Search Results

This chapter argues that economists are right in seeing ‘the right institutions’ as the key to economic productivity and progressiveness. But for the argument to be delved deeper, it needs to be recognized that there is a very real challenge; the magnitude of the challenge is only beginning to be understood. The conglomerate of things different economists have called institutions largely reflects the fact that many different kinds of structures and forces mould the way individuals and organizations interact to get things done — so-called ‘social technologies’. Economic growth involves the co-evolution of technologies and the institutions needed for their effective operation and advancement. Some institutions provide the broad background conditions under which technologies can proceed, and others come into existence and develop to support the important new technologies that are driving growth. The chapter reviews the processes of institutional change and argues that institutional change, and its influence on economic activity, is much more difficult to direct and control than technological change, and hence prevailing institutions are often drags on economic productivity and progressiveness. The evolution of technology and institutions in pharmaceutical biotech is considered.

The main strategic, economic, and political changes in the Middle East since the end of the cold war are outlined, and an attempt made to account for the linkages between them. It is argued, first, that a combination of external and internal factors has reinforced the fragmentation of the Middle East state system, and further undermined prospects for regional cooperation or integration in the security, economic, and political spheres. The record of economic liberalization is examined, before analysing the process of political liberalization. In both cases the focus is on the state, since that is the level at which management of the domestic and external environments is conducted. This allows consideration in the conclusion of the extent to which changes in the region can be directly attributed to the end of the cold war, and of the assumptions about the relationship between the international system and its regional and national units, particularly with regard to the impact of globalization on the nation state and domestic structures of political power.

The first section of this chapter examines the political and economic context of change in developing countries: the two themes are the evolution of the international economy, especially since the 1970s, and the political impact of the ending of the cold war. The next section addresses the key issues of liberalization and globalization, which preceded the end of the cold war but are now influenced by that event. The next section identifies the deepening of liberalization and globalization, and the phenomenon of regional integration and asymmetric competition between developed and developing countries. A more detailed discussion of two important expressions of liberalization and globalization follows, in the context of the political implications for developing countries: these are the importance of structural adjustment programmes for the advance of the new market forms and their associated ideology, and the GATT Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. The two final sections of the chapter evaluate the use of political power by developed countries to achieve economic ends, and a concluding section assesses the possible future pattern of interaction between developed and developing countries.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts. The preceding four chapters attempted to reconstruct some eight generations of life in Whickham from a variety of distinctive perspectives. Each of these directs attention to a particular dimension of the history of the parish, and also endeavours to add a layer to our understanding of an unfolding process of economic and social change. Throughout, the authors have tried to explain the course of Whickham's development, to convey something of the complexity and historical contingency of that process, and to capture something of its texture as human experience: its benefits and costs, the ways in which it impinged upon the lives of individuals and groups, and the contributions that they made in turn to the restless dynamic of economic development and social structuring. Some central themes are discussed.

This introductory chapter reflects on the need for in-depth historically sensitive research on the development of advanced welfare states. Contrasting the diverging trends and social and economic fortunes in the UK and Germany since the late 1970s, it argues that the two countries have all but undergone a role reversal in terms of their efficiency and sustainability as models of modern social capitalism. The chapter introduces the aims of the book, i.e. empirical investigation into, and causes for, the development of three major social policy domains in the two countries over the past 25 years or so. In order to comprehend similarities and diverging trends, multi-causal accounts at programme level are required.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion on the political, social, and economic changes in Europe. It explains the core idea of the book — specifically the kind of Europe being sought — highlighting the main issues at stake and the political choices associated with these. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is presented.

This chapter defines and traces the social question and its salient attributes for Schmoller and his colleagues by relating it to the rapid processes of social and economic change in Prussia during the 1860s and 1870s. It also traces the rise and spread of contemporaneous social thought and the simultaneous demise of classical economics between about 1850 and 1870.

This chapter is a wide-ranging survey of population, social, and economic factors thought to influence crime trends. It marches through various data sets to test continuity or structural change in the city over two decades. A concluding section summarizes a view of the meaning of this empirical montage. The bottom line is a mixed verdict. One of New York's four biggest boroughs—Manhattan—showed big social changes in the period after 1990 that could help explain a major crime drop. The other three major boroughs—Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx—were not transformed in such a similar fashion.

This chapter investigates the changing relations between caste, class, and power. The distribution of power creates a hierarchy which is different from the hierarchies of caste and class. The relations between class and power, and the role of caste in party politics are then examined. Sripuram constituted an agraharam village. One can obtain a variety of class positions with different degrees of probability, whatever one’s position in the caste structure may be. Several factors were responsible for the power and influence of the old landowning class in Sripuram. The changing relationships between the Brahmins and a variety of political parties are explored. The processes of economic change and political modernization have led the productive system and the organization of power to acquire an increasing degree of autonomy. It would appear that a certain measure of “discreteness” is enjoyed by each of the three orders considered: caste, class, and power.

This chapter addresses the widespread assumption that capitalism's future can best be understood as made up of more, and better, technology. The scale of scientific and technological activity today is wholly unprecedented, and guarantees a flood of new knowledge and things. A succession of “longwave theories” have tried to make sense of the long cycles of economic change, and now hint at a new kind of economy emerging from low carbon technologies, broadband, genomics, and nanotechnology. But technologies have always been as much shaped by societies as shaping them, and people should expect struggles to shape technology and science—struggles that will often pit big governments and big business against the public.

This chapter tackles Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital (1941), and various elucidations of the “Ricardo effect.” Here, the chapter examines how Hayek absorbed many of Sraffa’s criticisms and moved away from the “average period of production” concept to focus instead on time-rates of return on investment, which, we argue, bear a close resemblance to Keynes’s marginal efficiency of capital. Moreover, Hayek’s revision of the theory of capital presented in Prices and Production frees him from the post-Keynesian critique of Neoclassical capital theory, as exhaustively laid out in the Cambridge capital controversies. Freed of the dual albatrosses of reswitching and capital reversing, Hayek develops a theory of general equilibrium that, unlike modern intertemporal general equilibrium, points to a truly dynamic theory of economic change as a process in historical time. The chapter concludes by pointing out how this vision has inherent affinities with Keynes’s and suggests that Hayek failed to appreciate these affinities because he chose to conduct his analysis in strictly real terms and under the assumption of full employment. Relaxing these assumptions, we see that Hayek and Keynes were in many ways theorizing on opposite sides of the same, Wicksellian coin.

This chapter tracks the economy of the 1970s as it began to decline after the prosperity of previous decades. Economic growth had defined human history for two hundred years, reaching a peak in the generation after 1945 when world economic growth averaged an extraordinary 5–7 percent per year. Americans rode that growth to a higher standard of living than anyone else. But in the 1970s it all seemed to be flowing away. Unemployment, oil shortages, a plunging stock market, recession, and, above all, inflation were apparently ending these golden years of unparalleled prosperity. Inflation hit everyone, and it hit the poor hardest of all. Persistent inflation undercut dreams and hopes for the future. The economic trauma of the 1970s threatened to destabilize Americans' understanding of how the world worked.

Economic change requires comprehensive analysis of potential sources, independent and dependent variables, and possible shortcomings. Understanding without basis would be insufficient so there must a reliable framework to capitalise on. The chapter starts by enumerating three significant signs—namely, the macro and micro economic fundamentals, the current organisational approach, and the cultural tradition of a society—of sound economy that must be integrated in the theoretical and conceptual paradigm. After identifying the essential factors that determine successful and sustainable growth, the next question that the chapter addresses pertains to how to employ developmental strategies considering these indicators, and how some poor countries are not able to achieve an optimal point of national welfare even with the understanding of these forces.

Kessler and Bayliss (1992) illustrated how the union leaders were not prepared for the adverse political and economic changes that unions underwent in the 1980s. Since this study aims to analyse the key features of the environmental changes on the structure and processes of the union government, this chapter is concerned with explaining the factors represented in the linked upper and lowers arcs in the diagram shown in the previous chapter. This chapter discusses how the Conservatives set an agenda that undermined trade unionism and at the same time, a rhetorical denigration of trade unions came about. It also introduces Human Resource Management (HRM) techniques to address the changes that unions experienced from the changes in the labour market that are evident in employers' policies. In line with the changes, unions went through reorganization and also made ways to adapt to a more favourable political climate.