Economic Stress, Human Capital and Families in Asia

Economic Stress, Human Capital and Families in Asia

This book presents recent findings about the consequences and policy implications of economic stress for human capital development and family well-being in Asia. The scope of the chapters goes beyond the impact of current financial crisis to include the effect of economic deprivation families in Asia experience as a result of job loss, low-wage employment, and catastrophic natural calamities. The studies show how macro-level economic stress can filter down through households to affect individuals economic and socio-psychological well-being. The chapters reveal a wide spectrum of economic stresses experienced by families in Asia that is linked to poor human capital development, emotional distress, health problems, changing fertility patterns, more frequent geographic movement, and less supportive parenting behavior. The elderly, women, children, low-skilled workers are particularly vulnerable. The economic shocks in the past several decades have exposed the vulnerability of the family institution and the weaknesses in this regions social protection system that can lead to detrimental long-term effects on human capital development. This book is relevant for researchers and students in fields such as Family Studies, Globalization, Development, Social Problems, Social Stratification, Social Inequalities, Poverty and Welfare, Education, and Social Policies.

Economic Stress, Human Capital and Families in Asia

Philosophy of the Economy

Philosophy of the Economy

This book develops a philosophical analysis of economic reality and economic science from an Aristotelian point of view. It is the result of many years of thinking and philosophical study about these topics. It differs from other philosophy of economics books as it also deals with economic reality (not only the science) and approaches its subject from an Aristotelian perspective. It differs from other Aristotelian studies about economics as it covers the whole of philosophy of the economy. This book argues why Aristotles thinking guarantees an appropriate interdisciplinary synthesis.

Philosophy of the Economy

Marine Ecologonomics

Marine Ecologonomics

This book outlines a framework for analysis of marine resource management incorporating ecological and economic considerations and technological feasibility. Ecologonomics – a new emerging science combining economic and ecological concepts and principles – is introduced. Its use in studying changes in natural processes occurring in the marine environment in combination with analysing economic consequences of human impact on marine ecosystems is demonstrated. A unique book, which offers a rare insight into the research achievements of Russian scientists.

Marine Ecologonomics

Bioenergy from Wood

Bioenergy from Wood

This book is written for scientists and practitioners interested in deepening their knowledge of the sustainable production of bioenergy from wood in tropical and sub-tropical countries. Utilising the value chain concept, this book outlines the necessary aspects for managing sustainable bioenergy production. A wide range of topics is covered including biomass localization, modelling and upscaling, production management in woodlands and plantations, and transport and logistics. Biomass quality and conversion pathways are examined in order to match the conversion technology with the available biomass. A section is dedicated to issues surrounding sustainability. The issues, covered in a life-cycle assessment of the bioenergy system, include socio-economic challenges, local effects on water, biodiversity, nutrient-sustainability and global impacts. Through this holistic approach and supporting examples from tropical and sub-tropical countries, the reader is guided in designing and implementing a value chain as the main management instrument for sustainable wood.

Bioenergy from Wood

Eutrophication - Volume 2

Eutrophication - Volume 2

Eutrophication continues to be a major global challenge and the problem of eutrophication and availability of freshwater for human consumption is an essential ecological issue. The global demand for water resources due to increasing population, economic developments, and emerging energy development schemes has created new environmental challenges for global sustainability. Accordingly, the area of research on eutrophication has expanded considerably in recent years. Eutrophication, acidification and contamination by toxic substances are likely to pose increasing threats to freshwater resources and ecosystems. The consequences of anthropogenic-induced eutrophication of freshwaters are severe deterioration of surface waters and growing public concern, as well as new interest among the scientific community. Eutrophication: causes, consequences & control provides the latest information on many important aspects of the processes of natural and accelerated eutrophication in major aquatic ecosystems around the world.

Eutrophication - Volume 2

The Wages of Whiteness

The Wages of Whiteness

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roedigers widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.

The Wages of Whiteness

Convergence in Shareholder Law

Convergence in Shareholder Law

On the one hand, it can be argued that the increasing economic and political interdependence of countries has led to the convergence of national legal systems. On the other hand, advocates of the counterhypothesis maintain that this development is both unrealistic and unnecessary. Mathias Siems examines the company law of the UK, the USA, Germany, France, Japan and China to see how this issue affects shareholder law. The author subsequently analyses economic and political factors which may or may not lead to convergence, and assesses the extent of this development. Convergence of Shareholder Law, which was originally published in 2007, not only provides a thorough comparative legal analysis but also shows how company law interconnects with political forces and economic development and helps in evaluating whether harmonisation and shareholder protection should be enhanced.

Convergence in Shareholder Law

Energy, Transport and the Environment

Energy, Transport and the Environment

Sustainable mobility is a highly complex problem as it is affected by the interactions between socio-economic, environmental, technological and political issues. Energy, Transport, & the Environment: Addressing the Sustainable Mobility Paradigm brings together leading figures from business, academia and governments to address the challenges and opportunities involved in working towards sustainable mobility. Key thinkers and decision makers approach topics and debates including: energy security and resource scarcity greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions urban planning, transport systems and their management governance and finance of transformationthe threats of terrorism and climate change to our transport systems. Introduced by a preface from U.S. Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu and an outline by the editors, Dr Oliver Inderwildi and Sir David King, Energy, Transport, & the Environment is divided into six sections. These sections address and explore the challenges and opportunities for energy supply, road transport, urban mobility, aviation, sea and rail, as well as finance and economics in transport. Possible solutions, ranging from alternative fuels to advanced urban planning and policy levers, will be examined in order to deepen the understanding of currently proposed solutions within the political realities of the dominating economic areas. The result of this detailed investigation is an integrated view of sustainable transport for both people and freight, making Energy, Transport, & the Environment key reading for researchers, decision makers and policy experts across the public and private sectors.

Energy, Transport and the Environment

An Economic Analysis of Bilateral Investment Treaties

An Economic Analysis of Bilateral Investment Treaties

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) are an important instrument for the protection of foreign direct investment (FDI). However, compared to international trade law, international investment law has so far received only little research attention from an economic point of view. By applying a law and economics approach, Jan Peter Sasse provides a systematic analysis of the way BITs function. He explains why BITs are more than just a signal, how they relate to institutional competition as well as to institutional quality and why transparency in international investment arbitration is hard to achieve and may even be detrimental.

An Economic Analysis of Bilateral Investment Treaties

Perspectives on Poverty in India

Perspectives on Poverty in India

The book examines India s experience with poverty reduction in a period of rapid economic growth. Marshalling evidence from multiple sources of survey data and drawing on new methods, the book asks how India s structural transformation – from rural to urban, and from agriculture to nonfarm sectors – is impacting poverty.Our analysis suggests that since the early 1990s, urban growth has emerged as a much more important driver of poverty reduction than in the past. We focus in particular on the role of small and medium size conurbations in India, both as the urban sub-sector in which urban poverty is overwhelmingly concentrated, and as a sub-sector that could potentially stimulate rural-based poverty reduction. Second, in rural areas, we focus on the nature of intersectoral transformation out of agriculture into the nonfarm economy. Stagnation in agriculture has been accompanied by dynamism in the nonfarm sector, but there is much debate about whether the growth seen has been a symptom of agrarian distress or a source of poverty reduction.Finally, alongside the accelerating economic growth and the highly visible transformation that is occurring in India s major cities, inequality is on the rise. This is raising concern that economic growth in India has by-passed significant segments of the population. The third theme on social exclusion asks if, despite the dramatic growth, historically grounded inequalities along lines of caste, tribe and gender have persisted.This book would be of interest for policymakers, researchers, non-governmental organizations, and international agencies from India and abroad–who wish to know more about India s experience of the last two decades in reducing poverty.

Perspectives on Poverty in India

Cambridge Handbook of Culture, Organizations and Work

Cambridge Handbook of Culture, Organizations and Work

It is now widely recognized that countries around the world are becoming increasingly interconnected, and that both public and private organizations are of necessity becoming increasingly global. As political, legal, and economic barriers recede in this environment, cultural barriers emerge as a principal challenge to organizational survival and success. It is not yet clear whether these global realities will cause cultures to converge, harmonize, and seek common ground or to retrench, resist, and accentuate their differences. In either case, it is of paramount importance for both managers and organizational scholars to understand the cultural crosscurrents underlying these changes. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this 2009 book reviews, analyzes, and integrates available theory and research to give the best information possible concerning the role of culture and cultural differences in organizational dynamics.

Cambridge Handbook of Culture, Organizations and Work

Managing Creativity in Science and Hi-Tech

Managing Creativity in Science and Hi-Tech

Addressing the issues unique to managers of creative technical staff, this guide reflects not only Ronald Kays long experience observing and teaching successful management techniques, but also treats the expanding challenges due to increasingly globally-based projects and staff. As before, Kays guide helps readers to prepare themselves, graduate students and others to understand and improve their managerial skills and covers such practical, yet sometimes overlooked, steps such as: individual and team behavior of creative technical staff; managing their own and others R&D projects; hiring, evaluating and compensating technical staff; R&D proposals and administrative functions; and presentations, meetings and organizational culture. New to this edition are a chapter on the global impact of high-tech enterprises and sections on the roles of foundations and government funding and task-force participation. Also tackled are the basics of starting, financing and staffing venture-capital-funded enterprises. Whats more, this book also serves to increase the awareness and knowledge base of anyone who needs to meet the challenge of managing people with the creative energies that drive technologically-based economic growth.

Managing Creativity in Science and Hi-Tech

A History of Organized Labor in Peru and Ecuador

A History of Organized Labor in Peru and Ecuador

This volume traces the history of organized labor in Peru and Ecuador from its first appearance in the late nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. It discusses the relations of trade unionism with economic development and politics, particularly the political tendencies within organized labor. It also discusses the negative impact on the trade union movement of the free enterprise-free trade policies of the last decades of the twentieth century.

A History of Organized Labor in Peru and Ecuador

Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France

Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France

Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France examines the emergence of a citizen consumer role for women during postwar modernization and reconstruction in France, integrating the history of economic modernization with that of women and the family. This role both celebrated the power of the woman consumer and created a gendered form of citizenship that did not disrupt the sexual hierarchy of home, polity, and marketplace. Redefining needs and renegotiating concepts of taste, value, and thrift, women and their families drove mass consumer society through their demands and purchases at the same time that their very need to consume came to define them.

Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France

Socio-Economic Considerations in Biotechnology Regulation

Socio-Economic Considerations in Biotechnology Regulation

Within the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CPB) was established as an implementing agreement. The CPB is an international agreement establishing the rights of recipient countries to be notified of and to approve or reject the domestic import and/or production of living modified organisms (LMOs). Decisions regarding import/production are to be on the basis of a biosafety assessment. Article 26.1 of the CPB allows for the (optional) inclusion of socio-economic considerations (SECs) into that biosafety assessment process. This book compiles expert assessments of the issues relevant to SEC assessment of LMOs and fundamental for decisions regarding whether to undertake such assessments at all. It includes an overview of the inclusion of SEC assessment in the regulation of LMOs that looks at the rationale for the inclusion of SECs, in the context of the existing science-based risk assessment systems. This book reviews the various factors that can and have been suggested for inclusion in SEC assessment, and provides a meaningful dialogue about the contrasts, benefits and tradeoffs that are, and will, be created by the potential move to the inclusion of SECs in the regulation of LMOs, making it of interest to both academics and policy-makers.

Socio-Economic Considerations in Biotechnology Regulation

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820

What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the parliamentary union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820

Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy

Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy

The authors of this book challenge mainstream thinking about the nature of globalization. While not hostile to markets per se, they believe that capitalist market processes, left to operate freely, tend to generate injustice, insecurity, instability, and inefficiency. Taking account of the new realities of globalization, this volume explores an unusually wide range of subjects, including trade integration, multinational corporations, labor markets and migration, international capital flows, macroeconomic and environmental policy, and the central roles of the IMF and World Bank. It proposes alternatives to neo-liberal orthodoxy, developing policy measures that counter the destructive features of markets and promote equality as well as efficiency. The approach in this volume is particularly illuminating for understanding the Asian financial collapse of 199798 and similar recent crises. The volume also includes comments on each chapter by a wide range of distinguished economists, producing a lively and often controversial set of interchanges.

Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy

GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources

GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources

Through the results of a developed case study of information system for low temperature geothermal energy, GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources addresses the issue of the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in evaluating cost-effectiveness of renewable resource exploitation on a regional scale. Focusing on the design of a Decision Support System, a process is presented aimed to transform geographic data into knowledge useful for analysis and decision-making on the economic exploitation of geothermal energy. This detailed description includes a literature review and technical issues related to data collection, data mining, decision analysis for the informative system developed for the case study. A multi-disciplinary approach to GIS design is presented which is also an innovative example of fusion of georeferenced data acquired from multiple sources including remote sensing, networks of sensors and socio-economic censuses. GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources is a useful, practical reference for engineers, managers and researchers involved in the design of GIS, decision support systems, investment planning/strategy in renewable energy and ICT innovation in this field.

GIS to Support Cost-effective Decisions on Renewable Sources

The Global Crash

The Global Crash

The financial crisis hit the global economy unexpectedly from August 2007 producing consequences comparable to the ones experienced in the course of the 1930s. This book provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary account of the events leading to the financial crisis, its institutional causes and consequences, its economic characteristics and its socio-political implications.

The Global Crash

Capital Flows and Crises

Capital Flows and Crises

The implications of capital mobility for growth and stability are some of the most contentious and least understood contemporary issues in economics. In this book, Barry Eichengreen discusses historical, theoretical, empirical, and policy aspects of the effects, both positive and negative, of capital flows. He focuses on the connections between capital flows and crises as well as on those between capital flows and growth.Eichengreen argues that international financial liberalization, like other forms of economic liberalization, can positively affect the efficiency of resource allocation and the rate of economic growth. But analyses of both recent and historical experience also show an undeniable association between capital mobility and crises, especially when domestic institutions are weak and the harmonization of capital account liberalization and other policy reforms is inadequate. In his conclusion, Eichengreen makes suggestions for policy design to maximize the benefits of international financial liberalization while minimizing the risks of financial instability.

Capital Flows and Crises