Do political decentralisation and inter state competition favour innovation and growth? There has long been a lively debate surrounding this question, going back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This book is a new attempt to test its veracity. The existing literature tends to assume that the...

Contents: 1. Introduction -- 2. Debate and comment about the needham puzzle over the past half-century -- 3. The behavior of the peasants and their households: the logical starting point for the study of the puzzle in Chinese economic history -- 4. The petty peasant economy and the formation of...

How did climate change become an economic issue? Why is economic discourse so influential on the public policy of climate change? How can it best contribute to the scientific and public debates? Nine eminent scholars explain in this book both how economics has changed environmental understanding...

Emphasising a positive approach to dealing with terrorism (the carrot), this book provides a critique of deterrence policy (the stick) which can be ineffective and even counterproductive, and proposes three alternative and effective anti-terrorist policies: Decentralisation reduces vulnerability...

The economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have always been characterized by economic volatility and social disparities. The recent 'Arab Spring' wave of protests has increased political uncertainty and instability in the region, and this timely book provides an in-depth...

This unique book uses a transaction cost perspective to illustrate how hierarchies influenced the structure of markets and behaviour of individual businesses and cartels in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and present-day Russia

Richard Ebeling's insightful and highly readable book explains and applies the ideas of the Austrian economists to a wide range of contemporary public policy issues. He combines intellectual political-economic history with the modern Austrian theory of the market process to challenge the...

The expert contributors gathered here approach underdevelopment and inequality from different evolutionary perspectives. It is argued that the Schumpeterian processes of 'creative destruction' may take the form of wealth creation in one part of the globe and wealth destruction in another. Case...

As a country's current development is path dependent, the rise of China and its strategic implications can only be understood in a historical context. Hence, the key to understanding contemporary China is the understanding of its past. So far there has been an absence of a comprehensive text...

This broad review of the development of US water resource policy analysis and practice offers perspectives from several disciplines: law, economics, engineering, ecology and political science. The historical context provided goes back to the early 19th century, but the book concentrates on the...