The American Political Economy

The American Political Economy
Author: Jacob S. Hacker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316516369

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China

The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China
Author: Susan L. Shirk
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520912217

In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994. In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chine

The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies

The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies
Author: Johan Swinnen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-05-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1137501022

Winner of the European Association of Agricultural Economists Book Award Food and agriculture have been subject to heavy-handed government interventions throughout much of history and across the globe, both in developing and in developed countries. Today, more than half a trillion US dollars are spent by some governments to support farmers, while other governments impose regulations and taxes that hurt farmers. Some policies, such as price regulations and tariffs, distribute income but reduce total welfare by introducing economic distortions. Other policies, such as public investments in research, food standards, or land reforms, may increase total welfare, but these policies come also with distributional effects. These distributional effects influence the preferences of interest groups and in turn influence policy decisions. Political considerations are therefore crucial to understand how agricultural and food policies are determined, to identify the constraints within which welfare-enhancing reforms are possible (or not), and finally to understand how coalitions can be created to stimulate growth and reduce poverty.

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development
Author: William D. Ferguson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1503611973

This book examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad avenues for political input, and limiting concentrated private and public power. This juggling act can only be accomplished by resolving collective-action problems (CAPs), which arise when individuals pursue interests that generate undesirable outcomes for society at large. Merging and extending key perspectives on CAPs, inequality, and development, this book constructs a flexible framework to investigate these complex issues. By probing four basic hypotheses related to knowledge production, distribution, power, and innovation, William D. Ferguson offers an analytical foundation for comparing and evaluating approaches to development policy. Navigating the theoretical terrain that lies between simplistic hierarchies of causality and idiosyncratic case studies, this book promises an analytical lens for examining the interactions between inequality and development. Scholars and researchers across economic development and political economy will find it to be a highly useful guide.

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Author: Douglass C. North
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1990-10-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780521397346

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

The Political Economy of Reform

The Political Economy of Reform
Author: Federico Sturzenegger
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262194006

In this book, Federico Sturzenegger and Mariano Tommasi propose formal models to answer some of the questions raised by the recent reform experience of many Latin American and eastern European countries.

Fast Policy

Fast Policy
Author: Jamie Peck
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452944083

We inhabit a perpetually accelerating and increasingly interconnected world, with new ideas, fads, and fashions moving at social-media speed. New policy ideas, especially “ideas that work,” are now able to find not only a worldwide audience but also transnational salience in remarkably short order. Fast Policy is the first systematic treatment of this phenomenon, one that compares processes of policy development across two rapidly moving fields that emerged in the Global South and have quickly been adopted worldwide⎯conditional cash transfers (a social policy program that conditions payments on behavioral compliance) and participatory budgeting (a form of citizen-centric urban governance). Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore critically analyze the growing transnational connectivity between policymaking arenas and modes of policy development, assessing the implications of these developments for contemporary policymaking. Emphasizing that policy models do not simply travel intact from sites of invention to sites of emulation, they problematize fast policy as a phenomenon that is real and consequential yet prone to misrepresentation. Based on fieldwork conducted across six continents and in fifteen countries, Fast Policy is an essential resource in providing an extended theoretical discussion of policy mobility and in presenting a methodology for ethnographic research on global social policy.