An Empty Plate analyses the state of the South Africanagri-food system. Tracy Ledger demonstrates how this system is perpetuating poverty, threatening land reform, entrenching inequality and tearing apart our social fabric. The book asks two crucial questions: how did we get to this point and how might we go about solving the problem.This is a story of money, of power, of unanticipated consequences, and of personal and social tragedy. But it is also a story of what is possible if we reimag...

From Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor, a vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planetMuhammad Yunus is one of the modern world’s most trenchant social critics. In A World of Three Zeros, he declare it’s time to admit that the capitalist engine has failed most people – that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, widespread unemployment, and e...

From Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor, “a****n inspiring volume, full of practical information” (BusinessWeek) on the power of creative entrepreneurship to solve global inequalityWhat if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality? As founder of Grameen Bank, Nobel Peace Prize–winner Muhammad Yunus pioneered microcredit, the innovative banking program that p...

Affluenza has not just changed the world, it has also changed the way we see the world. Short of money? Borrow some. Caught in the rain? Buy an umbrella. Thirsty? Buy a bottle of water and throw the bottle away. Our embrace of “convenience” and our acceptance of our inability to plan ahead is an entirely new way of thinking, and over the past seventy years we have built a new and different economic system to accommodate it.There is nothing inevitable about this current way of think...

The neo-liberalism that dominated economic thinking since the advent of Thatcher and Reagan is now seen to have serious flaws. Progressive Capitalism seeks to replace it with a new Progressive political economy, based on an analysis of why the growth rates of countries differ, and what firms have to do to achieve competitive advantage in today's global economy. The cornerstone of the political economy of Progressive Capitalism is a belief in capitalism. But it also incorporates the three d...

Countries worldwide are struggling to imitate the industrial prowess of the East Asian pacesetters, but growth accelerations have proven remarkably transient. Building a portfolio of tradable goods and services and steadily raising the level of investment in these activities, has generally defied the best policy efforts - in particular, bringing investment ratios on par with East Asian averages has presented the greatest challenge. Hence the search is on for growth recipes not so tightly boun...

This important book delivers a critical wake-up call: a fierce global race for innovation advantage is under way, and while other nations are making support for technology and innovation a central tenet of their economic strategies and policies, America lacks a robust innovation policy. What does this portend? Robert Atkinson and Stephen Ezell, widely respected economic thinkers, report on profound new forces that are shaping the global economy—forces that favor nations with innovation-bas...

The Chinese and U.S. economies have been locked in an uncomfortable embrace since the late 1970s. Although the relationship initially arose out of mutual benefits, in recent years it has taken on the trappings of an unstable codependence, with the two largest economies in the world losing their sense of self, increasing the risk of their turning on one another in a destructive fashion.     In Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China Stephen Roach, senior fellow at...

Imagine this: a mere century ago, the purchasing power of an average American was one-tenth of what it is today. But what will it take to sustain that growth through the next century? And what can be said about economic growth to aspiring nations seeking higher standards of living for their citizens?In this important book, William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm contend that the answers to these questions lie within capitalist economies, though many observers make th...

The spread of capitalism worldwide has made people wealthier than ever before. But capitalism’s future is far from assured. The global financial meltdown of 2008 nearly produced a great depression. Economies in Europe are still teetering. Income inequality, resource depletion, mass migrations from poor to rich countries, religious fundamentalism-these are just a few of the threats to continuing prosperity.How can capitalism be sustained? And who should spearhead the effort? Critics...

Only a dramatic, imaginatively crafted intervention - a massive redistribution programme managed by the private sector, far-reaching policy changes in schooling, housing and health, and better, disciplined governance - will deliver the genuine liberation South Africa's still-poor millions expected from the 1994 settlement. Without it, without the real promise of a free, meritocratic society, South Africa will flounder and fail as corruption, crime, social decay, hopelessness and anger engu...

Despite technological advances in agriculture, nearly a billion people around the world still suffer from hunger and poor nutrition while a billion are overweight or obese. This imbalance highlights the need not only to focus on food production but also to implement successful food policies. In this new textbook intended to be used with the three volumes of Case Studies in Food Policy for Developing Countries (also from Cornell), the 2001 World Food Prize laureate...