Adam Smith warned of the prevalence of corporate conspiracies more than two hundred years ago. Since then, interest in cartels has sometimes intensified (during the Great Depression, for example) and sometimes diminished, but the need for control has always remained on the antitrust agenda. This...

In the 1990s, labour productivity growth accelerated in the United States, yet slowed down in other industrialised countries, reversing a three decade long tendency of convergence. The book explores this phenomenon. It first identifies the methodological and statistical problems involved in...

This wide-ranging collection charts the responses of the economics discipline to these changes, initially slowly but with gathering pace, as communication and information have moved from the sidelines to centre stage.

Headlines are made when the European Commission prohibits a merger, but this is actually very rare. Clearances subject to conditions (i.e. remedies) happen ten times as frequently, but have received far less attention in academic literature. This book provides an empirical assessment of the...

This absorbing book examines the period of massive structural adjustment taking place in the wine industry. For many centuries wine was very much a European product. While that is still the case today – three-quarters of world wine production, consumption and trade involve Europe and most of...

A unique and comprehensive source of information, this book is the only international publication providing economists, planners, policymakers and business people with worldwide statistics on current performance and trends in the manufacturing sector.

This book provides a uniform and coherent approach to the analysis of distribution systems in general and retail systems in particular. It develops the fundamentals of retail demand and supply, and demonstrates how the provision of distribution services is a principal determinant of economic...

Specialized markets are a unique product of China’s economic transition. They are marketplaces located in industrial clusters, specializing in the wholesale of local commodities and related goods. Ding Ke reveals that, despite their seemingly primitive form, specialized markets appeared in...