A comprehensive, rigorous, and up-to-date introduction to growth economics that presents all the major growth paradigms and shows how they can be used to analyze the growth process and growth policy design.This comprehensive introduction to economic growth presents the main facts and puzzles about growth, proposes simple methods and models needed to explain these facts, acquaints the reader with the most recent theoretical and empirical developments, and provides t...

It has long been recognized that an improved standard of living results from advances in technology, not from the accumulation of capital. It has also become clear that what truly separates developed from less-developed countries is not just a gap in resources or output but a gap in knowledge. In fact, the pace at which developing countries grow is largely a function of the pace at which they close that gap.Thus, to understand how countries grow and develop, it is essential to know...

Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains...

In the winter of 1933, the American financial and economic system collapsed. Since then economists, policy makers and financial analysts throughout the world have been haunted by the question of whether "It" can happen again. In 2008 "It" very nearly happened again as banks and mortgage lenders in the USA and beyond collapsed. The disaster sent economists, bankers and policy makers back to the ideas of Hyman Minsky – whose celebrated 'Financial Instability Hypothesis' is widely regarded as...

Ssemakula Peter Luyima provides a new concept for World Economy in the 21st century, by producing a revised concept of MuRatopian Economy; 30 years after Professor Kaoru Yamaguchi presented a synthesized analysis of the Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian with his own public money economic model. It is this author’s intention not only to provide an integrative concept for reconstruction of the World Economy, but to present an equitable economic strategy in the context of Louis Orth Kelso’s...

An accessible description of modern macroeconomics, and a defense of its policy relevance.Macroeconomists have been caricatured either as credulous savants in love with the beauty of their mathematical models or as free-market fundamentalists who admit no doubt as to the market's wisdom. In this book, Kartik Athreya draws a truer picture, offering a nontechnical description of prominent ideas and models in macroeconomics, and arguing for their value as interpretive...

Trying to summarize the essentials of macroeconomic theory in the wake of the financial crisis that has shaken not only Western economies but also the macroeconomic profession is no easy task. In particular, the notion that markets are self-correcting and always in equilibrium appears to have taken a heavy blow. However, the jury is still out on which areas should be considered as failures and what which constitute the future of research.The overall aim of this text is to provide a...

This intermediate-level undergraduate textbook in environmental economics builds on the microeconomics courses students take in their first year. It intentionally does not survey the whole field or present every possible topic. Instead, there is a clear focus on the theory of environmental policy and its practical applications. Most of the applied parts of the book deal with the economics of environmental policy in the European Union and in the United States. The book combines basic enviro...

This open access book encompasses a collection of in-depth analyses showcasing the challenges and ways forward for macroeconomic modelling of R&D and innovation policies. Based upon the proceedings of the EC-DG JRC-IEA workshop held in Brussels in 2017, it presents cutting-edge contributions from a number of leading economists in the field. It provides a comprehensive overview of the current academic and policy challenges surrounding R&D as well as of the state-of-the-art modelling techniq...

Economic activities are not concentrated on the head of a pin, nor are they spread evenly over a featureless plane. On the contrary, they are distributed very unequally across locations, regions and countries. Even though economic activities are, to some extent, spatially concentrated because of natural features, economic mechanisms that rely on the trade-off between various forms of increasing returns and different types of mobility costs are more fundamental. This book is a study of the ...

Much is written in the popular literature about the current pace of technological change. But do we have enough scientific knowledge about the sources and management of innovation to properly inform policymaking in technology dependent domains such as energy and the environment? While it is agreed that technological change does not 'fall from heaven like autumn leaves,' the theory, data, and models are deficient. The specific mechanisms that govern the rate and direction of inventive activ...

A vast new literature on the sources of economic growth has now accumulated. This book critically reviews the most significant works in this field and summarizes what is known today about the sources of economic growth. The first part discusses the most important theoretical models that have been used in modern growth theory as well as methodological issues in productivity measurement. The second part examines the long-term record on productivity among Organization for Economic Co-operatio...