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Today, ordoliberalism is at the center of the ongoing debate about the foundations, the present governance, and future prospects of the European Union—and yet we do not dispose of a comprehensive definition of it. Whenever we talk of the dominance of the German model, the discussion should involve a detailed picture of ordoliberal principles. This book retraces the intellectual history of ordoliberalism, focusing in particular on the works of its main representatives Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke, together with references to the contributions of Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow, Leonhard Miksch, and Friedrich Lutz. The book highlights the crucial, albeit overlooked, role of economic and political power in the making of ordoliberal thought. More precisely, the book shows that ordoliberalism, in its ideological, epistemological, theoretical, and political components, can be defined as a political economy of power; that is, as a form of economic knowledge whose primary objective is to analyze the sources, action, and impact of power within society. By doing so, the book will offer a new perspective on ordoliberals’ key concepts built in the interwar period while contextualizing them within a broader intellectual project.

Do patents facilitate or frustrate innovation? Lawyers, economists, and politicians who have staked out strong positions in this debate often attempt to validate their claims by invoking the historical record—but they typically get the history wrong. The purpose of this book is to get the history right by showing that patent systems are the product of contending interests at different points in production chains battling over economic surplus. The larger the potential surplus, the more extreme are the efforts of contending parties, now and in the past, to search out, generate, and exploit any and all sources of friction. Patent systems, as human creations, are therefore necessarily ridden with imperfections; nirvana is not on the menu. The most interesting intellectual issue is not how patent systems are imperfect, but why historically US-style patent systems have come to dominate all other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The answer offered by the essays in this volume is that they create a temporary property right that can be traded in a market, thereby facilitating a productive division of labor and making it possible for firms to transfer technological knowledge to one another by overcoming the free-rider problem. Precisely because the value of a patent does not inhere in the award itself but rather in the market value of the resulting property right, patent systems foster a decentralized ecology of inventors and firms that ceaselessly extends the frontiers of what is economically possible.

Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate—and the texts with which Malthus and Ricardo attempted to intervene into these disputes. The results show that political economy was produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments, giving its practitioners great intellectual freedom. Yet political economy was also expected to act as a species of counsel to Parliament and resolve policy questions. In this context, the presumption of Malthus and Ricardo to style themselves as ‘theorists’ who possessed special intellectual capacities that set them above merely ‘practical’ writers attracted hostile responses from their contemporaries. The tenuous position of theory in this period was worsened by the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, which enabled the enemies of Malthus and Ricardo to portray their work as theoretical enthusiasm—as the product of undisciplined minds that had succumbed to the pleasures of system, utopia, and fanaticism. The attack and defence of political economy in this setting was conducted with the vocabulary of theory and practice, and the period thus stands as a time when reflection on commerce and politics was conducted without method and models.

Through their philanthropy, Indian elites have played an influential role in the country’s development in the twentieth century. Presenting an innovative history of postcolonial development, the book plots elites’ formulations and formations of modernity and its entanglement with the national question. In an unusual move that reads more familiar forms of modernization from the second half of the twentieth century alongside earlier ideas of nationalist reform, it interrogates the influence of anti-colonial nationalism in India on contemporary development. It also brings into relief the longer historical trajectory of popular development ideas such as ‘self-care’ and ‘responsibility’. The book covers the differences and shifts in elites’ imaginaries of development across a range of sites—self, community, science and technology, and civil society. It concludes that as elites privileged their imaginaries of development over others, they have come to assume a pedagogic role for themselves as they justify their development choices and its exclusions: in the name of nation.

This book theorizes that information is a critical factor for subnational government (SNG) capital market formation and development. It empirically tests the stated relationship between information resolution institutions and mechanisms of information resolution on SNG borrowing. Based on empirical results, analyses of underlying fundamentals of city credit quality, and the study of contexts of information resolution reforms, the book recommends policy measures for central governments, regional and local governments, and financial sector firms to build capital markets for subnational borrowing. As subnational governments across the globe, especially cities, bear increasing pressures to provide critical capital infrastructure, responsibilities for the provision of local infrastructure resulting from decentralization efforts and population demands, the need for a wider array of internal and external resources, including bond market alternatives, become a priority. With information resolution, access to capital market financing becomes a feasible option of regional and local government finance. The evidence reported in this book demonstrates that SNG access to capital market financing depends on credit contractibility, which is the nation’s capacity of information resolution. The bases of credit contractibility are transparency of credit information, depth of credit information, dissemination, and regulatory quality. Evidence also shows that the informational content of underlying credit quality is a significant covariate of city-level borrowing and debt composition. Based on empirical findings and focusing on cities, the book argues that SNGs can and should strengthen their agency vis-à-vis the public and financial sector actors, in an environment where global capital is increasingly intertwined with the provision of critical infrastructure finance. Agency is necessary for city policymakers not only to achieve their key governance tasks efficiently, but do so effectively and equitably, consistent with the demands of the citizenry.

This book builds upon previous work by the author on economic development, structural change, and income inequality. The core focus of the book is the emergent processes of stalled industrialization and the spectre of premature deindustrialization in developing countries. The term ‘rust belt’ has been rarely associated with developing countries to date. In fact, it is commonly associated with deindustrialization in advanced countries and the US in particular. However, such a belt is threatening the middle-income developing world, starting from Brazil and other countries in Latin America, running down across South Africa, and then upwards to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines in South East Asia. This book discusses the causes and consequences of these emergent processes in developing countries.

The purpose of this book is to bring together for the first time a description, with examples, of the main methods used in microsimulation modelling, used in the field of income-distribution analysis. The book provides a practical complement to the Handbook of Microsimulation Modelling, published in 2014. It is structured to develop and use the different types of models used in the field, with a focus on household-targeted policy. The book aims to fill a gap in the literature in providing a greater degree of codified knowledge through a practical guide to developing and using microsimulation models. At present, the training of researchers and analysts that use and develop microsimulation modelling is done on a relatively ad-hoc basis through occasional training programmes and lecture series, built around lecture notes. This book would enable a more formalized and organized approach. Each chapter addresses a separate modelling approach in a similar, consistent way, describing in practical terms the key methodological skills for each approach: · It provides some policy context to each modelling approach so as to understand the modelling choices made and structures developed. · As a very data-intensive modelling approach, each chapter describes key data analysis and data-preparation methods. · As a modelling approach that is used extensively for deciding policy, often involving huge budgets, validation is key. Each chapter describes an approach to validating the model. · Depending upon the policy context, the analysis is assessed in different ways. Each chapter contains a section devoted to measurement issues and tabulating output from the models. · Last, each chapter contains an example simulation of a policy analysis using the chapter’s methodological approach.

Only a handful of economies have successfully transitioned from middle to high income in recent decades. One such case is Spain. How did it achieve this feat? Despite its relevance to countries that have yet to complete that transition, this question has attracted only limited attention. As a result, Spain’s development into a prosperous society is a success story largely underreported and often misunderstood. This book turns on their head the questions that usually frame the debate about Spain’s economic development. Instead of asking why Spain’s catching up was delayed, this book asks how it happened in the first place. Instead of focusing on how bad institutions undermined economic prospects, as the literature has done, this book explains how growth took place even in the presence of poor institutions. This wider lens opens up new perspectives on Spain’s development path. For example, comparisons are drawn not only with the richest countries but also with those that were in a similar stage of development as Spain. Drawing on a wide range of material, from archival sources to text analytics, the book provides a new account of why reforms were adopted, the role of external and internal factors, as well as that of unintended consequences. The result is an original interpretation of the economic rise of Spain that speaks also to the wider literature on the political economy of reform, the role of industrial and public policy more broadly, and the enduring legacy of political violence and conflict.