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The extent of fiscal transparency in Western Europe has varied over the centuries. Although ancient Greek, Roman, and medieval governments were sometimes open about their finances, the absolute monarchies of the 1600s and 1700s shrouded them in mystery. Factors that have encouraged transparency include (i) the sharing of political power and rulers’ need to persuade creditors to lend and taxpayers’ representatives to approve new taxes; (ii) the spread of technological innovations that reduce the costs of storing and transmitting information; and (iii) the acceptance of political theories that emphasize accountable government and public discussion of government policy.
How did today's rich states first establish modern fiscal systems? To answer this question, Political Transformations and Public Finances by Mark Dincecco examines the evolution of political regimes and public finances in Europe over the long term. The book argues that the emergence of efficient fiscal institutions was the result of two fundamental political transformations that resolved long-standing problems of fiscal fragmentation and absolutism. States gained tax force through fiscal centralization and restricted ruler power through parliamentary limits, which enabled them to gather large tax revenues and channel funds toward public services with positive economic benefits. Using a novel combination of descriptive, case study and statistical methods, the book pursues this argument through a systematic investigation of a new panel database that spans eleven countries and four centuries. The book's findings are significant for our understanding of economic history and have important consequences for current policy debates.
This book concentrates on how small European countries coped with economic integration and disintegration during the twentieth century. Small countries had to adapt flexibly to the drastically changing conditions outside their borders. They had to find ways of maintaining their political autonomy notwithstanding their economic dependence, and they have been quite successful in accomplishing this difficult balancing act. The authors analyse how small countries responded to the challenges of the international system and describe the different policies and strategies pursued by governments, industries and firms. Originating from the XIII. Congress of the International Economic History Association (IEHA), the contributions to this volume offer new perspectives on a widely debated topic and contribute to a better understanding of the current process of globalisation in small and large countries. The volume is divided into three sections: I. Coping with Different Regimes for International Trade and Changing Competitiveness; II. From an Open World Economy to Economic Disintegration and Protectionism; III. Trade Liberalisation, European Integration and Deregulation.
This book examines the concept of moral economy originally established by E.P. Thompson, focusing on the impact of religious norms on economic practice. With each chapter discussing a different empirical case study, the interrelations of the economy and religion are explored from antiquity through to the 20th century. The long-term trajectory and comparative perspective allows for moral economy to be seen in relation to ancient Greek commerce, medieval pawn-broking, Christian and Jewish economic ethics, urban social politics during the Plague, the Jesuit mission in Paraguay, the Ottoman Empire, religion in modern American capitalism, and Catholic attitudes toward taxation. This book aims to provide insight into how moral thinking about the economy and economic practice has evolved from a long historic perspective. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in economic history and cultural economics.
This book provides, for the first time, a systematic and comprehensive narrative of the history of one central idea in economics, namely the division of labour, over the past two and a half millennia, with special focus on that having occurred in the most recent two and a half centuries. Quite contrary to the widely held belief, the idea has a fascinating biography, much richer than that exemplified by the pin-making story that was popularized by Adam Smith’s classical work published in 1776.
Over the last twenty years, Ross B. Emmett has explored the work of Frank H. Knight, the philosopher of the Chicago School of economics. Knight occupies a paradoxical place in the history of Chicago economics: vital to the tradition’s teaching of price theory and the twentieth-century re-articulation of the defense of free enterprise and liberal democracy, yet a critic (in advance) of the empirical and methodological orientation that has characterized Chicago economics and the rest of the discipline in the post-war period, and skeptical of liberalism’s prospects. In the course of his investigation of Knight’s work, Emmett has written not only about Knight’s economics and philosophy, the nature of Chicago economics, and Knight’s place in the Chicago tradition, but also about the application of hermeneutic theory to the history of economics, the relation of the history of economic thought to the discipline of economics, and the relation between economics and religion. His eight-volume collection of primary-source material on The Chicago Tradition in Economics, 1892-1945 was published by Routledge in 2001.
This book is the first work dedicated to the key ideas of Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase on pollution and public goods with sustainable development in mind from the perspective of an economist-town planner. The seminal contributions of Ronald Coase, foretold in the form of the Coase Theorem by another Nobel laureate, George Stigler, have been much analyzed and often misinterpreted by friends and foes alike. In this book, Lawrence Lai attempts to revisit Coase's seminal works and bring to the fore their importance in economic and urban planning policy analysis. Coase's comparative institutional approach offers an important vehicle for the analysis of pressing social issues such as sustainable development, and all those interested in the creation of new platforms for performing policy analysis will welcome this important work.
A century ago, John Maynard Keynes entered the Treasury to serve his country during the First World War, but as is well known, appalled by the terms of the end-of-war Treaty of Versailles, he abandoned the British delegation, outlining the predictable adverse results in the Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. Far less well known is his personal and political development that led him to be called to service even before Great Britain entered the conflict. Starting from Keynes’s early political activity, Carlo Cristiano charts the stages through which Alfred Marshall’s young pupil rapidly rose to be one of his country’s major experts on monetary issues. The very young L...
Political and economic liberalism has generally been considered to be of marginal import in France, but at an intellectual level, it is a different story. An exploration of the history of French economic thought shows how a rich intellectual tradition developed during the nineteenth century, which has been previously neglected in English language studies of French thinking. In this important new collection, Robert Leroux brings together key works, both from widely regarded and lesser known authors, whose thinking constituted the core of a singular intellectual movement. These include such figures as Charles Dunoyer, Joseph Garnier, Gustave de Molinari, Yves Guyot, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benj...
Whilst some of Hayek's contributions to economics are purely analytical, others are inspired by a broader vision that could be characterized as political economy. In this authorative volume, some of the world's leading Hayek scholars examine the link between these two essential components of Hayek's thought, and consider them against a wider background of thought in the Austrian tradition.