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This book is about using game theory to model money and financial institutions. Using the backdrop of a simple two-good economy with two continua of traders, we propose a strategic market game to explicitly model the moves that accomplish trade. We then study variations on this simple model, to understand such things as changing the type of money used in the economy (consumable storable money vs gold vs fiat money) and/or the trading structure (buy-sell vs sell all), the role of banks (both central banks and private banks), the market structure for banking (monopoly vs oligopoly vs perfect competition), bankruptcy, and credit clearinghouses. We are also able to examine the process of a gold demonetization in favor of fiat money. The key feature that allows this is that the players’ decision problems are dynamic, each with a fully defined state space. The physical money is tracked throughout. Hence the players’ optimizations all have inequality constraints reflecting their cash flows. Indeed, our models link the timeless general equilibrium analysis with the fully dynamic complex world around us where the institutions constrain the dynamics. We are able to solve (most of) the models analytically, using the solution concept of (perfect) noncooperative equilibrium. This allows us to perform sensitivity analyses, which show how the “phases” of the economies change as a function of the amount of money in the economy. Finally, we comment throughout the book on how overly simplified the models have to be in order to portray the above phenomena while still being solvable. Hence by themselves they are not realistic. However, they do represent a first step in building a more realistic theory of money and financial institutions.

This book explores the philosophical and social environment in which the modern American corporation is grounded, and explains why, from a cultural perspective, the people should not expect the corporations to behave responsibly and accountably. The American corporation is a subject of wonder for the fabulous wealth that this protected capital has produced, freeing so many people to pursue other dreams and lead lives of greater meaning than merely making a living. It is a wonder, because, in these ways, modern American business corporations have created material well-being that allows so many people to live the eighteenth-century liberal ideal on which America was founded, an ideal of individual freedom, autonomy, and choice. However, the American corporation is also a subject of horror for the way its limited liability permits it to dump the costs of production onto those who are powerless to affect its conduct. The book examines the legal structure of the corporation in finer detail, demonstrating how each aspect of that structure contributes to some problems identified and suggesting ways in which an environment might be created in which managers, stockholders, and workers can use the best aspects of the structure to more likely assure responsible, long-term management. It also presents a brief examination of the nature of capitalism and its various forms.

This book brings a variety of perspectives—cultural, economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. It focuses on the efforts of Luo-speaking people and others in Kenya to make sense of, and cope with, foreign interventions in the form of credit. The book also reveals that contemporary financial aid programs in western Kenya are deeply rooted in colonial and early postcolonial history, and examines how credit begins to appear in the three faces of usury, charity, and fantasy. It notes the important role of women in Kenyan farming and argues that they should be “adequately represented” as recipients of training and extension. The book discusses the loan repayment under the Integrated Agricultural Development Project and the Smallholder Production Services and Credit Project, and compares the tobacco-growing project of British American Tobacco with government and international aid agencies' projects in Kenya, focusing on the subject of credit and discredit. Its conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need for credit among African farming people.

This book presents the biography of the extraordinary Spanish industrialist and entrepreneur Eduardo Barreiros, who was a conquistador. He conquered markets, not peoples, and these conquests began in his own country, Spain, not in Mexico or in Peru, where men such as Cortés and Pizarro made their names. Barreiros's triumphs included exports in countries as far removed and as far apart as Egypt and Venezuela and Portugal and Germany. Barreiros came to maturity in the 1950s, when the regime in Franco's Spain was almost as hostile to private enterprise as Communist ministers would have been. Successive Spanish ministers of industry, Suanzes in particular but also Sirvent and the alleged modernizer López Bravo, spurned independent entrepreneurs, and were still advocates of national syndicalism, which, in practice, was a kind of bureaucratic statism. Barreiros, who, with his brothers, created a large industrial empire from nothing in ten years, proved that these great men were mistaken. He was a motor manufacturer and made trucks, tractors, buses, and, finally, saloon cars. The later life of Barreiros had its frustrations as well as its triumphs.

To what extent is economic freedom good? This book tells the story of how the business community, and the trade associations and think tanks that it created, launched three powerful assaults during the last quarter of the twentieth century on the federal regulatory system and the state civil justice system, to accomplish a revival of the laissez faire political economy which dominated Gilded Age America. Although the consequences of these assaults became painfully apparent in a confluence of crises during the early twenty-first century, the patch-and-repair fixes that Congress and the Obama administration put into place did little to change that underlying laissez faire ideology and practice, and it continues to dominate the American political economy. In anticipation of the next confluence of crises, the author offers suggestions for more comprehensive governmental protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.

Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect. But a precondition for the Industrial Revolution was also the establishment in British North America of a unique type of colony — for the settlement of people and culture, rather than the extraction of things. England's republican revolution of 1649–53 was a spectacular attempt to change social, political, and moral life in the direction pioneered by the Dutch. This book argues that it was also a turning point in world history. In the revolution's wake, competition with the Dutch transformed the military-fiscal and naval resources of the state. One result was a navally protected Anglo-American trading monopoly. Within this context, more than a century later, the Industrial Revolution would be triggered by the alchemical power of American shopping.

Nineteenth-century Brazil's constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financial markets needed to thrive. This study shows why sovereign creditworthiness did not necessarily translate into financial development. Using a vast array of archival evidence, this book shows that political commitment to a secure public debt was neither necessary nor sufficient to insure financial development in nineteenth-century Brazil.

The 1990s brought surprising industrial development in emerging economies around the globe: firms in countries not previously known for their high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new Information Technologies (IT) by using different business models and carving out unique positions in the global IT production networks. This book asks why economies of different countries develop in different ways, and the answer relies on exhaustive research into the comparative experiences of Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland—states that made different choices to nurture the growth of their IT industries. The book concludes on this point that the role of the state in economic development has changed, but it has by no means disappeared. Further the book offers a new way of thinking about state-led rapid-innovation-based industrial development that takes into account the ways production and innovation are now conducted globally. The book also offers specific guidelines to help states make advantageous decisions about research and development, relationships with foreign firms and investors, and other critical issues.

Why have ninety million workers around the globe left their homes for employment in other countries? What can be done to ensure that international labor migration is a force for global betterment? This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the causes and effects of labor migration, and recommends sensible, sustainable migration policies that are fair to migrants, and to the countries which open their doors to them. The authors survey recent trends in international migration for employment, and demonstrate that the flow of authorized and illegal workers over borders presents a formidable challenge in countries and regions throughout the world. They note that not all migration is from undeveloped to developed countries, and discuss the murky relations between immigration policies and politics. The book concludes with specific recommendations for justly managing the world's growing migrant workforce.

To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today, they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words—about four times the length of War and Peace. The author of this book maintains that America's tax code has become a tangle of loopholes, paperwork, and inconsistencies—a massive social program which fails tests of simplicity and fairness. More important, our tax system has failed to keep pace with the changing economy, creating burdens and wastes of resources that weigh our nation down. The author offers a solution in which most Americans pay no income tax at all, and those who do pay tax enjoy a far simpler tax process, arguing that this is possible without decreasing government revenues or removing key incentives for employer-sponsored health care plans and pensions.

This book provides a fresh perspective on the impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on host country development, and offers a contemporary and balanced assessment of the influence of multinationals on development. It questions some of the traditional development assumptions and paradigms, arguing that many are outmoded, outdated, and misguided. Drawing from recent research in international business and multinational management, the book brings a more microeconomic, “on the ground” focus to the mechanisms by which MNEs affect growth and development. It is about the relationship between MNEs and the poorer countries in the world, sometimes referred to as less-developed or developing economies, which include the poorer parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Through the process of economic development, many of these countries have both increased their per capita incomes and improved the internal distribution of these incomes, moving into a smaller group of developing economies that are viewed as “emerging.” A key finding in the book is that on balance, MNEs contribute positively to the economic development of poorer and emerging economies—both directly and indirectly. Direct contributions emanate from the role of the MNE in bringing new knowledge assets to developing countries in the form of technology and managerial skills. A second conclusion of the book is that the FSAs of MNEs can help generate new capabilities and business competences in developing economies.

Over the past six decades, federal regulatory agencies have attempted different strategies to regulate the natural gas industry in the United States. All have been unsuccessful, resulting in nationwide gas shortages or massive gas surpluses, and costing the nation billions of dollars. Additionally, partial deregulation has led the regulatory agency to become more involved in controlling individual transactions among gas producers, distributors, and consumers. This book demonstrates that no affected group has gained from these experiments in public control and that all participants would gain from complete deregulation. Although losses have declined with partial deregulation in recent years, current regulatory practices still limit the growth of supply through the transmission system. This history of the regulation of natural gas is a cautionary tale for other natural resource or network industries that are regulated or are about to be regulated.

Walking through nearly any grocery store, contemporary American consumers are bound to encounter organic food. At any of the myriad of farmers’ markets that have sprung up in cities and small communities across the United States, shoppers can expect to see claims about the provenance and farming practices employed to grow everything from prized heirloom tomatoes to seemingly mundane heads of garlic. But behind the scenes, critical scholarship has shown that organic farming increasingly resembles the industrial food system organic pioneers set out to challenge. Faced with the pressures of the modern agricultural economy many farmers have conventionalized, intensifying how they farm in the face of tremendous competition and cost. Beyond the organic labels, emblazoned on products at the supermarket and the glistening bushel baskets arrayed in market stalls, are farmers, many of whom are trying to do their best to achieve sustainability in today’s food system. This book offers a glimpse into this world, through an ethnography of a small New England farm and the people who work in its fields. It sheds light on how small-scale farmers navigate the difficult terrain between ideals of sustainability and the economic realities of contemporary farming. Using new theories of economic sociology, this book moves beyond the current debates about the conventionalization of organic agriculture. Instead, it takes a relational approach to organic practices—investigating the complex ways market pressures, moral and emotional attachments, privilege, and personal relationships intersect to shape the everyday experiences of agriculture for today’s organic farmers and their consumers.

Why should a developing country surrender its power to create money by adopting an international currency as its own? This book explores the currency problems that developing countries face and offers sound, practical advice for policy makers on how to deal with them. The author, who has extensive experience in real-world economic policy making, challenges the myths that surround domestic currencies, and shows the clear rationality for dollarization or the use of a standard international currency. The book opens with a story of the Devil, who, through a series of common macroeconomic maneuvers, coaches the president of a mythical country into financial ruin. This ruler's path is not unlike that taken in several real developing countries, to their detriment. The book introduces new ways of thinking about financial systems and monetary behavior in Third World countries.

Predicting the future is serious business for virtually all public and private institutions because they must often make important decisions based on such predictions. This book explores how institutions from legislatures to corporations might improve their predictions and arrive at better decisions by means of prediction markets, a promising new tool with virtually unlimited potential applications. The book explains how prediction markets work; why they accurately forecast elections, sports contests, and other events; and how they may even advance the ideals of our system of republican government. It also explores the ways in which prediction markets address common problems related to institutional decision-making. Throughout, the book extends current thinking about prediction markets and offers imaginative proposals for their use in an array of settings and situations.

This book argues that, although little noticed, the face of central banking has changed significantly over the past ten to fifteen years. The author, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System and member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, shows that the changes, although quiet, have been sufficiently profound to constitute a revolution in central banking, and considers three of the most significant aspects of the revolution. The first is the shift toward transparency: whereas central bankers once believed in secrecy and even mystery, greater openness is now considered a virtue. The second is the transition from monetary policy decisions made by single individuals to decisions made by committees. The third change is a profoundly different attitude toward the markets, from that of stern schoolmarm to one of listener. The author examines the origins of these changes, and their pros and cons.

As China emerges as a global powerhouse, this book examines its economic past and the shaping of its financial institutions. A comparative study of foreign banking in prewar China, it surveys the impact of British overseas banknotes on China's economy before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Focusing on the two leading British banks in the region, the book assesses the favorable and unfavorable effects of the British presence in China, with particular emphasis on Shanghai, and traces instructive links between the changing political climate and banknote circulation volumes. Drawing on recently declassified archival materials, the author revises previous assumptions about China's prewar economy, including the extent of foreign banknote circulation and the economic significance of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925.

Everyone wants energy that is clean, cheap, and secure, goals which often conflict: traditional fossil fuels tend to be cheaper than alternative fuels, but they are hardly clean or (in the case of oil) secure. This book provides an explanation of the issues as well as sensible proposals for a truly sustainable energy policy. The author, an economist, points out that current energy policies are fatally flawed and that government policies should focus on “getting the prices right” so that the prices of fossil fuels reflect their true costs to society—including greenhouse gas and security costs. By using carbon and security taxes, alternative energy forms will be able to compete on a more even playing field against fossil fuels, which will unleash advances in alternative energy and conservation technologies, enabling the marketplace and consumers to find the right balance among energy sources that are cheap, clean, and secure.

This history explores the many unrecognized, enduring linkages between the state of California and the country of Chile. The book begins in 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, and it concludes with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet's diplomatic visit to the Golden State in 2008. During the intervening centuries, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically altered California's development. In turn, Californian systems of servitude, exotic species, educational programs, and capitalist development strategies dramatically shaped Chilean history. The book develops a new set of historical perspectives—tracing eastward-moving trends in U.S. history, uncovering South American influences on North America's development, and reframing the Western Hemisphere from a Pacific vantage point.

This book focuses on intellectual piracy and presents an interpretive study of the American appropriation of forbidden European know-how from the perspective of a diplomatic historian of the early republic. The technology and the manner in which Americans acquired it came in three forms that were never quite independent of one another. First, there was the knowledge itself—the mechanical and scientific discoveries that made innovations possible. Second, there were the innovations that improved existing production processes and allowed for the creation of new products that were smuggled across the Atlantic Ocean. Third, and most important, were the workers who immigrated to North America, bringing with them the professional training they had acquired in Europe's factories. These three distinct historical phenomena constitute a unified problem from the perspective of the relations among states—namely, the rules and boundaries of national ownership of intellectual property on the international scene. The book focuses on the role policies relating to intellectual property played in promoting the appropriation of smuggled technology, which led to the emergence of the United States as the premier industrial power in the world. It discusses the evolution of the American approach to the problem of the relations between international boundaries and intellectual property from the colonial period to the age of Jackson, examines the role of federal and state governments in that transformation, and explains the contradictory American policy.