Browse

More than eight years after the global financial crisis began, the economy of Greece shows little sign of recovery, and its position in the eurozone seems tenuous. Between 2008 and 2014, incomes in Greece shrank by more than 25 percent, homes lost more than a third of their value, and the unemployment rate reached 27 percent. Most articles on Greece in the media focus on the effects of austerity, repayment of its debt, and its future in the eurozone. In this book, leading Greek economists from institutions both within and outside Greece take a broader and deeper view of the Greek crisis, examining the pathologies that made Greece vulnerable to the crisis and the implications for the entire eurozone. Each chapter takes on a specific policy area, examining it in terms of Greece's economic reality and offering possible directions for policy. The topics range from macroeconomic issues to markets and their regulation to finance to the public sector. Individual chapters address the costs and benefits of participation in the eurozone, Greece's international competitiveness, taxation, pensions, the labor market, privatization, product markets, finance, education, healthcare, corruption, the justice system, and public administration. The contributors argue that Greek institutions require a deep overhaul rather than quick fixes to enable long-term growth and prosperity.

International Economics (IE) and International Business (IB) are usually treated as two separate disciplines. With the advent of new trade theory the firm was reintroduced in IE and the fields more and more discuss the same topics. This book shows that IE as well as IB could benefit from each other.

As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China’s successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China’s reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China’s regional-based central planning.

Mobility of students in developed countries has dramatically increased over the last fifty years. Students do not necessarily remain in their countries of origin for higher education and work; they might be born in one country, attend university in a second, and find employment in a third. In this book, contributors from Europe, North America, and Australia examine the interrelated mobility of students and graduates, and its consequences—in the countries of origin, studies and work—for fiscal policies, the financing of higher education, and economic growth. Taking a variety of approaches, including formal modeling and econometric analysis, the contributors first examine evidence of the interrelationship between the mobility of students and graduates, especially researchers; investigate free-riding problems associated with mobility, including the provision and funding of public higher education; and address the effects of education policy on human capital accumulation and economic development, offering recommendations for well-designed policies in the presence of migration of talents. The book offers a rich picture and a unified treatment of the mobility of students and graduates and of its determinants and consequences. It paves the way for further research on how globalization affects human capital formation and its contributions to overall welfare.

Post-Treaty Politics argues that secretariats—the administrative arms of international treaties—matter in world politics. Centrally, this book argues that in drawing from their unique networks and knowledge, secretariats emerge not simply as state functionaries or appendages, but as actors in their own right. The book examines secretariat influence through the lens of overlap management, showing that in the messy world of overlapping treaty regimes, secretariats are well-positioned, skilled, and willing to work through the challenges of overlap management. Although secretariats may not have the coercive power to dictate their will against state preferences, the book demonstrates how they influence political outcomes in ways that reflect constitutive forms of power. For example, secretariats change power relations between states by (re)defining governance architectures/institutions, altering relationships by redistributing capabilities, and shaping shared norms and ideas. The book also explains the factors that condition secretariat influence, arguing when secretariat functions enjoy low substitutability and state preferences are weakly solidified, secretariats can influence politics in these ways. Post-Treaty Politics thus uncovers not only how and when secretariats exert influence, but also why such influence matters in world politics

This book aims at parsing and explaining some key forces that feature in every one of the global and regional financial crises and monetary crises that erupted in the world economy over the past decades. The text presents historical accounts of the recent major financial crises and then proceeds to present and explain the main streams of theories on the financial crises that featured in these historical episodes: banking crises and panics; credit frictions and market freezes; currency regime crises, births and bursts of asset bubbles, and conflicting forces behind the volatility of international capital flows. The book also deals with the emergence of a new paradigm: the development of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century macroeconomic analytical framework from the pre-2008 paradigm of modern macroeconomic thinking that served as the workhorse of policy making. The old model had been used to provide the theoretical underpinning for monetary and fiscal policy making in the period known as the Great Moderation. But, as part of the intellectual awakening after the 2008 global crisis, there is a surge of remodeling efforts aimed at the development of an analytical framework that can underpin monetary and fiscal policy making in the era of the Great Recession.