Backwardness and Modernization

Backwardness and Modernization PDF Author: Jacek Kochanowicz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754659051
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries; those in the second part deal with the change following the fall of state socialism. Professor Kochanowicz here argues that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies.

Backwardness and Modernization

Backwardness and Modernization PDF Author: Jacek Kochanowicz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754659051
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The subject of this book is the economic backwardness of Poland and Eastern Europe in the modern era. The studies in the first part analyse various aspects of the region's economic and social history in the period from the 16th to the 20th centuries; those in the second part deal with the change following the fall of state socialism. Professor Kochanowicz here argues that, for understanding the present, it is necessary to take into consideration historical legacies.

Explaining Economic Backwardness

Explaining Economic Backwardness PDF Author: Anna Sosnowska
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789633862919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This monograph is about an exciting episode in the intellectual history of Europe: the vigorous debate among leading Polish historians on the sources of the economic development and non-development, including the origins of economic divisions within Europe. The work covers nearly fifty years of this debate between the publication of two pivotal works in 1947 and 1994. Anna Sosnowska provides an insightful interpretation of how local and generational experience shaped the notions of post-1945 Polish historians about Eastern European backwardness, and how their debate influenced Western historical sociology, social theories of development and dependency in peripheral areas, and the image of Eastern Europe in Western, Marxist-inspired social science. Although created under the adverse conditions of state socialism and censorship, this body of scholarship had an important repercussion in international social science of the post-war period, contributing an emphasis on international comparisons, as well as a stress on social theory and explanations. Sosnowska's analysis also helps to understand current differences that lead to conflicts between Europe's richest and economically most developed core and its southern and eastern peripheries. The historians she studies also investigated analogies between paths in Eastern Europe and regions of West Africa, Latin America and East Asia.

Modernization from the Other Shore

Modernization from the Other Shore PDF Author: David C. Engerman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674272412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy. American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for--and the costs of--Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain. This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective

Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Alexander Gerschenkron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description


The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy

The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy PDF Author: Andrew Hoberek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107048109
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy explores the creation, and afterlife, of an American icon.

Modernizing a Slave Economy

Modernizing a Slave Economy PDF Author: John Majewski
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807882372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.

How to achieve the welfare state in the twenty-first century

How to achieve the welfare state in the twenty-first century PDF Author: Kozulj, Roberto
Publisher: Editorial UNRN
ISBN: 9874960159
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Kozulj proposes a bold and vital idea: if the activities linked to urban development were reoriented towards the construction and reconstruction of sustainable cities, this would tend to solve a large part of the problem of structural unemployment,

The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-century Europe

The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-century Europe PDF Author: David D. Roberts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415192781
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
By assessing totalitarianism in a more deeply historical way, this study suggests how we might learn further lessons from this troubling phase of modern political development."--Jacket.

China's Strategic Modernization Implications for the United States

China's Strategic Modernization Implications for the United States PDF Author: Mark A. Stokes
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428911979
Category : Air defenses
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Conventional wisdom portrays the People's Republic of China (PRC) People's Liberation Army (PLA) as a backward continental force that will not pose a military challenge to its neighbors or to the United States well into the 21st century. PLA writings that demonstrate interest in exploiting the revolution in military affairs (RMA) are dismissed by a large segment of the PLA- watching community as wistful fantasies. The author offers an alternative perspective by outlining emerging PLA operational concepts and a range of research and development projects that appear to have been heavily influenced by U.S. and Russian writings on the RMA. Fulfillment of the PLA's vision for the 21st century could have significant repercussions for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region.

Bear Traps on Russia's Road to Modernization

Bear Traps on Russia's Road to Modernization PDF Author: Clifford Gaddy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134106823
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Bear Traps examines Russia’s longer term economic growth prospects. It argues that Russia’s growth challenges are conventionally misdiagnosed and examines the reasons why: a spatial misallocation that imposes excess costs on production and investment; distortions to human capital; an excessively high relative price of investment that serves as a tax on physical capital accumulation; and an economic mechanism that inhibits adjustments that would correct the misallocation. Bear Traps explains why Soviet legacies still constrain economic growth and outlines a feasible policy path that could remove these obstacles. The most popular proposals for Russian economic reform today — diversification, innovation, modernization — are misguided. They are based on a faulty diagnosis of the country’s ills, because they ignore a simple reality: Russia’s capital, both physical and human, is systematically overvalued, owing to a failure to account for the handicap imposed by geography and location. Part of the handicap is an unavoidable consequence of Russia’s size and cold climate. But another part is self-inflicted. Soviet policies placed far too much economic activity in cold, remote locations. Specific institutions in today’s Russia, notably its federalist structure, help preserve the Soviet spatial legacy. As a result, capital remains handicapped. Investments made to compensate for the handicaps of cold and distance should properly be treated as costs. Instead, they are considered net additions to capital. When returns to what appear to be large quantities of physical and human capital fail to satisfy expectations, the blame naturally goes to poor institutions, corruption, backward technology, and so on. Policy proceeds along the wrong path, with costly programs that can end up doing more damage than good. The authors insist that the goal should be to seek to remove the handicaps rather than to spend to compensate for them. They discuss how Russia could develop a modernization program that would let the nation finally focus on its economic advantages, not its handicaps.