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Recent commentaries on Iran have stressed attacks on workers and wages by a neoliberal regime bent on slashing costs in response to sanctions, stagnation, and inflation. At the same time, Iranian political elites and government experts uniformly advocate for higher minimum pay. Underneath this paradox lies a complex shift of class inequality away from salary scales determined by firms and government agencies toward a single minimum wage set every year by the Supreme Labor Council, the central body responsible for employment policy. The result is not labor discipline or wage repression but an unruly wage containment state. Integrating archival sources, interviews, and statistical data, the article examines how elite conflicts, societal interests, and economic forces have structured the politics of pay in Iran. Framed comparatively, Iran’s wage containment state is a product of the way in which politics, development, and international relations have shaped Iranian capitalism.
Overseas large-scale combat operations (LSCOs) could require domestic hospitals to treat large numbers of combat casualties. Our goal was to evaluate the financial impact on hospitals of treating combat casualties during an LSCO.
Methods
Using a discrete event simulation model, we explored how 5 civilian hospitals in Omaha, Nebraska, would fare after accepting combat casualties during a National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) activation. We compared changes in financial measures (government payments, hospital revenues) and occupancy measures (civilian patient displacement) under different scenarios for combat casualty reimbursement rates as fractions (75%-125%) of Medicare rates.
Results
Combat casualties replaced 100% of civilian patients at 3 of 5 hospitals, displacing a total of 10,905 civilian patients [95% CI: 10551-11248]. Combat casualty reimbursement at 125% of Medicare rates resulted in government payments of $462 million and net income gains for civilian hospitals of approximately 23 times pre-activation baselines. Combat casualty reimbursement below 125% of Medicare rates led to net income losses.
Conclusions
Large influxes of combat casualties could result in rapid, profound displacement of civilian patients and revenue loss at NDMS-participating facilities, potentially affecting hospitals’ ability and willingness to treat them. Policymakers need to identify appropriate reimbursement rates for combat casualties.
Understanding the financial implications of intensive care unit (ICU) survivor care is critical to the success of ICU follow-up clinics. The model of value-based healthcare first suggested by Porter and Teisburg in their 2006 book, Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results, presents a perspective from which to argue for the importance of ICU follow-up clinics. A robust understanding of the financial implications of ICU follow-up clinics must go beyond billing and collections generated by these clinics and should focus on total value provided by these clinics to patients. A general equation to assess value is value = quality / cost. Cost should include not only cost to providers or payors but also to patients and their families. We present a series of practical financial considerations when developing a follow-up clinic that focus on the value attained relative to the costs of running the clinic. We also suggest areas that would benefit from further research, such as optimal staffing, alignment of time frame for resolution of post intensive care syndrome with time points at which the value of follow-up clinics is assessed, and application of behavioral economics to ICU survivor follow-up care process design.
Between 1860 and 1930, the Canada-United States border emerged as a crucial economic boundary. In creating the border, however, Canada and the United States prioritized revenue generation over coherence or uniformity. This priority created an unpredictable barrier for both businesses and individuals. Consuls often focused their attention on understanding the impacts of tariffs, trade volume, and smuggling on transnational commerce. The border’s practical impacts, however, went far deeper. For individuals, the border’s unpredictability shaped everything from how they gave gifts to the ways they supported their families. For businesses, the border impacted profit margins and intellectual property. But it also changed how businesses approached administrative tasks—everything from staff training to who they delegated to fill out paperwork. Although imagined as a federal project, the border’s tolerances for variation ensured that regional and local solutions proliferated. Federal mandates merged with local interests to create an inconsistent barrier of ever-changing heights.
The topic of “management” and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) continues to fascinate scholars. This paper draws on varying theoretical perspectives to explore their respective contributions to our knowledge of NPOs. The two longstanding and contrasting disciplines of economics and sociology have contributed most, traditionally, to the study of NPOs. However, neither of these disciplines has resolved all the dilemmas associated with NPOs. The standard economic model does not apply well to the distinctive nonmarket situation of NPOs. The sociological perspectives offer interesting insight, but fail to develop plans of action for NPOs. However, both of these traditional perspectives are starting to be eclipsed by the focus on marketing research.
Studying a sample of recently published papers in the main Economics journals, I find that these American journals mostly publish work on American data, written by members of American universities. I argue that this state of affairs is not essentially because of a language problem, but is explained by the domination of US universities on the international academic market in Economics. This domination has thus direct consequences for the topics of research, and thus for the accumulation of knowledge, in Economics.
Rational choice theories belong to the most important building blocks of 20th century economics. Their usefulness to model human behaviour has been extensively debated in modern social science and beyond. While some have argued that rational choice theories should be applied to a broad range of political and social phenomena, the rise of behavioural economics questions whether they are appropriate at all for understanding economic behaviour. Conversations on Rational Choice sheds light on what is actually at stake in these debates. In 23 conversations, some of the most prominent protagonists from economics, psychology, and philosophy discuss their individual perspectives on the nature, possible justifications, and epistemic limitations of rational choice theories. Offering a comprehensive assessment of the value of rational choice theories in producing knowledge in economics, these conversations lay the ground for a more nuanced appraisal of rational choice theories from a practical viewpoint.
In the early 1980s, a group of radical African economists working at the Dakar-based Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP) were dismissed. Among them were three Ghanaian economists, Tony Obeng, Cadman Atta Mills, and Kwame Amoa, who applied a neocolonial analysis of global political economy to critique international development policies. Although the precise circumstances of their dismissal remain unclear, it was evident that their revolutionary approach to development clashed fundamentally with IDEP’s methods. Inspired by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of neocolonialism and the Latin American school of dependency theory, these Pan-African scholars refuted the dominant, anti-political, dehistorical, and simplistic Western explanation of Africa’s underdevelopment and urgently searched for better explanations. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, this article centers Africans and African institutions engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s.
Teaching introductory courses on the ancient world is a study in reviewing a vast field of material without compromising on nuance. It is a tightrope walk, especially when beginning a teaching career. Comedy and economics are topics often parsed in more advanced courses to engage the primary source materials and modern debates with appropriate depth of analysis. However, their place in the introductory classroom is an essential aspect of understanding the ancient Greek world fully. Especially as students often struggle to find ancient comedy amusing upon first interaction, teaching these topics is a process of trial and error for the professor, who is often constrained by their own exposure to these topics. This article shares a classroom activity on comedy and economic institutions designed for the introductory class, engaging students by activating prior knowledge and practicing close reading of a selection from an ancient text.
This chapter analyzes different methodologies for using the history of international development and economic growth to study US foreign relations. Early efforts to historicize development, driven largely by the scholarship of anthropologists, political theorists, and historical sociologists, focused on the intellectual origins and discursive effects of development and growth discourse. I show how, over the past two decades, historians have expanded upon this work in multiple ways. They have used governmental and nonstate archival collections to analyze the intellectual and political origins of ideas about development and growth in the United States. They have used documents in foreign languages from across the world to analyze how those receiving development assistance alternately resisted, challenged, accepted, adapted, and integrated US foreign aid into their domestic state-building and development initiatives. Historians have likewise integrated analytic frameworks from other subfields and disciplines – such as environmental history, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of economic thought – to assess the short- and long-term legacies of development initiatives. The chapter explores these approaches to analyzing development and growth as entry points to study how, why, and to what ends the United States exercised power in myriad ways across the world.
This introductory chapter outlines the motivation behind the book, critically discusses anthropocentrism in economics, and introduces the distinction between the direct and indirect approaches. It also puts the book into perspective, highlighting its overall contribution.
This Element presents an economic analysis of Augustine's Laws and Weapons Systems. It explores and evaluates their economic content and subjects them to critical analysis. The Element is both theoretical and empirical and the empirical work uses an original UK data set on military aircraft over the period 1934 to 1964. The period embraces major technical changes involving war and peace and the shift to jet powered aircraft.
This chapter examines how Bloomsbury and music intersected at the figure of Edward J. Dent, the Cambridge music scholar. It offers Dent as an embodiment of which Bloomsbury and early twentieth-century musical culture in England and Europe were mutually constitutive, using him as a point for comparison to gauge Bloomsbury’s musical enthusiasm and sensibility. The chapter first surveys existing musical-literary criticism within studies of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It then explores the overlaps between Dent and Bloomsbury on issues including non-European musical cultures, sexuality, personal relationship, modernist aesthetics, music as a performing art, international politics, education, and state funding. Following a discussion of Dent’s involvement during and after the Second World War in John Maynard Keynes’ work on “national” opera, the chapter ends with Keynes by examining one of his letters to the BBC as an epitome of music’s protean role in Bloomsbury.
This chapter examines the distinctive hardheadedness of the Bloomsbury group’s famous devotion to the life of the mind. While Bloomsbury is virtually synonymous with the prizing of aesthetic appreciation, emotional intensity, and intellectual reflection, many of the group’s members were equally concerned with the inextricability of such rarefied states from very material sources of maintenance, support, and security. The chapter foregrounds the inseparable connection between economics and aesthetics in the thought and practice of the Bloomsbury group, identifying a concern with this connection as one of the key preoccupations stemming from the influence of G. E. Moore’s philosophy, and tracing its significance in a range of economic, artistic and literary works.
I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.
In this chapter, we discuss practical ways One Health approaches can be integrated into legal and policy action from the lens of the environment sector, to deliver improved human, animal, and ecosystem health outcomes. Relevance to specific processes are highlighted: (1) national implementation of global environmental conventions, including in laws and policy frameworks; (2) environmental and social impact assessment; and 3) local governance systems, including in and around protected areas. Examination of these topics is ground-truthed by national, regional, and subnational examples, including from Liberia, building on lessons from the country’s robust multi-sectoral One Health coordination platform that can guide One Health action at all levels. We also explore the relevance of One Health economics to guide law and policy decisions frameworks in reducing environmental degradation and other trade-offs and maximising societal co-benefits. Finally, we discuss how industry standards and voluntary frameworks, such as the IUCN Green List Standard and its accompanying One Health tools, can have a supporting role in advancing good governance and multi-sectoral management for conservation and health outcomes.
Daily life in cities is often about balance and compromise. Urban densities facilitate things being in close proximity and provide convenience for residents, but they also create an opportunity for traffic congestion and increased social and environmental inequity, and the possibility of lower-density suburban sprawl. To promote urban sustainability, a careful balance of economic development, ecology, and equity is required. In this chapter, four examples of urban sustainability crises and the dramatic response to them are examined. The cases include Miami, US; Oslo, Norway; St. Georges, Grenada; and Shenzhen, China. In each situation, the sustainability crisis emerges from a deeply set awareness of diminishing environmental quality of life and a feeling that the residents’ sense of place is under threat. The drivers of this threat are deeply embedded in social and economic factors. In each city, the policy switch to enhanced sustainability results from an aggressive, multi-scalar effort to alter and redirect the pattern of urban spatial development.
Economics is the study of decisions made when allocating scarce resources to satisfy needs and unlimited wants and business is the enterprise engaged in the production of goods and services, usually for profit. Australia needs innovative individuals with a knowledge and understanding of economics and business who question, process and analyse information, make informed decisions and then reflect upon outcomes. With the end of the mining boom, decreases in manufacturing due to offshoring of labour and the depletion of Tier-1 mines, innovation and entrepreneurship are necessary for a prosperous Australian economy in the future. This chapter will: outline where Economics and Business appears in the Australian Curriculum; provide information on delivery and assessment of Economics and Business knowledge and understanding with illustrations of integration with other learning areas; integrate Economics and Business with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and perspectives and Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and then explain how Economics and Business inquiry and skills are delivered through the creation and implementation of a business plan.
In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?
The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.