Economics and Finance

There is widespread agreement that climate change is a serious problem. If we fail to regulate greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, or use alternative strategies for addressing the problem, the damages could be significant, and perhaps catastrophic. After several international meetings in which nation states have tried unsuccessfully to address the climate change problem, there is a widespread sense of frustration and urgency: frustration at the slow pace at which countries are moving toward an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; urgency because of the growing evidence that climate change is a serious problem that should be addressed globally and quickly. The aim of this book is to take a close look at the fundamental political and economic processes driving climate change policy. It identifies institutional arrangements and policies that are needed to design more effective climate change policy. The book also examines ethical and distributional arguments that are critical in understanding and framing the climate debate. The book is built around a conference honouring Tom Schelling that took place at the Sustainable Consumption Institute at The University of Manchester in October 2010. Each chapter represents a significant contribution to the literature on the political economy of climate change.

This book chronicles how a controversial set of policy assumptions about the Japanese economy, known as revisionism, rose to become the basis of the trade policy approach of the Clinton administration. In the context of deep-rooted fears over Japan's increasing economic strength, revisionists argued that Japan represented a distinctive form of capitalism that was inherently closed to imports and that posed a threat to U.S. high-tech industries. Revisionists advocated a “managed trade” solution in which the Japanese government would be forced to set aside a share of the market for foreign goods. The author describes the role that various American academics, government officials, and business leaders played in developing revisionist thought. The revisionist drumbeat grew loudest just as the Clinton administration came into office. The author uses extensive interviews with policy makers to trace the internal discussions inside the Clinton White House, which culminated in the adoption of revisionist assumptions and then to demands for “results-oriented” trade agreements during the Framework negotiations. Japan, however, refused to accept these managed trade solutions, and fought to discredit revisionism and to rally global support against American unilateralism. Despite a history of caving in to U.S. pressures, this time the Japanese held firm even in the face of an historic failure of a bilateral summit in 1994 and the threat of sanctions against Japanese autos in 1995. In the end, it was the U.S. that folded; for the first time ever, Japan said “no,” and in the process beat back America's demands for managed trade once and for all.

This book considers the econometric analysis of both stationary and non‐stationary processes, which may be linked by equilibrium relationships. It provides a wide‐ranging account of the main tools, techniques, models, concepts, and distributions involved in the modelling of integrated processes (i.e. those that accumulate the effects of past shocks). Since the focus is on equilibrium concepts, including co‐integration and error‐correction, the analysis begins with a discussion of the application of these concepts to stationary empirical models. Later chapters show how integrated processes can be reduced to this case by suitable transformations that take advantage of co‐integrating (equilibrium) relationships. The concepts of co‐integration and error‐correction models are shown to be fundamental in this modelling strategy. Practical modelling advice and empirical illustrations are provided.

Knowledge of econometrics, statistics, and matrix algebra at the level of a final‐year undergraduate or first‐year graduate course in econometrics is sufficient for most of the book. Other mathematical tools are described as they arise.

This book documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after hurricane Katrina and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. Two introductory chapters address Katrina’s impact and the planning and public-sector recovery policies that set the context for neighborhood recovery. Three chapters present and analyze rebuilding narratives for six New Orleans neighborhoods. In the heavily flooded Broadmoor and Village de L’Est neighborhoods, residents coalesced around communitywide initiatives, one through a neighborhood association and the second under church leadership, to help homeowners return and restore housing, get key public facilities and businesses rebuilt and create new civic capacity. Another chapter shows how differing socioeconomic conditions, geography, government policies and neighborhood capacity and responses combined to create varied recovery trajectories across four adjacent neighborhoods in the center of the city. A concluding chapter argues that grassroots and neighborhood scale initiatives can make important contributions to city recovery in four areas: repopulation, restoring “complete neighborhoods” with key services and amenities, rebuilding parts of the small business economy and enhancing recovery capacity. It also calls for more balanced investment and policies to rebuild rental housing, deliberate collaboration with community-based organizations to undertake and implement recovery plans, and changes to federal disaster recovery policies.

More than fifty developing countries depend on three or fewer commodities for more than half of their exports. In fact, reliance on only a single commodity for a large share of export earnings is quite common in these countries, exposing them to the risk of export earnings instability as a result of price shocks and, perhaps even more significantly, falling purchasing power of exports over the long run in the face of the declining real price of the commodity in question. The problems faced by commodity-dependent developing countries are formidable. Although diversification is the most appropriate response to the problem of the secular decline in commodity prices, long-term transformation in the economy can be a slow process and, in the long-run, the success will depend on a host of such factors as the development of human resources, institutional capacity building, poverty alleviation, and appropriate domestic policy and environment. By granting increased aid flows and debt relief, and providing assistance to encourage production of non-traditional export items, the international community can play a proactive role in the development of the commodity dependent poor countries. Only concerted efforts both at the domestic fronts of these countries and co-operation extended by the international community can help mitigate the problem of the world's most vulnerable economies.

This book analyses the role of communities and markets in economic development. It is divided into three parts. Part I presents four chapters on historical and theoretical perspectives on the community and market. Part II contains four chapters focusing on the role of the community in the process of market development in contemporary developing and transitional economics. Part III focuses on communal control over public goods.

One of the most important, and visible, things economists do is to forecast what will happen in the economy in the future. Each year, a number of different groups in the United States use their own econometric models to forecast what will happen to the economy in the coming year. Some economic forecasts are more accurate than others. This book consists of chapters comparing the different models now being used. It is organized topically rather than by model. The contributors include: Roger Brimmer, Ray Fair, Bert Hickman, F. Gerard Adams, and Albert Ando. The editor provides an introduction to the volume.

This book offers a new perspective on the economics of globalization, based on the concepts of firms' capabilities as the immediate cause of countries' wealth. It presents new ways of looking at the way China, India, and Africa have been drawn into the global economy over the past two decades. It offers new perspectives on some of the most central questions in the current debate: What effects does the rise of China have for the advanced industrial economies? Why have some industries adapted quickly and effectively to the changing global scene, while others have not? How were the ‘Transition Economies’ of Eastern Europe affected by trade liberalization? How have the economic prospects of sub-Saharan African countries changed over the past decade? This analysis contributes to the recent literature on quality and trade, which is providing a new and different approach to the analysis of globalization, and which focuses on those economic mechanisms that are central to the current wave of this centuries-old phenomenon.

This book presents a new set of practical and powerful tools to help business get the full benefit from their information technology (IT) investments. It addresses how organizations can work together to improve business performance. It elaborates on the approach for assessing the maturity of IT-business alignment; once maturity is understood, businesses can identify opportunities for enhancing the harmonious relationship of business and IT. The book is divided into eight parts, with parts II-VII focusing on the six strategic alignment maturity assessment criteria.