Limits to Liberalization

Limits to Liberalization PDF Author: Patricia M. Goff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801444586
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The so-called culture industries--film, television and radio broadcasting, periodical and book publishing, video and sound recording--are noteworthy exceptions to the rhetorical commitment of Western countries to free trade as a major goal. These exceptions threatened to derail such high-profile negotiations as NAFTA and its predecessor, the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, as well as the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Conventional wisdom did not foresee trouble from this source, because these established industries are not commercial national champions, nor are they particularly large providers of jobs. As Patricia M. Goff shows, the standard trade literature considers the monetary value but doesn't recognize the symbolic importance of cultural production. In Limits to Liberalization, she traces the interplay between the commercial and the cultural. Governments that want to expand free trade may simultaneously resist liberalization in the culture industries (and elsewhere, including agriculture and health care). Goff traces the rationale for "cultural protectionism" in the trade policies of Canada, France, and the European Union. The result is a larger understanding of the forces that shape international trade agreements and a book that speaks to current theoretical concerns about national identity as it plays out in politics and international relations.

Limits to Liberalization

Limits to Liberalization PDF Author: Patricia M. Goff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801444586
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
The so-called culture industries--film, television and radio broadcasting, periodical and book publishing, video and sound recording--are noteworthy exceptions to the rhetorical commitment of Western countries to free trade as a major goal. These exceptions threatened to derail such high-profile negotiations as NAFTA and its predecessor, the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, as well as the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Conventional wisdom did not foresee trouble from this source, because these established industries are not commercial national champions, nor are they particularly large providers of jobs. As Patricia M. Goff shows, the standard trade literature considers the monetary value but doesn't recognize the symbolic importance of cultural production. In Limits to Liberalization, she traces the interplay between the commercial and the cultural. Governments that want to expand free trade may simultaneously resist liberalization in the culture industries (and elsewhere, including agriculture and health care). Goff traces the rationale for "cultural protectionism" in the trade policies of Canada, France, and the European Union. The result is a larger understanding of the forces that shape international trade agreements and a book that speaks to current theoretical concerns about national identity as it plays out in politics and international relations.

States of Liberalization

States of Liberalization PDF Author: Mitchell P. Smith
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791482839
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
As economic competition is introduced into areas formerly served by public sector monopolies, to what extent do governments lose discretion over their use of the public sector? States of Liberalization examines the impact of the European Union's rigorous single-market competition policy on the abilities of Western European governments to use the public sector to achieve political objectives. Examining several politically contentious sectors, including government purchasing of goods and services, postal services, and public sector financial institutions, Mitchell P. Smith explores and explains the scope and the limits of this transformation. While European economic integration and the application of European Community competition policy have substantially infused competition into public services, the process has been more modest, and more deliberate, than a simple reading of Europe's potent market-making mechanisms would predict.

Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity

Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity PDF Author: Kathleen Thelen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107053161
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Policing Africa

Policing Africa PDF Author: Alice Hills
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Pub
ISBN: 9781555877156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The use and abuse of political power in Africa has been closely related to the role and function of the police. This study explores the impact of cautious moves toward liberalization across the continent on both policing systems and the relationship between those systems and national development.

The Limits of the Market

The Limits of the Market PDF Author: Paul de Grauwe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198784287
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Paul De Grauwe examines why a healthy mix of market and state seems so difficult and analyses the internal and external limits of the market and the government, and the swing between these two points.

Economic Freedom and Prosperity

Economic Freedom and Prosperity PDF Author: Benjamin Powell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429813201
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Economic theory and a growing body of empirical research support the idea that economic freedom is an important ingredient to long-run economic prosperity. However, the determinants of economic freedom are much less understood than the benefits that freedom provides. Economic Freedom and Prosperity addresses this major gap in our knowledge. If private property and economic freedom are essential for achieving and maintaining a high standard of living, it is crucial to understand how improvements in these areas have been achieved and whether there are lessons that can be replicated in less free areas of the world today. In this edited collection, contributors investigate this research question through multiple methodologies. Beginning with three chapters that theoretically explore ways in which economic freedom might be better achieved, it then moves on to a series of empirical chapters that examine questions including the speed and permanence of reform, the deep long-run determinants of economic freedom, the relationship between voice and exit in impacting freedom, the role of crises in generating change, and immigration. Finally, the book considers the evolution of freedom in China, development economics, and international trade, and it concludes with a consideration of what is necessary to promote a humane liberalism consistent with economic freedom. Economic Freedom and Prosperity will be of great interest to all social scientists concerned with issues of institutional change. It will particularly appeal to those concerned with economic development and the determinants of an environment of economic freedom.

China's Regulatory State

China's Regulatory State PDF Author: Roselyn Hsueh Romano
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462851
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Today's China is governed by a new economic model that marks a radical break from the Mao and Deng eras; it departs fundamentally from both the East Asian developmental state and its own Communist past. It has not, however, adopted a liberal economic model. China has retained elements of statist control even though it has liberalized foreign direct investment more than any other developing country in recent years. This mode of global economic integration reveals much about China’s state capacity and development strategy, which is based on retaining government control over critical sectors while meeting commitments made to the World Trade Organization. In China's Regulatory State, Roselyn Hsueh demonstrates that China only appears to be a more liberal state; even as it introduces competition and devolves economic decisionmaking, the state has selectively imposed new regulations at the sectoral level, asserting and even tightening control over industry and market development, to achieve state goals. By investigating in depth how China implemented its economic policies between 1978 and 2010, Hsueh gives the most complete picture yet of China's regulatory state, particularly as it has shaped the telecommunications and textiles industries. Hsueh contends that a logic of strategic value explains how the state, with its different levels of authority and maze of bureaucracies, interacts with new economic stakeholders to enhance its control in certain economic sectors while relinquishing control in others. Sectoral characteristics determine policy specifics although the organization of institutions and boom-bust cycles influence how the state reformulates old rules and creates new ones to maximize benefits and minimize costs after an initial phase of liberalization. This pathbreaking analysis of state goals, government-business relations, and methods of governance across industries in China also considers Japan’s, South Korea’s, and Taiwan’s manifestly different approaches to globalization.

Capital Ideas

Capital Ideas PDF Author: Jeffrey M. Chwieroth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400833825
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The right of governments to employ capital controls has always been the official orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund, and the organization's formal rules providing this right have not changed significantly since the IMF was founded in 1945. But informally, among the staff inside the IMF, these controls became heresy in the 1980s and 1990s, prompting critics to accuse the IMF of indiscriminately encouraging the liberalization of controls and precipitating a wave of financial crises in emerging markets in the late 1990s. In Capital Ideas, Jeffrey Chwieroth explores the inner workings of the IMF to understand how its staff's thinking about capital controls changed so radically. In doing so, he also provides an important case study of how international organizations work and evolve. Drawing on original survey and archival research, extensive interviews, and scholarship from economics, politics, and sociology, Chwieroth traces the evolution of the IMF's approach to capital controls from the 1940s through spring 2009 and the first stages of the subprime credit crisis. He shows that IMF staff vigorously debated the legitimacy of capital controls and that these internal debates eventually changed the organization's behavior--despite the lack of major rule changes. He also shows that the IMF exercised a significant amount of autonomy despite the influence of member states. Normative and behavioral changes in international organizations, Chwieroth concludes, are driven not just by new rules but also by the evolving makeup, beliefs, debates, and strategic agency of their staffs.

Limits to Privatization

Limits to Privatization PDF Author: Marianne Beishem
Publisher: Earthscan
ISBN: 1849771839
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Limits to Privatization is the first thorough audit of privatizations from around the world. It outlines the historical emergence of globalization and liberalization, and from analyses of over 50 case studies of best- and worst-case experiences of privatization, it provides guidance for policy and action that will restore and maintain the right balance between the powers and responsibilities of the state, the private sector and the increasingly important role of civil society.The result is a book of major importance that challenges one of the orthodoxies of our day and provides a benchmark for future debate.

Markets without Limits

Markets without Limits PDF Author: Jason F. Brennan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317815629
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
May you sell your vote? May you sell your kidney? May gay men pay surrogates to bear them children? May spouses pay each other to watch the kids, do the dishes, or have sex? Should we allow the rich to genetically engineer gifted, beautiful children? Should we allow betting markets on terrorist attacks and natural disasters? Most people shudder at the thought. To put some goods and services for sale offends human dignity. If everything is commodified, then nothing is sacred. The market corrodes our character. Or so most people say. In Markets without Limits, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski give markets a fair hearing. The market does not introduce wrongness where there was not any previously. Thus, the authors claim, the question of what rightfully may be bought and sold has a simple answer: if you may do it for free, you may do it for money. Contrary to the conservative consensus, they claim there are no inherent limits to what can be bought and sold, but only restrictions on how we buy and sell.