One of the most important yet least understood organizations in the world, the WTO is a lynchpin of globalization, allowing us to enjoy products and services from around the globe. However, it also lays bare the frailty of many industries, leading some to claim that it stokes unemployment and harms the developing world.In this engaging introduction, David Collins examines the goals of the WTO and the difficulties experienced by member countries struggling to adapt to the pressures ...

The Communist Manifesto is a timeless classic providing intelligent insight into socialism, communism and today’s group identity politics.This pocket edition includes a new introduction by the economist and bestselling author of Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis.The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late twenties. Its impact reverberated across the globe and th...

Capital: The Process of Capitalist Production is Marx's monumental critique of political economy and the first volume of his analysis of capitalism's inner laws. Moving from the commodity and money to surplus value, machinery, accumulation, and primitive accumulation, the book combines rigorous economic argument, historical inquiry, philosophical dialectic, and biting literary satire. Written against classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo, it transforms political economy into a cri...

What happens in Spain, among the euro zone's largest economies, matters. Its high unemployment (over 26%), burgeoning public debt, and banking crisis will be formative for the zone's future. In Spain: What Everyone Needs to Know, a timely addition to Oxford's acclaimed What Everyone Needs to Know series, veteran journalist William Chislett provides much-needed political and historical context for Spain's current economic and political predicament. Chislett recounts the country's fascinatin...

From the author of Day of Reckoning, the acclaimed critique of Ronald Reagan’s economic policy (“Every citizen should read it,” said The New York Times): a persuasive, wide-ranging argument that economic growth provides far more than material benefits.In clear-cut prose, Benjamin M. Friedman examines the political and social histories of the large Western democracies–particularly of the United States since the Civil War–to demonstrate the fact that incomes on the ...

Capitalism and the corporate form it creates is over-rated and neither are understood. Capitalism and that corporate form restrain your choice. They both present us with either an absence of choice or meaningless ones. Democratic Socialism doesn't do either. Democratic Socialism means more real and freer choices. Ed tells all the why, the what and the who. Economics, politics, and ideology aren't always easy to understand. But, it is necessary that we do so, if we are to be a free people. ...

Safe drinking water counts for nothing. A pollution-free environment counts for nothing. Even some people - namely women - count for nothing. This is the case, at least, according to the United Nations System of National Accounts. Author Marilyn Waring, former New Zealand M.P., now professor, development consultant, writer, and goat farmer, isolates the gender bias that exists in the current system of calculating national wealth.As Waring observes, in this accounting system women a...

Wolfgang Streeck has written extensively on comparative political economy and institutional theory. In this book he addresses some of the key issues in this field: the role of history in institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and economic-functionalist explanations of institutional stability, and the recurrent difficulties of restraining the effects of capitalism on social order. In the classification of the 'Varieties of Capit...

Democratic liberalism v. authoritarianism -- the ideological divide that defined the twentieth century. But when the cold war ended, "the end of history"; was proclaimed. Soon the fire of freedom would burn worldwide, the experts said. And where markets were freed, human rights would inevitably follow.Or not. In the last twenty years, nations including India, Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates have disproved the idea that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked. Em...

After communism collapsed in the former Soviet Union, capitalism seemed to many observers like the only game in town, and questioning it became taboo for academic economists. But the financial crisis, chronic unemployment, and the inexorable rise of inequality have resurrected the question of whether there is a feasible and desirable alternative to capitalism. Against this backdrop of growing disenchantment, Giacomo Corneo presents a refreshingly antidogmatic review of economic systems, ta...

In the early 1960s fewer than five percent of Japanese owned automobiles, China's per capita income was among the lowest in Asia, and living standards in rural South Korea put it among the world's poorest countries. Today, these are three of the most powerful economies on earth. Dwight Perkinsdraws on extensive experience in the region to explain how Asia sustained such rapid economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. East Asian Development covers Japan, South Ko...

Is Japan running out of husbands? Is China running out of wives? Did Genghis Khan really invent free trade? And why can't you see the price of a Big Mac at McDonalds in Argentina? In Trading Places, Tim Harcourt – also known as the Airport Economist – takes you around the globe, talking to businesses, governments, union officials, NGOs and others in the community to understand what makes each economy tick. He reveals where the opportunities are, identifies the risks, and provides ...