Browse

This book presents the report on the European economic system, which was submitted to the President of the European Commission in July 2003. The report is divided into three parts. The first contains an assessment of the economic performance in terms of growth, stability, and cohesion. The second explores the challenges facing the European Union. The third presents a series of policy recommendations for the future.

In the past decade or so, systems integration has become a key factor in the operations, strategy, and competitive advantage of major corporations in a wide variety of sectors (e.g. computing, automotive, telecommunications, military systems, and aerospace). In the past, systems integration was confined to a technical, operations task. Today, systems integration is a strategic task that pervades business management not only at the technical level but also at the management and strategic levels. This book shows how and why this new kind of systems integration has evolved into an emerging model of industrial organisation whereby firms and groups of firms join together different types of knowledge, skill, and activity, as well as hardware, software, and human resources to produce new products. The business of systems integration has fundamental implications for the capabilities of firms. Firms have made a transition from being vertically integrated to being the integrator of somebody else's activities. This book, the first to systematically explore the re‐invention of systems integration from a business and innovation perspective, is based on contributions from leading international scholars. It delves deeply into the nature, dimensions, and dynamics of the new systems integration, deploying research and analytical techniques from a wide variety of disciplines including, the theory of the firm, the history of technology, industrial organisation, regional studies, strategic management, and innovation studies.

Trustworthiness in the financial services industry was eroded by deregulation and the changes to industry structure and remuneration which followed. Deregulation was based on a belief that the self-interest of individuals would produce good outcomes (Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’) and economists’ belief in efficient markets took this idea further by assuming that all individuals are selfish and have no regard for the interests of other people. However although Smith accepted that individuals may be self-interested, he also believed that they have other-regarding motivations, including a desire for the approbation of others. This book argues that the trust-intensive nature of financial services makes it essential to cultivate such motivations, and provides proposals for how this might be done. The book suggests reforms of governance, and of legal and regulatory arrangements, to address these issues by seeking to change the ethical culture to one that reinforces ‘other-regarding’ behaviour. Such proposals would encourage firms and individuals in the financial services to act in a more trustworthy manner by focusing on four key requirements: the appropriate definition of obligations, the identification of corresponding responsibilities, the creation of mechanisms which encourage trustworthiness, and the holding to account of those involved in an appropriate manner. Financial reforms at present lack sufficient focus on these requirements. The book explores how these requirements can be better met in specific parts of the financial services industry so as to bring about better outcomes.

After a turbulent century of unprecedented social and technological change, capitalism has emerged as the dominant ideology and model for economic growth in the richest, most developed countries. But only thirty years ago economic growth was faltering, inflation rising, and the Left were arguing for greater state intervention in industry. How did this transformation happen? And what price have we paid in the process? This book provides a history of the problems facing the economies of Europe, Japan, and the US during the latter half of the 20th century, and questions whether capitalism has really brought the levels of economic growth and prosperity that were hoped for. The book then looks at the impact the rapidly developing economies of China and the South are likely to have on the older economies of the North. As the race is on to maintain growth and protect competitive advantage, the book asks: is the ‘race-to-the bottom’ inevitable, with welfare states being dismantled to meet competitive demands? Or is there an alternative model that sees a strong commitment to welfare provision as essential to economic growth? Can we afford not to tackle inequality at home as well as abroad?

Capitalist economies have developed with a fair amount of diversity among themselves, which should have resulted in dramatic differences in levels of development. The fact that these differences are for the most part not noticeable may indicate that capitalism is based on such robust mechanisms that it accommodates varied institutional environments. In other words, institutional differences would be akin to national folklore, with few if any consequences for economic dynamics. If institutional specificities did have an effect, competition among nations would sooner or later lead to the adoption of international ‘best practices’. This book challenges these views on several counts. There are some elements of truth in the statement that differences in macroeconomic policy mix could explain in part the differences in economic performance. But this does not amount to saying that institutional specificities do not matter in explaining important differences in the basic economic mechanisms of the different countries. There is a considerable amount of theoretical and historical work that insists on the central role of institutions in economic dynamics.

The collapse of the Doha Round hangs heavily over an already troubled world economy. Some have concluded that this failure is simply the result of a lack of political will and a pre-occupation with issues such as terrorism. But as this book reveals, the World Trade Organization needs serious structural changes, not just political backbone. It shows for instance that the WTO—now with 153 members—has become increasingly unwieldy in terms of concluding trade agreements and he suggests that countries organize around specific platform positions, a strategy that would make the “holy grail” of consensus once again possible. The book also argues for financial support for poorer countries so that they can participate effectively in negotiations and it contends that the principle of the “single undertaking” (that “there is no agreement until everything is agreed”) has become a serious and perhaps crippling constraint, and must be modified.

This book examines capitalism as an economic system and in comparison to socialism. The book explains a view of capitalism as an economy of surplus—a chronic excess of supply of goods and labor. This environment breeds rivalry among producers, which in turn encourages innovation. Socialism, on the other hand, is defined by a shortage of goods and labor and excess of demand. Whereas socialism is slothful and imitative, capitalism is dynamic and progressive. The two chapters of this book explore these differing ideologies on macro and micro levels, ending with definitive explanations of how the systems work and how they develop.

Beer was the drink of choice in many ancient societies and throughout the past centuries in large parts of the world. Right now, it is globally by far the most important alcoholic drink, in volume and value terms. The largest brewing companies have developed into global multinationals. The beer market is characterized by strong growth in emerging economies, by a substantial decline of (per capita) beer consumption in traditional markets, and a shift to new products. There has been a strong interaction between governments (politics) and markets (economics) in the beer industry. For centuries, taxes on beer or its raw materials were a major source of tax revenue for governments. Governments have also regulated the beer industry for reasons related to quality, health, and competition. The beer market is not only an interesting sector to study in itself but also yields important general economic insights. This book is the first economic analysis of the beer market and brewing industry. It comprises a comprehensive and unique set of economic research and analysis on the economics of beer and brewing. The various chapters cover economic history and development, demand and supply, trade and investment, geography and scale economies, technology and innovation, health and nutrition, quantity and quality, industrial organization and competition, taxation and regulation, and regional beer market developments.

Transition in Central and Eastern Europe has led to a U‐shaped response of output, that is, a sharp decline in output followed by recovery. Six years after the beginning of transition, most of the countries of Central Europe now seem firmly on the upside. Most of the countries of Eastern Europe are still close to the bottom of the U; an optimistic view is that they are now negotiating the turn.

This U‐shaped response of output, its causes and its implications, is the subject of this book. That transition came with an often‐large initial decrease in output should be seen as a puzzle. After all, the previous economic system was characterized by myriad distortions. One might have expected that removing most of them would lead to a large increase, not decrease in output. This is not what happened. The purpose of this book is to understand why, and to draw general lessons.

Since the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy-makers, and social scientists have been searching for alternative paradigms through which to re-imagine contemporary modes of thinking and writing about economic orders. These attempts have led to their re-engagement with fundamental anthropological categories of economic analysis, such as barter, debt, and the gift. Focusing on favours, and the paradoxes of action, meaning, and significance they engender, this volume advocates for their addition to this list of economic universals. It presents a critical re-interrogation of the conceptual relationships between gratuitous and instrumental behaviour, and raises novel questions about the intersection of economic actions with the ethical and expressive aspects of human life. Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used ‘favour’ as a byword for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of ‘masked’ economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses.

Derived from the 2001 Santa Fe Institute Conference, “The Economy as an Evolving Complex System III,” represents scholarship from the figures in the area of economics and complexity. The subject, a perennial centerpiece of the SFI program of studies, has gained a wide range of followers for its methods of employing empirical evidence in the development of analytical economic theories. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume address a wide variety of issues in the field of economics and complexity, accessing eclectic techniques from many disciplines, provided that they shed light on the economic problem. Dedicated to Kenneth Arrow on his 80th birthday, this volume honors his many contributions to the Institute. SFI-style economics is regarded as having had an important impact in introducing a new approach to economic analysis.

This book illuminates a comprehensive social system that comprises explicit markets, tort liability, and criminal liability, and describes each of these three institutions as serving the same function in different social and physical circumstances. It defines exchanges as compensated transfers of rights and objects among individuals, and shows that markets, tort, and crime each operate to organize and facilitate, to govern, exchange of a particular kind of right in a particular exchange environment to which its own rules and procedures are well suited. Under perfect conditions, each operates to move rights and objects from lower- to higher-valuing owners by requiring every taker of rights to compensate every loser in full for the costs of the taking. Markets can organize voluntary exchange of property rights only where theft can be deterred, but when rights or objects are stolen, an involuntary transfer is initiated, and markets are incapable of organizing the completion of the involuntary exchange by compensating the victim. This is the role of tort and criminal liability, which complete the involuntary transaction begun by the theft by imposing a compensatory liability price on every offender equal to the costs imposed by the theft. Marginal-cost pricing in markets controls voluntary, lawful cost imposition by distinguishing inefficient from efficient cost imposition and encouraging the latter, and corrective justice in tort and crime, each in an institutional domain determined by the character of the rights being traded, controls involuntary, unlawful cost imposition in the same way.

America faces two distinct but related economic challenges. Steadily rising federal debt—largely fueled by rising healthcare costs and an aging population that will boost spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—will make it harder to grow the nation’s economy, boost living standards, respond to wars or recessions, address social needs, and maintain the US role as a global leader. At the same time, an increasingly fractured society has left many people behind and let critical investments lag, even as overall prosperity has grown. How and when US citizens address these challenges will help determine the future they build for themselves and their children. This book proposes a remedy with three core elements: controlling entitlement spending in ways that preserve and enhance the programs’ anti-poverty and social insurance roles; betting on the future by stipulating major new public investments in human and physical capital; and raising and reforming taxes to pay for government services fairly and efficiently. Together, these changes would control federal borrowing, strengthen the economy, increase opportunity, reduce inequality, and build better lives for current and future generations. There is no need to kill popular programs or starve government. Indeed, a primary goal of fiscal reform is to maintain and enhance the vital functions that government provides. The country needs to act responsibly, pay for the government it wants, and shape that government in ways that serve it best.

This book addresses the nature of industrial dynamics, structural change, and transformation in our time. The central focus is on the question of evolutionary processes and complex transformation in the economy, with particular emphasis on the nature of flexibility and stability. The 19 authors — many of whom are leaders in their field — share a common approach to the economy as an inherently dynamic and complex system consisting of diverse components and activities, which are interacting and changing in different ways over time. Framing the book this way stresses the necessity of analyzing not only economic transformation, but also that diverse actors are deciding, doing, and acting in ways which affect the outcomes. The chapters are grouped within three themes: 1) Experimenting and Inertia, 2) Evolution and Adaptation of Structure, and 3) Innovating and Technological Transformation.

This book on Flexicurity Capitalism provides four rigorously formulated approaches to an analysis of the current and future evolution of capitalism from a Marx-Keynes and Kalecki- Schumpeter (MKS) perspective. It does so in self-contained ways, focusing on macrodynamical models of the working of modern capitalist societies in the tradition of Classical and Keynesian authors, augmented by a modern reformulation of Schumpeterian ’Competitive Socialism’, the flexi(bility-se)curity approach currently intensively debated in the EU area. On this basis the book provides a novel approach to the study of the future of capitalism, a topic that has never been more important than now -- since the prosperity phase after World War II. It supplies an alternative to those discussions of current forms of capitalism which focus on the status quo of such economies, instead of providing an ideal scenario first, on the basis of which compromises between the status quo and the 'ideal' can be discussed. The employed modelling approaches, of an advanced type, are aimed at the post-graduate level of economic teaching. The chapters of the book can be utilised independently of each other but, nevertheless, provide a unique approach to macrodynamic theorizing that is firmly rooted in the MKS tradition of the understanding of the growth dynamics of capitalist economies.

Few sectors of the global economy have experienced the dynamic and structural change that has occurred over the past several decades in banking and financial services, or as much turbulence and damage to the economy and to individuals. Regulatory and technological changes have been among the main catalysts of transformation in the financial industry worldwide, making entrenched competitive structures obsolete and mandating the development of new products, new processes, new strategies, and new public policies toward the industry. This book attempts to reassess the continuing transformation process of global banking and finance—its causes, its course, and its consequences. It begins with an overview of the most recent developments. Next, the major dimensions of international commercial and investment banking are examined, including money and foreign exchange markets, debt capital markets, international bank lending, derivatives, asset-based and project financing, and equity capital markets. Next, the various advisory businesses—mergers and acquisitions, privatizations, institutional asset management, and private banking—are analyzed. In each case, the factors that distinguish the winners from the losers are identified. This is brought together in the final section of the book, which deals with problems of strategic positioning and execution, as well as with critical risk issues and regulations.

In recent years, intellectual property rights (IPR) both in the form of patents and copyrights have expanded in their coverage, the width and depth of protection, and the tightness in their enforcement. Moreover, for the first time in history, the IPR regime has become increasingly uniform at international level by means of the TRIPS agreement, irrespectively of the degrees of development of the various countries. The book, first, addresses from different angles the effects of IPR on the processes of innovation and innovation diffusion in general, and with respect to developing countries in particular. Contrary to a widespread view there is very little evidence that the rates of innovation increase with the tightness of IPR even in developed countries. Conversely, in many circumstances tight IPR represents an obstacle to imitation and innovation diffusion in developing countries. What can policies do then? This is the second major theme of the book which offers several detailed discussions of possible policy measures even within the current TRIPS regime including the exploitation of the waivers to IPR enforcement that it contains, various forms of development of technological commons, and non patent rewards to innovators, such as prizes. Some drawbacks of the regimes, however, are unavoidable: hence the advocacy in many contributions to the book of deep reforms of the system in both developed and developing countries, including the non patentability of scientific discoveries, the reduction of the depth and width of IPR patents, and the of IPR

This book analyses the role of technological change in the competitiveness of firms and national economies. This includes an examination of the roles of R&D spending, and the organizational and technological capabilities of firms in the encouragement of innovation; the way institutions in various nations differ in the way in which they encourage, or discourage, innovation; and the way in which different industrial sectors provide, or fail to provide, incentives to innovate; and the ways in which trade, the operation of multinationals and international trade negotiations influence national production and innovation systems. The book explores the relation between organizational structures, and the process of innovation. It places the analysis of innovation within an international perspective and gives historical and current examples of the interaction between organizational and technological capabilities, industrial and innovation policies and economic performance. Examples are drawn from a range of sectors (services, pharmaceuticals, construction, chemicals) and a range of countries (including the UK and other European countries, the USA, East Asia, and Latin America).