Gathering contributions by leading social development scholars, this report offers a comprehensive description of the national development of cultural consumption in China. By comparing the annual growth of cultural consumption, GDP growth, per-capita income growth and savings growth, the authors reveal the disparity between urban and rural areas in terms of cultural consumption, as well as that between provinces. Based on an analysis of the status quo of cultural consumption in China, the...

From one of America's foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who electe...

John W. Budd's The Thought of Work provides a much needed and highly eloquent statement of the meanings and orientations to work across time and nations. It is essential reading for students of work from senior scholars to beginning undergraduates.— Randy Hodson, Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences The Ohio State University and past editor ― American Sociological ReviewBy drawing explicit attention to diverse, implici...

This book provides a comprehensive defense of third-world sweatshops. It explains how these sweatshops provide the best available opportunity to workers and how they play an important role in the process of development that eventually leads to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, the author argues that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement has agitated for would actually harm the very workers they intend to help by creating less desirable alternatives and undermin...

Redistribution, or subsidies and regulations intended to help the poor, unemployed, and financially distressed, have changed in many ways since the onset of the recent financial crisis. The unemployed, for instance, can collect benefits longer and can receive bonuses, health subsidies, and tax deductions, and millions more people have became eligible for food stamps. Economist Casey B. Mulligan argues that while many of these changes were intended to help people endure economic events and ...

If the American labor movement is to rise again, it will not be as a result of electing Democrats, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt-the kind employed up until the 1960s.In Reviving the Strike, u...

South Asia has created nearly 800,000 jobs per month during the last decade. Robust economic growth in large parts of the region has created better jobs -- those that pay higher wages for wage workers and reduce poverty for the self-employed, the largest segment of the region’s employed. Going forward, South Asia faces the enormous challenge of absorbing 1 to 1.2 million entrants to the labor force every month for the next two decades at rising levels of productivity. This calls for an agenda...

There is a growing body of work examining the ‘consequences’, or more accurately the inter-relationships between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and society at the microsocial (individual, household) level. The vast majority of this work has so far been focused on the US and the subsequent publications have consequently provided predominantly US-centred analyses.This book will re-dress this balance by providing analyses of the situation in Europe and is associate...

This volume deals with issues of widespread interest including, the origins of investor rights in different markets, the political, legal and economic conditions that determine levels of shareholder participation, and the implications of variation in investor rights.

Drawing on a wide range of studies of Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, the contributions gathered here consider how political history, business history, the history of science, cultural history, gender history, intellectual history, anthropology, and even environmental history can help us decode modern consumer societies.

The society and economy of Vietnam is still characterised by a rapid transformation process. There is high economic and political pressure. coming not only from internal developments but also from foreign countries.This groundbreaking book takes stock of the rapid processes of change in the labour market and the industrial relations of Vietnam. The contributions of Vietnamese and international experts cover the institutional arrangements of the labour market and of the system of in...

This book explores the widening gap between the wage packets of skilled and unskilled workers that has become a pressing issue for all states in the globalized world economy. Comparing the experiences of more and less developed economies, chapters analyse the underlying causes and key social changes that accompany income inequality.