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This chapter analyzes the policy context within which water law reforms are introduced. It examines the basic principles that underlie existing water sector reforms, in particular the concept of integrated water resources management, the focus on water conservation, water as a basic need, water as an economic good, decentralization and participation, and governance and institutional changes. It considers the policy framework that has steered water sector reforms over the past two decades. It focuses in particular on the international policy framework and the role of development banks in fostering the adoption of these principles at the national level. It then analyzes water policies adopted at the national and state level, and discusses the shift towards an emphasis on water law reforms as one of the key elements contributing to the overall process of reform in the water sector.

This introductory chapter considers the significance of examining how financial operators and financial products coexist. This coexistence is tense because the bank deals with innovative products that yield unexpected reactions on unevenly charted markets. Since the designs of the financial products introduced here is coextensive to the lives of traders, engineers, and salespeople, these innovations are major protagonists and need to be fleshed out. The chapter also explains how the book is a case study of economic derivation, but rather than look at derivatives as a class of economic goods, it studies derivation as a process. In doing so, it fills the gap between propagandists of financial engineering and its blunt critics by offering some elements of an analysis of economic derivation.

Knowledge has come to be viewed as an advantage in its own right and not simply as an improvement of other kinds of assets. Prompted by the rapid spread of the information economy, knowledge assets have only begun to be thought of as economic goods. In contrast to physical assets, knowledge assets could in theory last forever. This chapter briefly summarizes the working hypothesis that will be established in the rest of the book, namely that a firm's distinctive competences, its capabilities, and its technologies can be observed as emerging from the discontinuous effect of its knowledge assets on the spatio-temporal and energy systems that make up its physical assets. Technologies, competences, and capabilities, each in their own system, are manifestations of a firm's knowledge assets operating at diverse levels of organization.

This chapter discusses the idea of water as an economic good. In the past several decades, there has been greater recognition that how humans manage water scarcity and its competing uses must change. This new perspective is reflected in the International Conference on Water and the Environment's (ICWE) 1992 Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development, which declared as one of its core principles: “Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.” If water is an “economic good,” then the institutions for managing water should ensure that scarce water is allocated to its most valuable competing use. Rising freshwater scarcity would mean that all users of water would pay higher costs. Any increasing scarcity would be temporary and the resulting higher costs would be “an important way of achieving efficient and equitable use, and of encouraging conservation and protection of water resources.”

This chapter examines how economic goods (food, shelter, etc.) and the common goods (justice, moderation, courage, wisdom, etc.) contribute to the good life. Drawing on the wisdom of Aristotle and Confucius, it considers the lessons that both philosophers' reflections offer for contemporary assessments of economic and common goods. For Aristotle, external goods such as property and wealth are required for human flourishing, but they are merely means to the end of the good life and are inferior to internal goods that arise from the well functioning of the rational soul. Whereas Aristotle insists that it is not a government's job to secure external goods for its people, Confucius argues in Zhongyong that the ruler is responsible for securing the people's external goods. That is, external goods belong to the public realm of politics for Confucius and are a clear sign of the legitimacy of the government.

This book begins with the paradox found in philosopher and satirist Bernard Mandeville's poem “The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest.” It was a paradox that puzzled many Britons during the eighteenth century: How could fashion be at once a social “folly,” a moral “vice” born of envy and appetite, and an economic good, “turning the trade” and contributing to the success of the English nation and British empire? Bernard Mandeville believed that in an imperial, commercial context the relationship between private vices and public benefits was salutary. If Britons were curbed of the impulse to fulfill their own desires, he argued, they would grow weak and dull. “As pride and luxury decrease, so by degrees they leave the Seas,” Mandeville rhymed, linking self-indulgence with the common good.

Most approaches to ethics and economics today are “Aristotelian” in methodology. Although he had a psychological account of virtue to which to refer, Aristotle largely analyzed economics in terms of market norms and general social good. This chapter argues for the radical proposal of the Stoics. It suggests that we need, in addition to an account of virtue, a tool for considering the role markets play in our lives—and only the Stoics provide us with the right kind of theoretical tool in their virtue ethic. The key to their agility with ethics and the market is their theoretical approach to economic goods. They term economic goods “indifferents” and the benefits from making this distinction enable us to talk about ethics and economics without confusing the two.

This chapter considers what kind of thing money is, and, particularly, how to conceptualize it as ‘flowing’ from one place to another. A further question is what kind of good this complex thing is. We know money can be regarded as an economic good, but economic goods are of a variety of kinds. In its different forms money can function differently for different purposes, any adequate account of which would have a sociological dimension. For money is available to be used only on certain terms as set by those who control the institutions. Thus the question of ‘where money comes from’ is also of notable normative significance: money is a product of complex social arrangements and normative orders grounded in deep-seated power relations. Powers to create money and to control the conditions of its creation are powers that people have good reason to want subject to legitimate political authority.