For decades, free trade was advocated as the vehicle for peace, prosperity, and democracy in an increasingly globalized market. More recently, the proliferation of foreign direct investment has raised questions about its impact upon local economies and politics. Here, seven scholars bring together their wide-ranging expertise to investigate the factors that determine the attractiveness of a locale to investors and the extent of their political power. Multinational corporations prefer to in...

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler's provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social benefits and so hostile to them in principle, even though they receive them? The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for its inability to convey how much it has accomplished for ordinary citizens. Mettler argues that this difficulty is not merely a failure of communication; rather i...

A concise introduction to the ways in which the world's federations manage their finances. Topics covered include the distribution of taxation powers among different levels of government; regional equalization schemes; authority over natural resource revenues; and the impact of federal systems of government on pension, welfare, and income assistance programs. The book targets second-, third-, and fourth-year courses in Federalism and Comparative Politics at the university level, and will also...

• Why is productivity higher in cities? • Does urbanization cause growth or does growth cause urbanization? • Do countries achieve rapid growth or high incomes without urbanization? • How can policy makers reap the benefits of urbanization without paying too high a cost? • Does supporting urbanization imply neglecting rural areas? • Why do so few governments welcome urbanization? • What should governments do to improve housing conditions in cities as they urbanize? • Are innovations in housin...

International institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the International Olympic Committee, are perceived as bastions of sclerotic mediocrity at best and outright corruption at worst, and this perception is generally not far off the mark. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to re...

Perceptions of Africa have changed dramatically. Viewed as a continent of wars, famines and entrenched poverty in the late 1990s, there is now a focus on “Africa rising†? and an “African 21st century.†? Two decades of unprecedented economic growth in Africa should have brought substantial improvements in well-being. Whether or not they did, remains unclear given the poor quality of the data, the nature of the growth process (especially the role of natural resources), conflicts that affect par...

A bedrock American principle is the idea that all individuals should have the opportunity to succeed on the basis of their own effort, skill, and ingenuity.-Federal Reserve Chairman Ben BernankeIncome inequality has been on the rise since the late 1970s, but the economic and financial crisis of 2008 instigated an unemployment epidemic that dramatically compounded this problem in the United States and catapulted the issue to the center of debate. There is wide agreement across the po...

Globalization and its relation to poverty reduction and development are not well understood. This book explores the ways in which globalization can overcome poverty or make it worse. The book defines the big historical trends, identifies the main globalization processes - trade, finance, aid, migration, and ideas - and examines how each can contribute to economic development. By considering what helps and what does not, the book presents policy recommendations to make globalization more ef...

Catch Up analyzes the evolution of developing countries in the world economy from a long-term historical perspective, from the onset of the second millennium but with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is perhaps among the first to address this theme on such a wide canvas that spans both time and space. In doing so, it highlights the dominance of what are now developing countries and it traces their decline and ...

The dominant approach to economic policy has so far failed to adequately address the pressing challenges the world faces today: extreme poverty, widespread joblessness and precarious employment, burgeoning inequality, and large-scale environmental threats. This message was brought home forcibly by the 2008 global economic crisis.Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice shows how human rights have the potential to transform economic thinking and policy-making with far-reaching ...

This volume documents and explains the remarkable resilience of emerging market nations in East Asia and Latin America when faced with the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Their quick bounceback from the crisis marked a radical departure from the past, such as when the 1982 debt shocks produced a decade-long recession in Latin America or when the Asian financial crisis dramatically slowed those economies in the late 1990s. Why?This volume suggests that these countries' resistan...

This volume, edited by James M. Boughton and K. Sarwar Lateef, contains the proceedings of a conference held in Madrid, Spain, in 1994, by the IMF and the World Bank to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 that created the two institutions. The conference provided a forum for reflection and for reassessing the roles of the institutions as they approach the twenty-first century.