environmental issues not too dissimilar from that of the
majority population. These surveys do not support the notion of minority
lack of environmental involvement or presence in the decision-making
process due to lack of environmental concern. What does emerge is a
suggestion that in some cases, while important, environmental issues
may, however, occupy a lower position of importance relative to issues
such as crime, education, or poverty.
The last chapter in
Part 1, Chapter 6, looks at the US. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) as a representative of the general attitude that governmental
environmental agencies have exhibited toward the issue of environmental
justice. Both in personnel makeup and personnel attitudes, the EPA, in
spite of a concerted effort to introduce environmental justice as an
issue in their policy process, faces a difficult problem of cultural
resistance. Even more to the point, the chapter points out that
relative to most of the other environmental and natural resource
management government agencies such as the Department of Energy or the
Department of the Interior, the EPA has actually come the furthest.
In any lengthy
discussion of a major socioeconomic policy issue, such as environmental
justice, at some point one has to deal with what government's role
should be. As important as it was to appreciate the dynamics of the
evolution and process of environmental justice, it is equally important
to carefully consider what role, if any, government can and should take
in confronting this issue and the specific form of that role. Not all
socioeconomic problems require a governmental solution. An important
policyanalytic achievement is determining when not to call in the
government troops. An essential feature of the question, What ... and
how? is at a practical level-examining how to actually assess specific
conditions and their possible policy significance. Chapters 7 through 9
attempt to answer this question by exploring the following operational
sets of criteria:
-
Reasons for
government involvement in environmental justice.
-
Approaches to
measuring environmental socioeconomic impact, whether
-
by governmental or
nongovernmental organizations.
-
Demonstration of a
method for assessing environmental-justice conditions that involve
multiple risks.
Chapter 7 begins this
exploration: it argues that from the perspective of maximizing overall
social welfare, government involvement can be justified only in the
presence of very specific socioeconomic conditions. And in the specific
case of environmental justice, there are instances where these
conditions may not occur. Most of these necessary and sufficient
conditions revolve around the occurrence of what economists call market
failure. Of course, all government intervention does not entail
responding to market failure. But it may be argued that in the case of
most environmental-justice problems, market failure should be the
guiding criterion for any corrective government involvement.' Ignoring
this guiding principle, government intervention in non-market-failure
environmental-justice situations, while perhaps assisting a few, will
often result in a worsening of society's overall welfare.'
But recognizing the
reasons for government involvement in the abstract and identifying
specific occurrences in the real world are two very different exercises.
As will become clearer in Chapters 8 and 9, the issues of government
involvement in many environmental-justice cases greatly depend on proper
measurements of environmental-justice conditions and occurrences. In
fact, a major stumbling block in developing a comprehensive federal
environmental-justice policy is the poor condition of available
measurement, or lack of understanding of the measurement, of occurrences
of environmental injustice. Poor or inappropriate measurement in this
case can lead to misguided intervention decisions. This problem returns
us to the axiom that mere observation of an instance of unequal
distribution of environmental burdens and benefits does not
automatically qualify an event as a case of environmental injustice.
Taking this a step
further, and assuming that the question of the form of intervention is
resolved, the challenge becomes how to select the appropriate level and
scope of government involvement. That is, is the government activity
one that should be primarily local or state based, or is it more
properly federally based? Or should it be a multilevel endeavor? To add
to the complexity of the problem, most area-specific
environmental-justice problems are just that: area specific, local in
both their source and effect. But does this locality parameter mean that
the appropriate level of government involvement should also be local?
What if similar local patterns can be detected over a national or
regional area? What about non-area-specific problems such as farm worker
pesticide exposure, lead poisoning, or contaminated fish consumption?
Are state or federal actions the proper response to these problems?
What about a purely local system that exhibits locality differences that
resemble the prisoner's dilemma? That is, those localities with the more
restrictive local rules are placed at a competitive disadvantage with
other localities in trying to encourage business location in their
community. Will not a local-only solution result, nationally or
regionally, in a less than optimal outcome?'
Political realities
and needs will undoubtedly shape much of the government
environmental-justice agenda. Nevertheless, a more careful assessment
of the question of government involvement still offers a background or
foundation on which the politics of action can be played out. In many
cases, it is not a choice of a politically viable but inefficient
response versus a politically unpalatable but efficient response. Many
policy mistakes in past regulatory actions, especially in the
environmental area, have been due less to a concession to political
realities and more to simple ignorance of the dynamics of the
socioeconomic forces involved. Even politicians occasionally like to
make sense when given the opportunity.
Role of Public-Policy
Analysis: In trying for a more rational approach to understanding,
assessing, and responding to the issue of environmental justice, a
natural decision is to turn to a problem-framing and decision-making
approach such as publicpolicy analysis. Granted, no real-world policy
activity in the environmental area, or most other areas of government
intervention, reflects a purely "rational" response to a socioeconomic
problem. Embedded in any policy decision are such factors as the
appeasement of constituency groups, political expediency, and many other
objectives in which resources are used inefficiently. But while
admitting that all choices are not immediately rational, such an
admission does not diminish the attraction of evaluating an issue such
as environmental justice from a perspective other than pure
emotionalism or political expediency.
An important point to
recognize about most environmental-justice issues is that they seldom
involve purely social policy circumstances.' Whether it is
decision-making about site location, the use of pesticides in farming,
or protocols for the clean-up of hazardous sites, market-driven forces
play the major role in outcomes, regardless of other prejudices or
biases. There is no evidence that firms or business enterprises,
whatever the biases of their decision-makers, choose, for example,
minority communities as the sites for a particular burdensome
environmental activity out of some desire to discriminate against
minorities. Firms, like people, seldom discriminate unless it is in
their best perceived interest. Minority communities often lack political
clout, lack risk information, are in a weak economic position, or have
other disadvantages that make them, purely from a market-driven
perspective, a logical location choice. Thus, policy solutions that
focus on changing underlying biases and attitudes while ignoring the
market realities that allowed these biases and attitudes to reach
fruition seldom succeed. And hence, viewing environmental-justice issues
through the lens of public-policy analysis is not just a curious
exercise, but a necessary condition for successful government response.
The field of
public-policy analysis over the last twenty to twenty-five years has
rapidly developed as an interrelated collection of methods, concepts,
and constructs for evaluating, understanding, and guiding government
intervention into what previously have been essentially private market
activities. Borrowing heavily from economics, management science, and to
a lesser extent political science, public-policy analysis attempts to
provide a guideline for possible government response to socioeconomic
problems, and at the same time, it provides a framework for assessment
of the subsequently developed public activities. Although far from
perfect, the policy-analytic approach definitely offers a more
structured and rational basis for what to do and when to do it. To the
problems at hand, a policy analysis approach to environmental-justice
issues does not guarantee solutions, but it does offer useful insights
into where to begin looking for them.
A Case of
Environmental Justice The Disposal of Hazardous Material in Noxubee
County, Mississippi : As a problem in environmental equity, the case of
Noxubee County, Mississippi, is noteworthy for its ordinariness. An
underinformed minority population appears to be the potential victim of
both environmental and economic exploitation by a giant industrial
enterprise trying to ensure its own economic well-being. Also playing a
role in this drama are institutions as varied as a long-established
community civil rights organization opposing its state chapter, a major
midwestern university that made a questionable land decision, a state
government anxious to boost regional economic development, a federal
government agency anxious to avoid a lose-lose engagement, local
commerce groups opposing economic development, mainstream environmental
organizations trying to gain credibility in the environmental-justice
area, and finally, student organizations from the same midwestern
university newly discovering environmental racism. What develops is that
in such a complex scenario, where all outcomes have both a positive and
a negative side, labels of "good guy" and "bad guy" prove difficult to
assign. The "right position" is a vague place that everyone professes to
occupy, but to which no one has an exclusive claim.
Valuing the Environment in Developing Countries: Case Studies edited
by David Pearce, Corin Pearce, Charles Palmer (Edward Elgar) brings
together well-wrought case-studies of how economics is incorporating the
insights of ecology and other environmental sciences into schemes to
revalue and create new incentives to preserve and manage natural
resources rather than exploit them. This volume should become a widely
used supplement text in environmental economics and development
strategies studies.
The science of environmental economics is
concerned with an array of issues, but they can be conveniently
summarized as: (a) measuring the `state of the environment' in terms of
how people feel about their surroundings, (b) assessing the causes of
environmental degradation, and (c) designing incentive-based policies
for improving the environment. In each case the economic perspective
differs markedly from what other disciplines would do if confronted with
the same issues. A scientist would measure, say, emissions of air
pollutant and their atmospheric concentration. This would be a measure
of the `state' of the environment. Causes would most probably be
assessed by scientists and most social scientists in terms of `who does
what'. Thus a slash-and-burn agriculturist, or a logging company, would
be seen as the `cause' of the problem of deforestation. To the economist
this identification of the proximate agent is not what is meant by a
cause. Real, or fundamental, causes relate to the incentive systems that
give rise to deforestation; that is, what drives the logger to behave as
he does, and why does the agriculturist do what he does? To the
economist, the answers lie in the many, varied and frequently
contradictory signals that economic systems and governments relay to the
proximate agent. It might be a subsidy that is contingent on clearing
forest land, or the sale of a forest concession to log which does not
reflect the true costs of logging. From this analysis of causes it also
follows that the economic approach tends to identify different policy
prescriptions to other disciplines. Traditional policies tended to focus
on bans or quotas, limits and standards. The policy was `obey this or
face the following consequence', or `command and control'. Today some
disciplines seem content with calling for more participation and
'stakeholder dialogue'. Both are important but neither is a recipe for
success unless accompanied by a careful analysis of the true causes of
environmental degradation. In turn, policy has to address those causes,
not the cosmetic issues, or, dare one say, the `politically correct'
issues. Policy is therefore likely to be directed towards definitions
and arrangements of property rights, prices, removal of price
disincentives, information and reform of governance.
Probably the most
controversial of the stages in the three-part sequence of the economic
approach is the way economists assign importance to the state of the
environment. Crudely put, the more people care about an issue the more
important it is. The economist's approach to measuring the state of the
environment is therefore based on human preferences. Scientific measures
of environmental trends are important, but they are the object of what
people care about. They do not therefore measure the state of the
environment, whereas scientific information coupled with preference
measurement does measure the state of the environment. A surprising
number of scientists are wholly or partly indifferent to what people
care about. This indifference often stems from scientific arrogance -
the feeling that experts `know better' than the `common man'. But some
attitudes stem from a belief that, if humans are to survive and prosper
on this earth, we cannot trust human preferences to ensure that survival
will occur. Nowhere is that view more strongly expressed than in much of
the literature on `sustainable development', a notion of an economic and
social development path that tries to ensure a lasting rise in human
well-being. The problem is that many advocates of sustainable
development confuse 'sustainability' with 'survivability'. The latter
is hardly worth the candle if survival entails increasing immiseration.
Focus on the notion of human well-being and its sustained increase over
time would avoid this confusion and its anti-democratic overtones.
Again, this is why economists (in the main - many of them fall into the
same trap) emphasize the role played by human preferences.
If preferences are
central, how are they measured? The economist brings to bear on this
question the whole panoply of welfare economics and the formal links
that it establishes between preferences and willingness to pay for a
benefit and willingness to accept compensation for a loss. This is the
cornerstone of cost-benefit analysis. It has its faults but, to date, no
other evaluation procedure comes close to it in terms of theoretical
coherence. The idea of measuring preferences as an input to cost-benefit
approaches has been around in economics since Jules Dupuit thought about
how to justify the costs of roads and bridges in France in the 1840s.
Not surprisingly, therefore, there is a vast literature covering the
technical issues and case studies in developed economies. The
application of cost-benefit approaches in the developing world is far
more recent. The major texts emerged in the late 1960s and into the
1970s (Marglin et al., 1972; Little and Mirrlees, 1974; Squire and van
der Tak, 1975). But none of these texts dealt with environmental assets,
despite the fact that environmental destruction has been extraordinarily
rapid in the poorer world. Moreover, that destructive process has had
substantial negative effects on human well-being. The neglect of
environment in developing country cost-benefit analysis, which is
mirrored today in a widespread ignorance of environmental economics
among development economists, was therefore serious. It has since been
rectified in the environmental economics literature, though not, sadly,
in most of the development literature.
One issue that may
explain the neglect of environmental economics in development work
extends the notion of the irrelevance of preferences to decision making
in general. If people in rich countries cannot be trusted with their own
futures, how can we trust people who are poor, ill-informed and
generally preoccupied with the problems of survival? Oddly, this view is
often accompanied by the contrary assumption that poor people must
always be consulted about their future, a wholly correct approach but
one which seems to stop short of actually measuring their preferences.
In the early days of environmental economics in developing countries it
was quite common to come across the view that `cultural' differences
made the use of economic valuation inappropriate or unworkable in poor
countries. The contributions to this volume are testimony to the error
of this assumption. They are all concerned, in one way or the other,
with the measurement of preferences for environmental change.
The current volume is
one of two, the first dealing with the developing world and the second
of which will deal with the developed world. Most, but not all, of the
contributions come from authors who have at one time or the other worked
in the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment
(CSERGE) at University College London, in association with the
University of East Anglia. CSERGE was founded in 1991 on the basis of
the 'state-cause-policy' paradigm identified above. By and large,
CSERGE's work has been driven by economic analysis. Hence the current
volume is focused entirely on economic approaches. The range of
applications is very wide, from water quality to air pollution, from
wetlands to wildlife tourism. The common theme is that economic
valuation based on what people want is perfectly feasible in the
developing world. None of the authors pretends that the techniques they
adopt are perfect, but they show how they can be applied, often with
limited resources, to critical issues in development. A second theme,
which is in no way a logical consequence of measuring preferences, is
that environmental assets are important - the resulting economic
valuations are often large relative to the opportunity cost of
surrendering the environmental resource. Third, some of the chapters
show that the 'non-market' benefits of the assets in question are
especially important for low income groups. It is a common error to
find `income' being measured by wages or receipts from the sale of
crops, the apparently non-monetized benefits that many poor people get
from environmental resources being ignored. Fourth, but only implicit
in most of the chapters, what local people are willing to pay for the
conservation of environmental assets may be a small fraction of global
willingness to pay.
People in developed
economies are willing to pay a lot to be tourists in wildlife-rich
countries, and many will pay simply to conserve the asset in question
without any probability that they will actually see the asset. This
non-use value does much to explain donations to charities that
specialize in environmental conservation in the developing world.
Why might rich
people's valuations be relevant to developing country conservation
policy? Because valuation is only one stage of a two-stage process. If
we can demonstrate how important the environment is in terms of
willingness to pay, then the next stage is to devise ways in which those
valuations can be realized as cash flows. The issue is to design
`capture' mechanisms. A cost-benefit analysis does not concern itself
with capture mechanisms - that is, means of converting non-monetary
benefits to cash flows. If benefits exceed costs, that is sufficient
cause to recommend conservation. But for a great many policy contexts,
costs and benefits matter only if they are associated with real resource
flows. Capture mechanism design is therefore critical if, say, the black
rhinoceros or the Chinese panda is to avoid extinction.
One other theme is
relevant. A great deal of interest has been shown in recent years in the
idea of extending national income accounts to reflect environmental
asset change. Forests can be depleted and GNP might actually rise. But
the rise masks a reduction in the underlying stock of economic assets
since the forest stock is a constituent part of those assets. It is
therefore important to set the record straight and include the
depletion of the forest as a loss of real wealth. Amending income
accounts in this way seems worthwhile, but its usefulness should not be
exaggerated. Far too many politicians have not understood what modifying
the national accounts means, and far too many believe that, once they
have been modified in some way, economic decisions will change. There is
no real evidence to support this view.
Economic valuation
thus has many uses. It can be used to modify national income accounts;
it can be used as an essential ingredient of cost-benefit analysis;
often overlooked, it can be used to signal that an issue is important in
economic terms, an argument that is sometimes powerful when the person
to be persuaded is the minister for finance. In the rich world it can be
used to measure damage liability and to set environmental taxes, both
uses also being relevant to the developing world as the transition to
higher incomes comes about and environmental institutions grow.
Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Ethics by Robert Phillips, R.
Edward Freeman (Berrett-Koehler)
Business ethics has never been more prominent than today and stakeholder
theory is, unquestionably, the most popular framework for discussing
business ethics. However, there remains a relative shortage of in-depth
treatments of the topic, and these tend to be "how-to" manuals rather
than academic works. In short, there is a dearth of books on the market
that provide a detailed defense of the actual "theory" behind
stakeholder theory. Remarkably, the only similar book in existence, R.
Edward Freeman’s classic, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach
has been out of print for a decade. Author Robert Phillips was doctoral
student of Freeman’s at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, so
Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Ethics is not only a natural
outgrowth of this earlier work but is also long overdue for publication.
- Business ethics, including corporate responsibility, has become a
very hot area in the popular as well as the academic literature
- Stakeholder theory is a prominent popular and academic way of
understanding business ethics, however no full-scale defense of
stakeholder theory exists
- Examines stakeholder theory from the perspective of several fields
of study including strategic management, economics, moral and
political philosophy, social psychology, and environmental ethics
A look at recent
headlines proves that business ethics has never been more prominent than
it is today. As scandal after scandal emerges in the American business
world, we are forced to ask: Is there no ethics in business? Haven't the
last 25 years of teaching and research in business ethics by
philosophers and management thinkers made a difference? For whose
benefit should a business organization be managed?
Author Robert Phillips
cuts through many vexing questions to propose a theory of organizational
ethics that takes two important ideas seriously. The first is that
organizations are dependent on their stakeholders for their successes
and their failures. The second idea is the multifaceted theory of ethics
from philosopher John Rawls-the most prominent moral and political
philosopher of the twentieth century-and his followers. The heart of
Rawls's view is his theory of justice articulated in the principle of
equal liberty.
Stakeholder theory is
unquestionably the most popular framework for discussing business
ethics. With the exception of R. Edward Freeman's classic, Strategic
Management: A Stakeholder Approach, which has been out of print for a
decade, there is a dearth of books that provide a detailed defense of
the actual "theory" behind stakeholder theory. Thus, Phillips'
Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Ethics is not only a natural
outgrowth of this earlier work, but also one that is long overdue for
publication.
Addressing the
difficult question of what the moral underpinning of stakeholder theory
should be, Phillips elaborates a "principle of stakeholder fairness"
based on Rawls's ideas. Phillips shows how this fairness principle
clarifies several long-standing questions in stakeholder theory,
including: Who are an organization's legitimate stakeholders? What is
the basis for this legitimacy? What, if any, are the limits of
stakeholder theory? What is the relationship between stakeholder theory
and other moral, political, and business ethical theories? Applying
research from many related disciplines, Stakeholder Theory and
Organizational Ethics is an overdue response to several longstanding
and fundamental points of contention within business ethics and
management theory.
Robert Phillips
received his PhD. from the University of Virginia's Darden School where
he studied with premier business ethicists R. Edward Freeman and
Patricia Werhane. He has held faculty positions at Georgetown and the
Wharton School prior to coming to the University of San Diego where he
now holds a joint appointment in the Management and Social/Legal areas
of the School of Business as an Assistant Professor.
The dissertation upon which the book is based was a finalist for Best
Dissertation at the Academy of Management Social Issues in Management
division and the material that forms the foundation of Chapter Two in
the book was co-winner of the Best Paper award at the Society for
Business Ethics Annual Meeting in 1997.
The Elements of Statistics with Applications to Economics and the Social
Sciences by H. Joseph Newton, Jane Harvill, James Bernard Ramsey
(Duxbury) Designed for instructors who want to stress the understanding
of basic concepts and the development of "statistical intuition," this
book demonstrates that statistical reasoning is everywhere and that
statistical concepts are as important to students' personal lives as
they are to their future professional careers. Ramsey aims to develop
statistically literacy - from the ability to read and think critically
about statistics published in popular media to the ability to analyze
and act upon statistics gathered in the business world. Each chapter
contains a large set of exercises and the text comes with a simplified
student version of S-Plus. Most of the computational work required for
these exercises can be carried out through a menu-driven GUI interface.
To help facilitate learning, many worked examples are also provided. The
mathematical requirements include a little beyond what a student should
have upon entry into a first calculus course in an American university,
i.e., little beyond basic algebra. An appendix explains all the
mathematics used in the text. The underlying philosophy of this book is
that given a reasonable level of depth in the analysis, the student can
later acquire a much more extensive, and even more intensive, exposure
to statistics on their own or in the context of the work environment.
Some use of calculus is included. Use of the computer is integrated
throughout.
The Elements of Statistics with Applications to Economics and the Social
Sciences is an innovative and excellent undergraduate level text on
the foundations and reasoning of statistics estimation and inference.
This book is written for the curious student who is interested in
understanding the basics of statistical analysis, the intuition behind
statistical and information processing, and the process of decision
making based on some data. Most importantly, in this book Ramsey takes
the student through a fascinating voyage of discovery. In this voyage,
Ramsey devotes significant effort to explaining what are the fundamental
rules underlying most data analyses within the social and natural
sciences. This is done without requiring much prior knowledge of
calculus and with almost no formal mathematics. Ramsey accomplishes this
task by building on a large number of real world examples, some of which
he re-evaluates at the end of each chapter. By doing so, he allows the
reader (student or researcher) to see the real value of the knowledge
just acquired in the most recent chapter. That is, "what can I
understand now about that specific problem that I could not understand
before." In that way the student is going through an on-going learning
process. A process that allows one to understand the data by recognizing
what is observed and what is not observed, what is random and what is
not random, what process may have generated the data, and what one can
infer from the data.
To summarize, once Ramsey expresses his philosophy of approaching
statistical analyses, he proceeds to teach statistics in a completely
new and innovative way. First, unlike existing undergraduate textbooks,
Ramsey teaches the students via a "discovery" approach where each step
starts with a new set of questions and the students are guided toward
discovering the relevant answer, given the information they have.
Second, the text is easy to read and is full with real world examples
taken from a large number of disciplines. Finally, the book is equipped
with complete software (S-Plus) that provides the necessary tool for the
students to practice and understand how to work with real data. This is
an ideal undergraduate level textbook. It is a very useful statistical
text for the open minded and advanced undergraduate student and provides
the teacher with a perfect teaching tool.
Contents: 1. STATISTICS AS SCIENCE. What You Will
Learn in this Chapter. Introduction. Statistics: A Framework for
Decision Making. Statistics and the Methodology of Science. Statistics
as Science Itself. Summary. Case Study: Was There Age Discrimination in
a Public Utility. Addendum for the Reader. Exercises. 2. TYPES OF
VARIABLES, MEASUREMENTS, AND EXPLANATION. What You Will Learn in this
Chapter. Introduction. Types of Variables. Random and Deterministic
Variables. Summary. Case Study: Was There Age Discrimination in a Public
Utility. Figures. Exercises. 3. HOW TO DESCRIBE AND SUMMARIZE RANDOM
DATA BY GRAPHICAL PROCEDURES. What You Will Learn in this Chapter.
Introduction. Describing Data by Box and Whisker Plots. Plotting
Relative Frequencies. Cumulative Frequencies. Histogram. Summary. Case
Study: Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures.
Exercises. 4. MOMENTS AND THE SHAPE OF HISTOGRAMS. What You Will Learn
in this Chapter. Introduction. The Mean, a Measure of Location. The
Second Moment as a Measure of Spread. General Definition of Moments.
Standardized Moments. Standardization of Variables. Summary. Case Study:
Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 5.
THE DESCRIPTION OF BIVARIATE DATA. What You Will Learn From this
Chapter. Introduction. Three Dimensional Histograms. Scatter Plots.
Standardization for Pairs of Random Variables. Covariation and m11, the
first Cross Product Moment. Linear Statistical Relationships and the
Correlation Coefficient. The Correlation Coefficient and "Slope". Rank
Correlation. Bivariate Categorical Data. Summary. Case Study: Was There
Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 6. THE
THEORY OF STATISTICS: AN INTRODUCTION. What You Will Learn in this
Chapter. Introduction. The Theory: First Steps. Conditional Probability.
Random Variables: Intuition Made Formal. Statistical Independence.
Summary. Case Study: Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility.
Figures. Exercises. 7. THE GENERATION AND DESCRIPTION OF DISCRETE
PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION. What You Will Learn in This Chapter.
Introduction. Combinations and Permutation. Generating Binomial
Probabilities. Expectation. The Cumulative Distribution Function.
Summary. Case Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility Study:
Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 8.
THE GENERATION OF SOME CONTINUOUS PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS. What You
Will Learn in this Chapter. Introduction. How to Express Probability in
Terms of Continuous Random Variables. Theoretical Moments and Density
Functions. The Uniform Distribution. The Normal, or Gaussian, Density
Function and the Central Limit Theorem. Summary. Case Study: Was There
Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 9.
ELEMENTARY SAMPLING THEORY. What You Will Learn in This Chapter.
Introduction. An Illustrative Example. An Introduction to the Theory of
Simple Random Sampling. Stratified Random Sampling. Summary. Case Study:
Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises.
10. ESTIMATION OF THEORETICAL MOMENTS AND THE PARAMETES OF PROBABILITY
DISTRIBUTIONS. What You Will Learn in this Chapter. Introduction. The
Estimation of Theoretical Moments: Large Sample Results. The Estimation
of Moments and Parameters: Confidence Intervals and Small Sample
Results. Maximum Likelihood Estimators. Summary. Case Study: Was There
Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 11.
HYPOTHESIS TESTING: OR HOW TO DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN TWO ALTERNATIVES.
What You Will Learn in this Chapter. Introduction. The Basic Idea of
Hypothesis Tests. Simple and Composite Hypothesis Test. Two Sided
Hypothesis Tests. Test of Proportions. Hypothesis Tests when the
Variance is Unknown. Some Practical Examples. Summary. Case Study: What
There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 12.
THE GENERATION OF BIVARIATE AND CONDITIONAL PROBABILTY DISTRIBUTIONS.
What You Will Learn in This Chapter. Introduction. Some Pragmatic
Examples. The Generation of Bivariate Discrete Distribution. The
Generation of Bivariate Continuous Distribution. Bivariate and
Conditional Distributions Obtained by Sampling. Summary. Case Study: Was
There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Exercises. 13. THE THEORY
AND PRACTICE OF REGRESSSION ANALYSIS. What You Will Learn in this
chapter. Introduction. The Regression Model. Estimation and Inference:
The Basics. Estimation and Inference: Confidence Intervals and
Hypothesis Tests. The Regression in Regression Analysis. Summary. Case
Study: Was There Age Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures.
Exercises. 12. COMPARING POPULATIONS THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE.
What You Will Learn in this Chapter. Introduction. An Introduction to
One Way Analysis of Variance. Summary. Case Study: Was There Age
Discrimination in a Public Utility. Figures. Exercises. 15.
RETROSPECTIVE. What You Will Learn in this Chapter. Introduction. A
Schematic Review of What You Have Learned. The Role of Statistics in
Everyday Life. Case Study: Was There Discrimination in a Public Utility.
The Relationship between Sciences and Statistics. What You Might Learn
Next in Statistics. Exercises. A. MATHEMATICAL APPENDIX: REVIEW OF
CONCEPTS AND CONVENTIONS. Notational Conventions. Indexing. Sigma
Notation. Elementary Set Theory. Elements of Calculus. Exercises. B.
DIRECTIONS FOR USING THE STUDENT VERSION OF S-PLUS 4.5 IN THIS TEXT. C.
DIRECTIONS FOR USING MICROSOFT EXCEL IN THIS TEXT.
Reconstructing Economic Theory: The Problem of Human Agency y Allen
Oakley (Edward Elgar) This book applies a critical focus on the extent
to which methodological practices in mainstream economic theory impede
our understanding of substantive economic phenomena as the products of
human action. Economists, in general, work with a concept and
representation of the human agent that is palpably unrealistic. Most do
so, not out of ignorance, but rather to maintain the pretence that
economics is the only true science among the social sciences because it
enforces the use of rigorous and formalist methods of argument.
Allen Oakley's inquiry
pursues ideas of social ontology pertinent to reconstructing economic
theory in a way that addresses this lack of realism. These ideas take
the form of a revised metatheory for a humanistic economics in which
priority is given to properly understanding and depicting the human
origins of economic phenomena, rather than to meeting the imposed
demands of scientistic rigour. Indeed, he demonstrates that many
ontological ideas pertinent to such a reconstruction are extant in the
literature of social philosophy and theory, a literature largely
neglected by economic theorists.
Economists and social
scientists concerned about the nature and problems of mainstream
economic theory will gain a great deal from reading this challenging
book.
The implicit critical
focus of this book is the limited extent to which current methodological
practices in economics enable us to understand substantive economic
phenomena as products of human agency. Economists in general, especially
those considered to be doing orthodox things, work with a concept and
representation of the human agent that is palpably unrealistic. Most do
so not out of ignorance, for if pressed, they would all admit this to be
the case. They do so, rather, because it is convention and accepted
practice. Indeed, to do otherwise, risks professional suicide and peer
derision as a `pop sociologist'. The deeper reason for it, though, is
the pretence of mainstream economists that economics is the real science
among the social sciences. It has this status because of its use of
rigorous and formalist methods of argument. This is a sacred belief and
is defended with religious zeal.
My contribution here
is not another critique of mainstream economic theory as such. There are
already extant a number of penetrating critical deconstructions of the
contemporary discipline. These have established repeatedly that, from a
number of different perspectives, the accepted mode of constructing
economic theory is fundamentally flawed. My concern is, rather, that
captured in the title of the book: the inquiry pursues ideas pertinent
to reconstructing economic theory. And, to keep the project within
manageable bounds, the endeavour is confined to the pre-substantive
level. This restriction limits my inquiry to reconstructing the
foundations so that they can carry a new edifice. These foundations will
be in the form of a revised metatheory that provides the essential
premises required by a more completely humanistic economics. The
underpinning belief will be that any attempt so to reconstruct economic
theory must give priority to understanding properly the human origins of
its object phenomena, and that this understanding should precede and
dominate the design of its methodology.
There is already a
consciousness among some mainstream economists that there exist problems
with their theories that are attributable to the treatment of the human
agent as purely homo oeconomicus. In the extant efforts to make
mainstream economic theory `more realistic', the most common feature is
some extension and revision of the way the human agent is represented.
These extensions include amendments to what it means for agents to be
`rational', more attention to the demand for information in
decision-making, more explicit representations of the interdependence
and interactions between
agents, and a greater
recognition of the social and institutional context of, and influences
on, economic actions. But what remains unchallenged for most of these
economists is the deductive-nomological method that dictates the form of
their analyses. The effect has been that the genuine intention to be
`more realistic' has been truncated by the seemingly irrevocable
precondition that it not impede the established norms of formalism and
logical rigour that define what is acceptable in the construction of
economic theory.
By contrast, I will
argue that in treating economics as incorrigably a human and social
science, the primary concern should be with the implications for
economic theory construction of adopting a `realistic' representation of
the human agent and of human action. Among philosophers of the social
sciences, this is no novel suggestion. Such visions of agents and
actions are already extant in philosophical anthropology and social
theory. It is a well-established thesis in anthropological and social
inquiry that the actions of human beings qua agents are the joint
product of their congenital and acquired characteristics, in combination
with the multifarious influences of those situational structures and
social relationships that they accept and treat as relevant to their
well-being. These are the key tenets of the metatheory called
situational analysis.
The strategy of my
inquiry will be to explore a selected range of past and contemporary
ideas concerning the nature and role of human agency in understanding
and accounting for the phenomena of the human realm generally, and that
part of it that relates to economics in particular. It will become
apparent that although there exists an extensive modern literature on
the themes pertinent to situational analysis to be addressed in this
study, there remain a number of underappreciated and underutilized
contributions to the matters at hand by social philosophers and
theorists of the recent past. Each of the writers chosen for inclusion
here will be shown to have made some contribution to building up a
metatheory for the social sciences that has immediate relevance to a
reconstruction of economic theory.
The fundamental idea
upon which this study is based is a deceptively obvious and simple one.
It is that, undeniably, all the observed events and data we refer to as
economic originate in, and are generated by, human decisions and
actions. That is, the phenomena with which economists deal, be they of
private or government origin, are the results of individual and/or
collective human agency. The consequent belief underpinning arguments
here is that claims to know about and fully to understand, and thus to
be able to explain and perhaps make predictions about, economic
phenomena must be grounded in arguments that are, in principle at least,
reducible to arguments that refer to human action. It must be granted,
of course, that the individual human agent is not the only entity in the
human realm that is able to act, to be an agent in the sense of making a
difference. Nevertheless, all acting entities of concern to the social
sciences are manifestations of some complex of individual human actions.
What needs to be recognized in the `reduction' to such human action is
the fact that often the actions of complex entities cannot be reduced to
any mere summation of what individuals contributed to it. Actions within
the structures of such entities involve such a complex of interactions,
both formal and informal, that fully accounting for and discursively
representing the elements of the entity's action would simply be beyond
our analytical capacities. That is, such entities have `a life of their
own' that is a product of, but never fully reducible to, the actions of
its constituent individuals. It remains the case, though, that any
account of an observed phenomenon that stops short of some endeavour to
trace its human origins cannot but be incomplete.
The intention of my
study, then, can be seen to be confined to making a fundamental
contribution to what is, implicitly, the need for a much more
farreaching methodological and substantive reconstruction. To this end,
while the inclusion of an extended vision of human agency into the
theory of economic phenomena will be necessary to such a reconstruction,
it cannot be sufficient to ensure the development of the full range of
revisions required to deliver a proper understanding and representation
of these phenomena. The developments undertaken here leave the matters
of understanding and discursively representing the human agent and human
agency in particular substantive cases largely unattended. Much
pertaining to methodology and substance remains to be done.
Economics 3rd Edition by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Carl E. Walsh (W.W.
Norton) The science of economics has made great strides in the past 25
years. We now understand such problems as the role of information in the
efficiency of economic outcomes, the importance of strategy in the
outcome of economic relationships, the significance of finance in our
understanding of the firm, and, most importantly, the ways in which
microeconomic phenomena relate to those of macroeconomics. With this
fresh and original textbook, an economics professor at Stanford
University brings new economics to an introductory course. Color
photographs and diagrams.
Author Introduction: The Third Edition of this
textbook has a number of significant changes. To begin with, it is now a
collaborative effort. By working together, we have been able to broaden
dramatically the range of experience and expertise that informs our
book. The result is a new edition that improves substantially over its
predecessors while still retaining their guiding principles.
As we worked on the revision we kept our sites on
four main objectives. The first was to ensure that the book continues to
provide students with a clear presentation of the basic competitive
model, while also ensuring that students can quickly move on to explore
the richness of modern economic analysis in areas such as the economics
of information, imperfect competition, and the economics of technology
and innovation. These areas, prominent in the previous editions, have
taken on an even greater relevance as information technologies change
the marketplace. Our second objective was to present macroeconomics in a
manner that builds on the way economic researchers and economists in
policymaking positions frame their analysis, while doing so in a manner
that prepares students for understanding the public debates on monetary
and fiscal policy. Our third objective was to present modern economics
in a way that is conducive to good teaching and student learning. Here,
we stress core concepts and have reorganized the book so that
instructors will find it flexible enough for a variety of classroom and
lecture settings. Whether it is used for a one‑semester course covering
the principles of microcconormcs and macroeconomics or for a one‑quarter
course devoted solely to either micro or macro, the new edition allows
instructors to combine core chapters with a selection of additional
chapters that contain extensive depth coverage of various topics, or
that focus on issues of current policy debate.
Much has changed in the modern economy and in
modern economics since the Second Edition of this text book. The
productivity slowdown that gripped the economy in the twenty years after
1973 was replaced in the last half of the 1990s by an apparent
productivity acceleration. The fiscal deficits of the 1990s were
replaced, as the century ended, with fiscal surplus, although the
economic slowdown and the War on Terrorism have quickly eroded these
surpluses. The long economic expansion of the 1990s came to an end when
the book was in the last stages of preparation. New technologies,
particularly those associated with information‑based systems, are
transforming the economy to such a degree that many observers have come
to describe the contemporary economic environment as a new economy. Our
fourth objective was to write a textbook that reflects the contemporary
scene. Thus, the Third Edition integrates the recent developments
associated with innovation and the digital economy by using examples
from the new economy.
Principles of Microeconomics: As we began work on
this edition, we were repeatedly reminded of the importance of writing a
textbook that reflects modern microeconomics‑one that recognizes the
importance of incentives, limited information, innovation, and
technology. The new economy has provided many new examples and case
studies to illustrate the core principles of economics. And the new
economy provides further evidence of the importance of information and
technology, topics whose treatment has always been one of the strengths
of the previous editions. The new economy, despite its current slump,
has forcefully driven home the critical role new technologies play in
the modern economy. For students to make sense of competition policy in
the twenty‑first century, they need to understand what network
externalities are and how information and ideas are different from
traditional goods and services.
In the presentation of microeconomics, previous
editions of this book have been distinguished by their emphasis on
information, imperfect markets, innovation, and technology. This
distinction continues to mark the Third Edition.
Key changes for the Third Edition:
A number of key changes have been made to the
structure of the microeconomics sections. These include:
-
The opening chapter (Chapter 1) uses the story of
the Internet to introduce basic concepts in economics. Five core
concepts (incentives, trade‑offs, exchange, information, and
distribution) are explained in this opening chapter and then woven
throughout the book in Thinking Like an Economist boxes that serve
to illustrate how these key concepts help students understand issues
from overloaded AOL modem servers (Chapter 1) to why developing
economies have supported trade liberalization for information
technologies but not for financial services (Chapter 18).
-
The organization has been streamlined to allow
the core material for the basic competitive model to be covered in
the first ten chapters. This is followed in Part 3 by six chapters
covering imperfect markets, information, and the role of the
government.
-
A new introductory chapter to Part 3 (Chapter 11)
provides an overview of imperfect competition in the goods market,
imperfect information, and imperfections in the labor market. This
is followed by individual chapters that deal with each topic in
greater depth. This allows instructors to introduce students to all
these important topics even in shorter courses or when both
microeconomics and macroeconomics need to be covered within a single
course.
-
Optional chapters have been collected together in
Part 4. Teachers who wish to go beyond the basic course comprised in
Chapters 1 through 16 may add in chapters from Part 4 as they see
fit. For instance, after covering the labor and capital markets in
Chapter 9, some teachers may wish to cover investment decisions,
discussed in Chapter 17, "A Student's Guide to Investing:'
Similarly, the other chapters of Part 4 can be used to satisfy
particular course objectives according to the teacher's needs. The
flow chart below shows the chapter dependencies for the book.
-
Strategic behavior permeates modern economic
analy sis, so we have added a new chapter (Chapter 19) that uses
simple examples to introduce students to the concepts of Nash
equilibrium, dominant strategies, backward induction, and sequential
and repeated games.
Principles of Macroeconomics: The year 2001 saw an
unprecedented period of sustained economic growth coming to an end,
reinforcing the need to provide students with a macroeconomic framework
that encompasses both growth and fluctuations. The model of fluctuations
in the Third Edition is ideal for helping students understand the Fed's
interest rate cuts during 2001, as well as the impact of fiscal policies
designed to cut taxes and increase expenditures.
The basic organization of macroeconomics remains
from the second edition, with the full‑employment model with flexible
wages and prices developed first, followed by a treatment of economic
fluctuations. Each part has seen major restructuring, however.
Key changes for the Third Edition:
- The macroeconomic presentation kicks off with a new introductory
chapter that deals with the major issues in macroeconomics.
- The material on the full‑employment model now places greater
stress on the role of the capital market and the real rate of
interest in ensuring aggregate demand and supply balance at
full‑employment output.
- The pickup in economic growth at the end of the 1990s and the
debate over the role of new technologies have meant that issues of
growth and productivity have reemerged as ones of critical
importance. Because the fullemployment model of Part 6 provides the
basis for understanding the economics of growth and productivity, we
now devote a complete chapter to these issues at an early stage in
the macro presentation.
- Because major central banks around the world no longer implement
monetary policy through explicit control of the money supply, the
traditional discussion of money demand and supply has been
de‑emphasized. Instead, monetary policy is discussed in terms of
nominal interest‑rate control. The book focuses on the federal funds
market so that students can gain an understanding of what the
Federal Reserve actually does when it intervenes to raise or lower
the rate.
- Over the last decade, both academic researchers and economists in
central bank research departments world wide have increasingly made
use of a basic foundation for macroeconomic policy analysis that
relies on three components. First, underlying wage and price
rigidities lead inflation to adjust in response to movements of
output around its full‑employment level and to expectations of
inflation. Second, aggregate demand depends on the real interest
rate and expectations of future income. And third, monetary policy
is represented by either a rule for setting the nominal rate of
interest or by the specification of the central bank's objectives,
such as is typified by an inflation‑targeting policy regime. The
model of economic fluctuations we use reflects this framework.
- The model of fluctuations is developed in terms of inflation and
output, and it integrates monetary policy based on the federal funds
rate. Thus, rather than develop an aggregate demand and supply
model based on the price level and then append a model of price
level adjustment to explain inflation, the entire discussion is
carried out in terms of inflation and output. This provides a more
integrated framework and is ideal for getting students to
understand monetary policy actions. It is also ideal for analyzing
both the inflation‑targeting policies adopted by major central banks
such as the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada and the actions
of other central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the European
Central Bank.
In revising the macroeconomics presentation, the
authors have continued to honor one of the central objectives that
motivated the earlier editions: to write a modern textbook that
reflects, as much as possible, the way economists approach their
subject. The treatment of macroeconomics in the new edition does this
while also presenting a model that students can apply directly to the
policy debates they read about in newspapers or hear reported on the
television.
Introduction to Economic Growth by Charles I. Jones (Second Edition:
W.W. Norton) One of the hottest fields in contemporary macroeconomics,
economic growth is both fascinating to theorists and critically
important to policy makers. In Introduction to Economic Growth—the only
text in the field designed specifically for advanced
undergraduates—Charles I. Jones explains in clear, direct language how
economists have come to understand the long-run growth of economies.
Beginning with empirical evidence—how rich are the rich countries, how
poor are the poor, and how fast do the rich and poor countries grow?
—Professor Jones then presents the major theories of economic growth,
from the Nobel Prize-winning work of Robert Solow to the new growth
theory that has ignited the field in recent years.
Inclusive Economics: Gandhian Method and Contemporary Policy by
Narendar Pani (Sage) Economics today is dominated by pragmatism. And
what is considered pragamatic can change all the time. George Bush may
have been elected on a platform of smaller government, but that has not
stopped him from launching a major expenditure thrust that has converted
a stable surplus budget into a major deficit one. If this change is good
for America and the world, fine. But how can we be sure that he is not
just doing what is expedient?
It is in such situations that a revival of Gandhian
method could be useful. Pani manages to bring out a method from Gandhi's
writings that can help ensure that pragmatism does not degenerate into
expediency. He builds a consistent inclusive method and places it in the
context of recent debates on economic methodology. As such an exercise
has not been tried out before, some of its elements will surprise
Gandhians. And some of the implicit recommendations, like the need to
focus on the individual rather than national economies, will surprise
mainstream economists. But at a time when ideology has failed, a
scientific return to Gandhi does appear promising.
Beyond the Asian Crisis: Pathways to Sustainable Growth edited by
Anis Chowdhury, Iyanatul Islam (Edward Elgar) As Southeast and Northeast
Asia recover from the Asian crisis and return to a state of growth, the
authors of this book assess the lessons to be learned from the crisis to
achieve sustainable development in the future. While the importance of
each factor contributing to the crisis varies from country to country,
their collective experience has created unprecedented turmoil in current
thinking on development policy.
The authors argue that the major schools of thought
need paradigm changes in the wake of the crisis. Those who believe that
a ‘strong state’ or system of semi-democracy is essential for economic
growth have been disproved by the sudden collapse of these economies.
These countries must now adapt to the fact that society must be open to
ideas and democratize its polity to achieve innovation-driven
sustainable development. Those who used the success of East Asian
economies as a vindication of the neo-classical orthodoxy, referred to
as the ‘Washington consensus’, must now see the follies of progressive
withdrawal of the government from the economic sphere and of unfettered
flows of short-term capital.
This book offers a timely and reflective analysis
of the Asian financial crisis and brings together a detailed overview of
the different and often competing responses within the countries of the
region. It will be welcomed by students and scholars with an interest in
Asian economics, development studies, international political economy,
and international relations. |
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