الصفحة 2
الصفحة 2
Economic Liberalization and Integration Policy : Options for Eastern Europe and Russia
The authors of this book analyze the dynamics of macroeconomic and structural developments in Eastern Europe and Russia, with special attention paid to problems of international and national integration, "Dutch disease" and natural resource dependency, and distortions in institutional reforms. The analysis also sheds light on how these problems have implications for cooperation among OECD-countries. A critical focus is on institutional adjustment and learning, human capital formation, trade and foreign investment.
Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education : Lessons from Across Asia
This book offers pioneering insights and practical methods for promoting diversity and inclusion in higher education classrooms and curricula. It highlights the growing importance of international education programs in Asia and the value of understanding student diversity in a changing, evermore interconnected world
Digital Economic Dynamics : Innovations, Networks and Regulations
This book analyzes the dynamics and impacts of software development and discusses new institutional and economic changes in the context of digital market economies.The book furthermore examines telecommunications regulation of fixed line networks, cable TV and mobile communications.
Developmental Neurobiology
The text will serve as a readily tractable source for advanced undergraduate neuroscience majors and beginning graduate students who will benefit from a single source to begin their study of a more detailed understanding of neural development. Each chapter is peppered with a sound mixture of historical context and descriptions from both the vertebrate and invertebrate literature that best illustrate specific aspects of development. The liberal use of simple diagrams and tables, which readily illustrate complex issues, is a welcome addition for instructor and student alike.
Designing Democracy : Ideas for Better Rules
While liberal democracies are the best systems of self-governance for societies, they rarely invoke great enthusiasm. On the one hand, democracies have been known to fail in achieving efficient or fair allocations. On the other hand, many citizens take the democratic system for granted as they have yet to experience an alternative. In this book the vision we propose is that the potential of democ racies has not yet been exhausted, and that optimal democracies are both the Utopia for societies and the aim that scientists should be committed to. We present a number of ideas for drawing up new rules to im prove the functioning of democracies. The book falls into two parts. The first part examines ways of combining incentive contracts with democratic elections. We suggest that a judicious combina tion of these two elements as a dual mechanism can alleviate a wide range of political failures, while at the same time adhering to the founding principles of democracies. The second part presents new rules for decision-making and agenda setting. Together with modern communication devices, these rules can sometimes transcend the limitations of liberal VI Preface democracies in achieving desirable outcomes. Examples of such rules include the flexible majority rule where the size of the ma jority required depends on the proposal, or the rule that only those belonging to the winning majority can be taxed.
Critical Infrastructures at Risk : Securing the European Electric Power System
This book explores the potential risks and vulnerabilities of the European electricity infrastructure, other infrastructures and our society as whole increasingly depend on. The work was initiated by the need to verify the potential effects of the ongoing market and technical transformation of the infrastructure, which is fundamentally changing its operation and performance. The final aim is to set the basis for an appropriate industrial and political European-wide response to the risk challenges.
Crisis response in higher education : How the pandemic challenged university operations and organisation
This book explores the impact of Covid-19 on universities, and how students, staff, faculty and academic leaders have adapted to and dealt with the impact of the pandemic. Drawing on experiences from Britain, Australia and Sweden, it showcases how Covid has challenged routines and procedures in universities, and thrown them into a disarray of ever-changing events and short-term adaptations. The authors pay particular attention to how students, staff, faculty, and leaders have coped with Covid, through a series of autobiographical portraits of their strains but also heroic efforts in the harshest of circumstances.
Criminalising Harmful Conduct : The Harm Principle, its Limits and Continental Counterparts
This book explores the issue of legitimate criminalization in a modern, liberal society. Coverage provides a comparative study between two major criminal legal systems and its theories: the Anglo-American, on one side, and the Continental criminal legal system of Germanic legal circle, on the other.
Courts, politics and constitutional law : judicialization of politics and politicization of the judiciary
Examines how the judicialization of politics, and the politicization of courts, affect representative democracy, rule of law and separation of powers. This volume critically assesses the phenomena of judicialization of politics and politicization of the judiciary. It explores the rising impact of courts on key constitutional principles, such as democracy and separation of powers, which is paralleled by increasing criticism of this influence from both liberal and illiberal perspectives. The book also addresses the challenges to rule of law as a principle, preconditioned on independent and powerful courts, which are triggered by both democratic backsliding and the mushrooming of populist constitutionalism and illiberal constitutional regimes.
Counter-Terrorism Policing : Community, Cohesion and Security
This book charts these opportunities and challenges through unprecedented access to the police and diverse communities in Australian regional and metropolitan contexts. It locates these developments in an international comparison with like jurisdictions in the US, UK, and Canada and in light of former conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It examines the nature and impact of counter-terrorism on policing, diverse communities, legislation and policy and on the media. The book concludes by posing questions for the future of counter-terrorism policing in liberal democracies.
Contemporary Housing Struggles : A Structural Field of Contention Approach
This book provides a comparative study of housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest in 2008-2021. The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the usual focus of urban movements research provide an illuminating case of similar structural conditions governed by different political constellations at the national and local scales. Instead of searching for unilinear narratives connecting structural tensions to politicized claims, the book offers an in-depth contextual analysis of multiple forms of contention, their (often unintentional) interactions, and their broader political-structural background, including tensions surrounded by political silence.
Liberal Democracy : Prosperity through Freedom
Aims to show which factors have been decisive in the rise of successful countries. Never before have so many people been so well off. However, prosperity is not a law of nature; it has to be worked for. A liberal economy stands at the forefront of this success – not as a political system, but as a set of economic rules promoting competition, which in turn leads to innovation, research and enormous productivity.
Competition Policies in Emerging Economies : Lessons and Challenges from Central America and Mexico
Do small developing economies, or SDEs, need a specific competition policy to create competitive markets? Against the backdrop of globalization, protectionist policies that promote state ownership and heavy regulation of key industries are proving increasingly ineffective for driving growth. Countries around the world are instituting reforms to promote competition and business creation, yet the economic and political concentration of power, feeble judicial systems, and the scarcity of human and financial resources pose special challenges to SDEs. Competition Policies in Emerging Economies features an in-depth analysis of two strategic industries — telecommunications and banking — in several Central American nations which sheds light on the dynamics of the transition to deregulation and trade liberalization. Examining the lessons learned from these experiences and presenting discussion of political, legal, economic, financial, cultural, and organizational issues, the book provides unique perspectives on competition policy and economic development.
Comparative Environmental Politics
The book explores five major topics: state-society relations; environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs); Green parties and environmental movements; institutions of government and policy-making; variations in the capacities of states to protect the environment; and national responses to global problems. It compares and contrasts rich and poor nations, large and small countries, liberal democracies and authoritarian states.
Calibrating the Cosmos : How Cosmology Explains Our Big Bang Universe
Calibrating the Cosmos describes hard science, but is gently written. It explains in clear, non-mathematical language the measurements and the interpretation of the resulting data that have led to the current understanding of the origin, evolution and properties of our expanding Big Bang universe. Many people have a sketchy idea of the work of cosmologists, but Professor Levin’s experience in teaching both scientific and liberal arts students has enabled him to impart much of our current thinking without resorting to difficult mathematics. Theoretical concepts are emphasized, in particular the symmetries of homogeneity and isotropy enjoyed by our universe on the largest scales, how these symmetries lead to only one quantity being needed to describe the growth of the universe from its infancy to the present time, and how the so-called parameters of the universe are the ingredients used to construct the model universes to which ours – the real thing – is compared.
Building intuition : Insights from basic operations management models and principles
"‘This user-friendly book will help the reader to develop insights with respect to a number of models that are important in the study and practice of operations management’. … all the chapters are extremely well written and a pleasure to read. … This would be a good book to use as a text in any operations management course, and in particular for operations management courses which are part of a ‘liberal studies’ program. It would also be good book for managers … ." (R Bharath, Journal of the Operational Research society, Vol. 60 (7), 2009)
Buddhism and comparative constitutional law
The first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law,The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism.
Banking Sector Liberalization in India : Evaluation of Reforms and Comparative Perspectives on China
Banking Sector Liberalization in India explores in detail the changes in the Indian banking sector over the last 20 years, and puts them into a comparative perspective with the Chinese banking sector. For this purpose, the author develops a detailed indicator-based framework for assessing the liberalization of a banking sector along various process steps based on financial liberalization and transformation studies. This framework, along with the indicators for the process and the results of liberalization, is applied to the banking sectors in India and China to test for the effects of liberalization on the sector and the macro level. The key finding is that while liberalization has improved the sectoral performance, it has so far had no effect on the macro level. The book features a detailed description of recent reforms in the Indian banking sector, a set of indicators for evaluating banking sector reforms, and a large number of graphs with key figures for the banking sectors in India and China.
At the crossroads : The world trading system and the Doha Round
Since its foundation in 1995 the legitimacy of the WTO – and herewith the notion of organising global trade on the basis of herewith the notion of organising global trade on the basis of concepts like trade-liberalisation, treaty-based rule of law and concepts like trade-liberalisation, treaty-based rule of law and enforceability – is challenged for very different reasons this volume not only documents the proceedings of this conference but, against the backdrop of the ongoing efforts to revive the Doha Round wants to be understood as some sort of stocktaking: What did really go wrong in Cancún? Where does the WTO stand today? Has there been any progress made since? And, finally: Is there any chance left to reach the ambitions goals postulated by the Doha Development Agenda? These and other, related questions are being discussed in the volume at hand.
African Land Reform Under Economic Liberalisation: States, Chiefs, and Rural Communities
This book offers unique in-depth, comprehensive, and comparative analyses of the motivations, context, and outcomes of recent land reforms in Africa. Whereas a considerable number of land reforms have been carried out by African governments since the 1990s, no systematic analysis on their meaning has so far been conducted. In the age of land reform, Africa has seen drastic rural changes. Analysing the relationship between those reforms and change, the chapters in this book reveal not only their socio-economic outcomes, such as accelerated marketisation of land, but also their political outcomes, which have often been contrasting.
