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This book uses concepts from optimization theory to develop an integrated analytic framework for treating consumer, producer, and market equilibrium analyses as special cases of a generic optimization problem. The same framework applies to both stochastic and non-stochastic decision settings, so that the latter is recognized as an (important) special case of the former. The analytic techniques are borrowed from convex analysis and variational analysis. Special emphasis is given to generalized notions of differentiability, conjugacy theory, and Fenchel's Duality Theorem. The book shows how virtually identical conjugate analyses form the basis for modeling economic behavior in each of the areas studied. The basic analytic concepts are borrowed from convex analysis. Special emphasis is given to generalized notions of differentiability, conjugacy theory, and Fenchel's Duality Theorem. It is demonstrated how virtually identical conjugate analyses form the basis for modelling economic behaviour in each of the areas studied.

Its GDP having touched $2.6 trillion, India is poised to become the world’s third-largest economy in less than a decade. In doing so, it will have moved one step closer to reclaiming its pre-1820s glory, when it accounted for one-sixth of global output and ranked second in economic size. This rapid movement in the absolute size of the economy will be insufficient, however, to bring prosperity to India’s vast population. Today, 44 percent of the country’s workforce remains in agriculture and another 42 percent in tiny enterprises with fewer than twenty workers. Labor productivity of both sets of workers remains low, and they live overwhelmingly on subsistence-level incomes. This book lays down a concise road map of reforms that would help transform the country and create well-paid jobs in industry and services for those with limited or no skills. It argues that creation of good jobs requires the emergence of medium and large enterprises in industry and services, especially labor-intensive sectors such as apparel, footwear, and other light manufactures. India needs policies conducive to the growth of firms from small to medium, from medium to large, and from large to larger still. They must compete in the global marketplace to help increase India’s share in the world export market from less than 2 percent currently to 5 to 6 percent in a decade. Such policies include greater outward orientation; more flexible markets in land, labor, and capital; a concerted effort to improve the quality of higher education; faster urbanization; and improved governance at all levels.

This book provides an integrative framework for the anthropological demography of health, a field of interdisciplinary population research grounded in ethnography and in critical examination of the social, political, and economic histories that have shaped relations between peoples. The field has grown from the 1990s, extending to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child and maternal morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability and chronic diseases; new reproductive technologies; and population ageing. Collaboration with social, medical, and demographic historians enables these issues to be situated in the evolution of institutional structures and inequalities that shape health and care access. Understanding fertility levels and trends has widened beyond parity and contraception to the many life course risks and alternative healing systems that shape reproductive health. By going beyond conventional demographic and epidemiological methods, and idealised macro/micro-level units, the anthropological demography of health places people’s health-seeking behaviour in a compositional demography based on ethnographic observation of group formation and change over time, and of variance between what people say and do. It tracks family and community networks; class, linguistic, and religious groups; sectoral labour and market distributions; health and healing specialisms; and relations between these bodies and with groups controlling local and national governments. The approach enables examination of how local cultures and experience are translated formally into measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely, thus testing the empirical adequacy of such translations, and leading to revision of concepts of risk and governance.

Why do farm workers become more vulnerable as countries get richer? As countries get richer, the share of workers employed in agriculture falls. In richer countries, hired farm workers do ever more of the work on the fewer and larger farms that produce most farm commodities. These hired workers include local workers who lack the skills and contacts needed to get nonfarm jobs that usually offer higher wages and more opportunities as well as legal and unauthorized migrants from poorer countries who may not know or exercise their labor-related rights. Government enforcement of labor laws depends on complaints, and vulnerable workers rarely complain. The Prosperity Paradox explains why farm-worker problems often worsen as the agricultural sector shrinks and lays out options to help vulnerable workers. Analysis of farm labor markets in the US, Mexico, and other countries shows that unions and fair trade efforts to protect farm workers cover a very small share of all workers and are unlikely to expand quickly. Most labor-intensive fruits and vegetables are eaten fresh. Unsafe food that sickened consumers led to voluntary industry and later government-mandated food-safety programs to ensure that food is safe when it leaves the farm, with protocols enforced by both government inspectors and buyers who refused to buy from noncompliant farms. This food-safety model offers the most promise for a new era in protective labor policies.

The book reviews the theoretical foundations of macroeconomic, fiscal, and monetary policy. It offers a panoramic view of macroeconomic theory, covering a wide range of topics that are not customarily dealt with in macroeconomics texts, as well as more standard material. The style is intuitive and accessible, relying on basic calculus, but explained discursively and using diagrams. Advanced theory is bridged with more elementary/intermediate material. Established models are reviewed alongside current research. There is an extensive review of empirical evidence on virtually every topic, supplemented by narrative accounts for various episodes. The policy implications of the various theories are emphasized throughout. The chapters are largely self-contained so that different courses can focus at different places. A ‘Guidance for Further Study’ section and extensive bibliography give plenty of ideas for all levels of independent study, from UG Projects to M.Sc. dissertations to Ph.D. theses. The book should be seen as an affirmation that there is a well-developed body of theory that is invaluable for an in-depth understanding of the macroeconomy and policy; equally, there is much scope for critical discussion and debate. Thus, the key feature is a balance between: breadth as well as depth; analytical treatment and intuition; theory and evidence; vintage theories and current directions; theory and policy; (established) theory and debate. As such, the book should appeal to a variety of instructors and students of macroeconomics at advanced undergraduate or graduate level, as well as those in related fields such as political economy.

Info-metrics is a framework for modeling, reasoning, and drawing inferences under conditions of noisy and insufficient information. It is an interdisciplinary framework situated at the intersection of information theory, statistical inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. In a recent book on the Foundations of Info-Metrics, Golan (OUP, 2018) provides the theoretical underpinning of info-metrics and the necessary tools and building blocks for using that framework. This volume complements Golan’s book and expands on the series of studies on the classical maximum entropy and Bayesian methods published in the different proceedings started with the seminal collection of Levine and Tribus (1979) and continuing annually. The objective of this volume is to expand the study of info-metrics, and information processing, across the sciences and to further explore the basis of information-theoretic inference and its mathematical and philosophical foundations. This volume is inherently interdisciplinary and applications oriented. It contains some of the recent developments in the field, as well as many new cross-disciplinary case studies and examples. The emphasis here is on the interrelationship between information and inference where we view the word ‘inference’ in its most general meaning – capturing all types of problem solving. That includes model building, theory creation, estimation, prediction, and decision making. The volume contains nineteen chapters in seven parts. Although chapters in each part are related, each chapter is self-contained; it provides the necessary tools for using the info-metrics framework for solving the problem confronted in that chapter. This volume is designed to be accessible for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners across the disciplines, requiring only some basic quantitative skills. The multidisciplinary nature and applications provide a hands-on experience for the reader.

This book demonstrates that universal banks—which accept deposits, make loans, and engage in securities activities—played central roles in precipitating the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–09. Universal banks promoted a dangerous credit boom and a hazardous stock market bubble in the U.S. during the 1920s, which led to the Great Depression. Congress responded by passing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated banks from the securities markets and prohibited nonbanks from accepting deposits. Glass-Steagall’s structural separation of the banking, securities, and insurance sectors prevented financial panics from spreading across the U.S. financial system for more than four decades. Despite Glass-Steagall’s success, large U.S. banks pursued a twenty-year campaign to remove the statute’s prudential buffers. Regulators opened loopholes in Glass-Steagall during the 1980s and 1990s, and Congress repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999. The United Kingdom and the European Union adopted similar deregulatory measures, thereby allowing universal banks to dominate financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, large U.S. securities firms became “shadow banks” as regulators allowed them to issue short-term deposit substitutes to finance long-term loans and investments. Universal banks and shadow banks fueled a toxic subprime credit boom in the U.S., U.K., and Europe during the 2000s, which led to the Great Recession. Limited reforms after the Great Recession have not broken up universal banks and shadow banks, thereby leaving in place a financial system that is prone to excessive risk-taking and vulnerable to contagious panics. A new Glass-Steagall Act is urgently needed to restore a financial system that is less risky, more stable and resilient, and better able to serve the needs of our economy and society.

There is growing evidence that overcoming the low-income threshold and reaching middle-income status is not sufficient for countries to converge toward high-income levels. Few middle-income countries have successfully completed that transit in recent decades, with the majority remaining in the middle-income group, and so facing what has come to be called"the middle-income trap". It is therefore essential to explore whether middle-income traps really exist and, if they do, how these pitfalls are manifested, what their causes are, what economic policy measures are required to escape from them, and what international cooperation can do to support this process. Trapped in the Middle? brings together diverse perspectives on these important questions, providing new evidence and analytical approaches to enrich the debate on the domestic and international challenges faced by a significant number of middle-income countries, in which over three-quarters of the global population live.

Whereas the emergence of the classical gold standard (1870‒1914) has attracted considerable attention in the economic literature, only very few authors have inquired into the protracted confidence crisis of silver. Building on the results of Calomiris, Oppers, and Flandreau, this book explores the evolution of management practice in exchange banks in Asia. Using ‘forensic accounting’, it attempts to show that contemporaries were aware of problems caused by the gyrations of the silver price after 1870, and that they sought to actively remedy their harmful effects on trade between gold and silver using countries. It describes how the experiment with financial instruments, although originally mishaps, eventually led to success. Next, and contrary to the commonly held belief that nineteenth-century bankers did not have a sophisticated understanding of hedging strategies, it shows, in a quantitative way, that hedging strategies existed, impacting banks’ operations in profound ways. More specifically, it uses the mostly unexplored accounting data and archives of the Yokohama Specie Bank (YSB; the world’s third largest exchange bank before World War II) to describe the bank’s wrought management history in the tumultuous years around the turn of the twentieth century. YSB had to come to grips with Japan’s effort at adopting the gold standard (1897), the difficult expansionary ‘postbellum administration’ after the Sino-Japanese War (1894‒5), and the consolidation of the country’s imperialism (after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904‒5)—all events shaping not only the bank’s operations and expansion in Asia, but also affecting the organization of its branch network and management of its flow-of-funds.

This book deals with practical or real life aspects of public finance. It focuses on the growth in the activities of governments, in a world that expects more than in the past from governments. The book focuses on the growing complexity in both the work of the private market and that of the public sector. It stresses that part of the growing complexity is due to the more ambitious role that governments tried to play today, while part is due to choices made by governments, so that complexity may be partly avoidable. This was important in the different pursuit of social welfare by different countries. Complexity has increased opportunities for abuses, for rent seeking, and for mistakes in policies. It may also have increased the attraction of populist policies that claim to offer magical or easy solutions to problems. A major conclusion of the book is that the objective of simplicity in laws and in policies should be given more importance by both economists and governments.