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In the early 2000s, the US monetary policy committee, as well as other central banks around the world, began using “forward guidance,” or changes in their statement language, to signal policy changes. Underlying this shift toward clearer communication was the idea that more comprehensible monetary policy would lead to better economic performance and lower inflation. The first three chapters of this book argue that, rather than being a lofty goal set by altruistically motivated policy makers, transparency depends on the configuration of committee members’ preferences. Monetary policy committees that have central bankers with opposing preferences are argued to communicate more precisely compared to either a single decision maker or central bankers with more similar preferences. Precise communication is then shown to have positive effects by lowering inflation. Shifting focus and using data from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), chapter 4 presents evidence that committees with opposing preferences use a lower share of uncertainty words in policy statements and make more numerous changes to public announcements. Chapter 5 shows that households in Germany change their inflation expectations when given more precise central bank information. And chapter 6 shows that the level of precision in inflation-related news articles is negatively related to inflation in a sample of countries from Latin America. In conclusion, this book offers a new way of thinking about central bank committees and transparency. It finds that appointing a more policy-diverse central bank committee can encourage intercommittee governance and accountability as well as better economic performance.

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

In mankind’s relentless quest for prosperity, Nature has suffered great damage. It has been treated as an inexhaustible reserve of resources. The indefinite scale of global expansion is still continuing and now the earth’s very survival is under threat. But against this exploitation of nature, there is the concept of entropy, which places a finite limit on the extent to which resources can be used in any closed system, such as our planet. Considering the impact of entropy, this book examines the key issues of sustainability—social, economic, and environmental. It discusses the social dimension of sustainability, showing how it is impacted by issues of economic inequality, poverty, and other socio-economic and infrastructural factors in the Indian context. It also highlights how Indian households suffer from clean energy poverty and points to the inequality in distribution of different fuels and of fuel cost among households. It assesses India’s power sector and its potential to be a significant player in bringing the Third Industrial Revolution to India by replacing fossil fuels with new renewables. It concludes by projecting power sector scenarios till 2041–42 achievable through alternative, realizable policy with respect to energy conservation and fuel substitution, and thus paves the way for the green power.

Abstract: How do knowledge and ideas influence the competitiveness of firms and nations? Current debates about grand innovation prizes, patent trolls, technological disruption, human capital, and the role of an entrepreneurial state reflect and replicate earlier controversies that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. This book shows how and why the ideas of creative individuals promote progress. The insights are based on original archival research regarding over 100,000 inventors, patented inventions, and innovation prizes in Europe and the United States during industrialization. This systematic empirical analysis across time and place and institutions provides a comprehensive microfoundation for understanding technological change and long-run macroeconomic growth. British and French policies favored “administered innovation systems,” in which elites, administrators, or panels made key economic decisions about inducement prizes, rewards, and the allocation of resources. European institutions generated returns that were misaligned with economic value and productivity and perpetuated socioeconomic inequality. Europe fell behind when the negative consequences of such top-down administered systems accumulated and reduced comparative advantage. The modern knowledge economy emerged when, for the first time in world history, an intellectual property clause was included in a national Constitution, in the United States. This strong endorsement for open-access property rights and unfettered markets in ideas reflected a revolution in thinking about the sources of creativity and technical progress. U.S. global industrial ascendancy was a direct outcome of its decentralized market-oriented institutions, which fostered diversity in ideas and innovations, the diffusion of information and disruptive technologies, and sustained endogenous growth.

When we talk about development, we are talking about capitalist development. Taking a historical-comparativ e approach, Harrison understands development as a transformation which involves a deep and integrated political economy of change: a shift from a state of ‘capital-ascendance’ to ‘capital-dominance’. It is only through a transformation towards capital dominance that mass poverty reduction and the construction of a commonwealth are possible. However, capitalist development is extremely difficult and requires a highly exacting political endeavour. The politics of development is conceptualized as developmentalism: a strategy and ideology in which governments exercise heavy directive power, endure instability and crisis, and secure a rudimentary legitimacy for their efforts. The political exertions required to generate and sustain a developmentalist strategy are too great to be met by the simple desire to develop. Harrison argues that developmentalism requires a conflation of successful capitalist transformation with some form of existential insecurity of the state itself. Developmentalism flourishes when capitalist transformation connects to profound questions of sovereignty, statehood, nation-building, and elite survival. Authoritarian state action is intrinsic to developmentalism, which the book addresses by adapting a realist approach to politics in which political norms and values are generated within the agonies of suffering and benefit generated by an ascending capital. Taking case studies from the last 250 years, Developmentalism shows the deep contextualization of capitalist transformation as well as the massive improvements in material life that it has generated.

This text is designed to bridge the gap between Ph.D. and undergraduate textbooks in Macroeconomics. The text develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of money using a cash-in-advance constraint and endogenous production as in the real business cycle literature. The costs of inflation and optimal monetary policy, the impact of labor and capital taxes and as well as optimal fiscal policy are covered. Many extensions, including new Keynesian liquidity shock models are developed. Both standard analytic methods, such as Lagrangian methods, and computational methods using Matlab and Python, are developed as we construct quantitative models.

This is a detailed analysis of the business of the scholarly publishing of books, journals, preprints, and various scholarly publications in institutional repositories in the United States. Drawing on an extensive review of the literature and statistical sources, the book examines the changing environment of scholarly publishing and the product, price, placement, promotion, and costs (including some profit and loss statements) of scholarly books and journals. Special attention is paid to the history and development of scholarly books and journals; intellectual property issues, including the development of the US copyright law and infringement issues of Sci-Hub; an author’s contract; and the impact of technology (including open access) on books and journals. The book also discusses how scholarly publishers are trying to manage in what are turbulent times. The book contains extensive notes, book and journal statistical tables, and figures.

Ending poverty is a noble goal, relevant today as much as it was two decades ago when four women rose to prominent positions in their government and decided to make it their central objective. As the world strives to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we may find inspiration in the work of Eveline Herfkens from the Netherlands, Hilde F. Johnson from Norway, Clare Short from the United Kingdom, and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul from Germany who became ministers in charge of their governments’ international development policies in 1997–8. They believed that the best way to end global poverty was to join forces in changing the policies of the international institutions where decisions affecting the poor all over the world are made and to reform donor countries development programmes. They came to be known as the Utstein Four, after the Norwegian Utstein Abbey where they formalized their collaboration in 1999. They called their collaboration ‘a conspiracy of implementation’ to contrast their action-oriented approach with the lofty pronouncements leaders agree to in big global conferences only to forget them when they return home. This volume discusses Utstein’s many contributions ranging from helping relieve the poorest countries of their debt, using debt relief to actually lift individuals out of poverty, achieving primary education for all, especially girls, and putting developing country partners in charge of setting priorities and implementing programmes of assistance. It is a story of women’s empowerment which lasted for only about half a dozen years as the original Utstein Four moved on to other positions. But their influence continues to be felt because their approach to improve aid effectiveness was codified in international agreements and practices of global institutions. The last part of the book discusses the legacy of the Utstein group and the lessons that their experience offers to the continuing challenges of eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable development.

The book focuses on the short- and long-term macroeconomic challenges faced by developing countries characterized by missing, incomplete, and dualistic markets and weak institutions. Such problems affect long-term growth, short-term macroeconomic equilibrium, employment, and inequality far more than in the advanced economies. A central message of the book is that ignoring these features and applying to developing countries models inspired by the reality of advanced economies may lead to wrong conclusions and policies. These challenges are discussed for a number of archetypes of developing economies dependent on land and natural resources, affected by supply rigidities in agriculture, and featuring dualistic markets, a dominant informal sector, fast population growth, and chronic dependence on the export of commodities and a volatile external finance. Finally, the book discusses the impact on growth, inequality, and poverty of the stabilization and structural adjustment reforms that were increasingly implemented during the last thirty years. These issues have taken centre stage since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) initiatives that have not spelled out a clear macroeconomic approach. There is a risk, therefore, that the wrong policies and sudden shocks may derail progress towards the SDGs which might be achieved by means of social policies.