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Capitalist development has lifted some segments of the globe to considerable affluence, but too many individuals and countries have been left behind. Diagnosing Capitalism analyses capitalism from a multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on the different ways in which capitalism has developed in the Global North and the Global South. It reframes capitalism not as a neutral economic system, but as a regime of rule that organises subjectivity, institutions, and moral imagination. Featuring both theoretical and case-study chapters from highly renowned thinkers in the field of political economy, it draws on feminist, postcolonial, legal, and heterodox traditions to explore how valuation, financialisation, extractivism, and adaptive co-optation sustain global inequalities. It highlights how caste, coloniality, and welfare bureaucracies are not external to capitalism but central to its functioning. In doing so, it shows that no matter what theoretical lens we use to assess capitalism, its consequences and limitations cannot be ignored.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith set out a system for understanding why some societies prosper and others do not, and in the process founded the discipline of economics. In the 250 years since its publication, the world has transformed beyond recognition. Smith has also been reduced in the collective imagination to little more than a byword for the free market. The Wealth of Nations at 250 brings together today's most influential economists and economic historians to ask where Smith's system still holds, and where it needs new machinery. The task of rethinking what causes prosperity demands a return to the breadth of Smith's original vision, incorporating the cultural, institutional, and political foundations as well as the economic. Written in the spirit of Smith's own clarity, the book speaks to anyone interested in how and why nations prosper. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Understanding Our Philanthropic Commons boldly rethinks giving and volunteering as part of a shared resource system-a philanthropic 'commons'. Drawing on the influential frameworks of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and the Ostrom Workshop, this book equips readers with accessible tools, including the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, Social-Ecological Systems (SES), Institutional Grammar, and Design Principles for self-governance. Using case studies ranging from giving circles and donor-advised funds to workplace campaigns and volunteer management, the authors show how rules, norms, and strategies create institutional arrangements that shape philanthropic behaviour. Fresh insights are offered into addressing philanthropic social dilemmas-such as declines in giving and volunteering-amid technological, social, and economic change. This book is ideal for scholars, nonprofit leaders, policy professionals, and students seeking to understand how to sustainably govern giving resources, and for anyone interested in philanthropy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Billions flow through illicit trade annually, harming societies and economies, yet the International Community struggle to respond effectively. This book provides a groundbreaking, integrated perspective, bridging the divide between Public International Law and WTO Law to offer a cohesive strategy against illicit trade. It starts by proposing a much-needed definition and innovative typologies – like per se vs de facto – to systematically understand the phenomenon. Real-world case studies and analysis of state regulatory measures illustrate the practical challenges. The author critiques the WTO's evasive stance, dissecting key dispute settlement cases, and introduces the concept of 'International Law Against Illicit Trade' (ILAIT) based on established legal principles. Offering more than mere critique, the book culminates in specific, actionable proposals for WTO reform, making a compelling case for adapting trade rules to fight illicit trade effectively. This book is a vital resource for anyone involved in international trade law and policy.
The contributions of Amartya Sen and Cambridge Social Ontology are two important streams in the Cambridge tradition of political economy. Despite significant commonalities, the nature and limits of their convergence remain largely unexamined. Ontology, Ethics and Economics provides the first comparative analysis of these two schools of economic thought. It argues that coherence across economic, social, and ethical theorising can only be achieved when grounded on a solid ontological foundation. While Sen's work has reintroduced crucial ethical dimensions to economics, his reluctance to address ontology systematically has generated tensions that account for the wide and often contradictory interpretations and applications of his work. Offering an explicit account of social reality and its moral implications within a distinctive philosophical framework, this book shows how ontological inquiry can restore political economy's emancipatory orientation and its capacity to offer a genuine alternative to contemporary mainstream economics.
Examining the growing numbers of Palestinian women working in Israel as doctors, lawyers, and high-tech engineers, this study documents their efforts to forge successful feminine subjectivities along the fault lines of neoliberal diversity. Through a wide array of interviews, Amalia Sa'ar and Hawazin Younis explore the experiences of women through periods of relative political stability and during war. The book considers their changing attitudes towards success and prestige and their navigation of tensions and conflicting expectations. Additionally, Sa'ar and Younis examine the paradoxical adaptation of neoliberal diversity within Israel's system of racial exclusion and the devastating effects of war on these already precarious mechanisms of inclusion. Finally, this study introduces the concepts of multiple cultural competence and critical cultural competence, highlighting minority women's unique contributions and shifting the burden of inclusion from minorities to the majority.
Pluralism in economics is the view that modern approaches to studying economic phenomena are too restrictive. It is an important issue within the development of the discipline as many approaches that were once deemed to be outside the mainstream have now become part of the consensus, e.g. game theory, behavioural economics, and information economics. Pluralism and Complexity explores the philosophical background to pluralism and shows how this can be applied to modern economics. It examines key moments like the Keynesian Revolution and the New Classical counter-revolution to show how different 'epistemic visions' arise from fundamentally different ways of handling and simplifying complexity. Examining the history of aggregate economic analysis, this book argues that the propagation of a dogmatic view of science by political and self-interested elites creates a severe deficit of pluralism in macroeconomic research and offers suggestions for reversing this dangerous trend in economics and beyond.
Disclosure laws aim to empower individuals to make better decisions, yet in practice they often overwhelm readers with excessive and inaccessible information. Disclosure Laws in the Digital Era explains why traditional regulatory approaches fall short and how technological advances offer new opportunities to evaluate and improve disclosure quality. Through a comprehensive study of the U.S. franchise disclosure regime, Uri Benoliel demonstrates how AI and big data standards can assess whether disclosures genuinely help prospective franchisees understand key risks. Benoliel proposes a forward-looking framework that integrates technology into disclosure design, offering more reliable and scalable methods for regulatory oversight. Combining doctrinal analysis, empirical insights, and policy recommendations, the book offers valuable insights for scholars of disclosure, franchising, consumer protection, and contract law, as well as for policymakers, regulators, and legal practitioners seeking to strengthen transparency and informed decision-making in the digital era.
Preferences are the point of departure for economic analysis. Despite myriad experiments designed to characterize preferences, no consensus has been reached. In The Evolutionary Foundation of Preferences, Arthur J. Robson and Larry Samuelson examine how economic preferences might be shaped by biological evolution. They theorize that each of us is descended from a line of ancestors who were able to survive and reproduce, and they analyze how this may have affected modern preferences. Drawing on demographic models, they explain how different preferences induce different behaviors which lead to different growth rates among respective subpopulations. People whose preferences induce the highest growth rate eventually comprise the overwhelming proportion of the population. Examining neuroscientific evidence that points to a cardinal, or hedonic, interpretation of utility, the authors discuss the implications of these interpretations and the challenges raised for welfare economics.
The Cambridge Handbook of Competition Law and Antitrust Theory reimagines competition law for an era of global, digital, and societal transformation. Authored by leading scholars across disciplines, this landmark volume explores the intersections of efficiency, fairness, freedom, innovation, and democracy in competition law and market regulation. Moving beyond doctrine, it presents competition law as a dynamic framework that both shapes and reflects broader social values. Blending theoretical rigor with policy insight, it addresses critical issues including digital platforms, innovation, sustainability, and economic power. Designed for students, academics, practitioners, and policymakers alike, this Handbook provides an engaging interdisciplinary roadmap for understanding and rethinking competition law in the twenty-first century.
Global value chains (GVCs) are an important way in which modern businesses optimise their production processes by choosing to locate them in different countries. Given their importance to the world economy, it is no surprise that there is now a large literature in business. However, much less has been said about how insights from economics can be used in the analysis of GVCs. Reshaping Global Value Chains offers an in-depth and interdisciplinary analysis of global value chains, highlighting their crucial role in transforming global trade, production and development. It focuses on methods and toolkits closer to economics rather than other social sciences to explore key themes such as resilience, sustainability, innovation and inclusion, addressing the challenges posed by geopolitical, environmental and pandemic crises. Written by an impressive line-up of international scholars, this book provides practical and conceptual tools for understanding and rethinking GVCs in an era of increasing global uncertainty.
Ryan Jablonski's Dependency Politics examines how democracy works in aid-dependent countries. He draws on over six years of fieldwork to investigate relationships between donors and politicians, showing how politicians make policy and how aid dependency changes voters' assessments of politician performance. He reveals that voters don't simply reward politicians for aid, rather they condition their votes on beliefs about how politicians influence aid delivery. This leads to a 'visibility-uncertainty' paradox where aid can either enhance or erode democratic accountability. Revisiting assumptions about the effects of foreign aid on political behavior, he also explains how aid can cause citizens to vote against their interests and sometimes benefit opposition candidates over incumbents. Drawing on surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, Jablonski challenges conventional wisdom about foreign aid and offers lessons for balancing trade-offs over aid effectiveness, political capture and capacity-building. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Intellectual property (IP) rights have long faced strong legitimacy criticisms. As the vaccine debates during the COVID-19 pandemic showed, IP is often seen as a problematic asset of powerful private companies and developed economies. This book addresses these criticisms by focusing on a renewed interpretation of the TRIPS – the key international treaty for IP. By combining international law analysis and political theory, this work presents the TRIPS as the structuring agreement of the international IP regime rather than treating it as a technical trade instrument. Drawing on the ideal of freedom defined as protection against domination, the book develops a legal philosophy of the TRIPS, revisiting its foundations and proposing a renewed interpretation of its key norms. This reframing highlights how the treaty can potentially provide consistency and foreseeability in a conflict-ridden global multilateral trade system where weaker trade partners are often at a disadvantage. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Businesses are increasingly leveraging big data in financial analysis to improve decision-making, risk management, and market competitiveness, and professionals who know how to apply this data are in high demand. Designed for graduate programs and advanced undergraduate studies, this text synthesizes traditional statistics and econometrics with contemporary artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, preparing readers for the realities of modern-day financial data analysis. It studies known unknowns versus unknown unknowns and provides a systematic and objective characterization of statistical versus actual significance. Applying advanced theoretical and empirical methods to massive high-frequency databases, the book explores market microstructure, risk, market efficiency, equities, fixed income securities, and options. Grounded in over three decades of research, consulting, management, and teaching experience, it serves as a comprehensive and practical resource for students, practitioners, and scholars in capital markets, advanced analytics, and litigation.
This Element examines Secular Stagnation in the USA and responds to a recognised need for greater conceptual precision and analytical clarity regarding its nature and economic implications. Revisiting the contemporary economic debate, I propose a coherent reconceptualisation of Secular Stagnation grounded in long-run descriptive empirical evidence and an evolutionary theoretical framework. The analysis shows that stagnation should not be understood as a mere shortage of innovation or a transitory macroeconomic imbalance, but as a structural outcome of the interaction between technological change, demand dynamics, and selection mechanisms. Finally, I discuss how recent advances in automation technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), may either mitigate or reinforce Secular Stagnation, depending on how innovation policies and institutional settings shape the direction and diffusion of technological change in the US economy.
When a government participates in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) program, media coverage often highlights strong public reactions in the borrowing country, marked by mass mobilization and protests. In Creditors and Crowds, Sujeong Shim asks if public opinion matters for resolving economic crises. She shows how public opinion is pivotal to shaping global financial outcomes and reveals how public support for a government shapes the interactions among borrowing governments, IMF officials, and private portfolio investors. Combining cross-country data, case studies, and interviews, the author shows that public support for governments affects IMF programs' design and consequences. Using practical examples and comparative insights from Greece, Latvia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and more, Shim highlights the often-overlooked role of public opinion in international finance and offers lessons for governments navigating crises.
For more than seven decades, the European Union has delivered on its founding promise of peace in Western Europe. Yet serious economic and political problems persist, among them widening regional inequality. Europe's Poison Pill exposes the hidden costs of EU Cohesion Policy, showing how initiatives meant to promote convergence instead entrench stagnation, distort incentives, and defer essential reforms. Drawing on historical evidence, contemporary case studies, and economic analysis, Nuno Palma demonstrates that structural and investment funds operate as a modern resource curse, weakening many of the regions they target. The book offers a roadmap for restoring Europe's competitiveness and institutional credibility. By challenging entrenched orthodoxies, it reframes the debate on Europe's future and confronts the costs of preserving a failed model.