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Modern capitalism favors values that undermine our face-to-face bonds with friends and family members. Focusing on the post-communist world, and comparing it to more "developed" societies, this book reveals the mixed effects of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships. While most observers blame the egoism and asocial behavior found in new free-market societies on their communist pasts, this work shows how relationships are also threatened by the profit orientations and personal ambition unleashed by economic development. Successful people in societies as diverse as China, Russia, and Eastern Germany adjust to the market economy at a social cost, relaxing their morals in order to ob...
This anthology examines the "unfinished project of modernity" with respect to the unrealized potential for economic, social, and political development in Africa. It also shows how, facing the consequences of modernism, Africans in and out of the continent are responding to these unfinished projects drawing on (a) the customary, (b) the novelty of modernity, and (c) positive aspects of modernism, for the organization of their societies and the enrichment of their lives even as they contend with the negative aspects of modernity and modernism.
Macroeconomics: Understanding the Global Economy, 3rd Edition is to help students – and indeed anyone – understand contemporary and past economic events that shape the world we live in, and at a sophisticated level. But it does so without focusing on mathematical techniques and models for their own sake. Theory is taken seriously – so much so that the authors go to pains to understand the key aspects of theories in a way that will not put people off before they see how theories are useful to analyse issues. The authors believe that theories are essential to better understand the world, thus the book includes a wealth of historic and current episodes and data to both see how theories can help interpret the world and also to judge their validity. Economies today are very inter-connected; what happens in China matters pretty much everywhere; and what happens in one (even small) country in the euro zone has implications for the whole euro area and beyond, consequently Macroeconomics, 3rd Edition adopts a very international focus.
The Niger Delta Region has in the past two decades experienced protracted violent conflicts. At the roots of these violent conflicts are the genuine quests of the people for sustainable development that is based on social justice, equity, fairness and environmental protection. Although richly endowed, the region is hopelessly poor. This paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty has been attributed to a myriad of factors ranging from Nigeria's centralized federalism, to ethno-regional domination, corruption, poor governance, and oil-related environmental degradation. Development in the Niger Delta is vital not only to the stability and prosperity of Nigeria, but also to global energy security. This book provides unique insights into the challenges of development and peace building in the Niger Delta, and insights into other resource-rich but poverty-stricken, conflict-prone regions of the world.
This 2017 Article IV Consultation highlights that the economic conditions in Sudan have been challenging since the secession of South Sudan in 2011 and the loss of the bulk of oil production and exports. The authorities have implemented partial policy adjustments to help stabilize the economy and reestablish growth, most recently by allowing for greater exchange rate flexibility and reducing fuel subsidies. The current account deficit (cash basis) is expected to decline by 3.25 percentage points to 2.75 percent of GDP in 2017. Data for the first half of 2017 indicate weaker real domestic demand, partly offset by a strengthening contribution from net exports.
While Africa is too often regarded as lying on the periphery of the global political arena, this is not the case. African nations have played an important historical role in world affairs. It is with this understanding that the authors in this volume set out upon researching and writing their chapters, making an important collective contribution to our understanding of modern Africa. Taken as a whole, the chapters represent the range of research in African development, and fully tie this development to the global political economy. African nations play significant roles in world politics, both as nations influenced by the ebbs and flows of the global economy and by the international political system, but also as actors, directly influencing politics and economics. It is only through an understanding of both the history and present place of Africa in global affairs that we can begin to assess the way forward for future development.
For a profession concerned overwhelmingly with the material worldwhether houses, offices, highways, streets, parks, or sewer systemsurban planning has a poor understanding of materiality, perhaps because, as Robert Beauregard says, Plans erase what exists in order to propose what has been imagined. Too often planners position their work as fact-driven, purely administrative, and allegedly devoid of politics, or they fail to grapple adequately with the social and physical complexities of the real world. In this ambitious and provocative book Beauregard sets out to situate urban planning and its ways of knowing, being, and behaving within a new materialist framework that acknowledges the inevitable insufficiency of our representations of reality while also engaging more holistically with the world in all its diversityhuman and nonhuman actors alike."
Bringing together scholars from a wide array of disciplines - including anthropology, economics, history, sociology, and political science - this volume addresses the problems of the regime change and state failure in Africa in the context of the global economy, but from a specifically African perspective, arguing that the underdevelopment of the African economy is linked to the underdevelopment of the continents' nation states.
There is no recent literature that underscores the transition from Pan-Africanism to Diaspora discourse. This book examines the gradual shift and four major transformations in the study of Pan-Africanism. It offers an "academic post-mortem" that seeks to gauge the extent to which Pan-Africanism overlaps with the study of the African Diaspora and reverse migrations; how Diaspora studies has penetrated various disciplines while Pan-Africanism is located on the periphery of the field. The book argues that the gradual shift from Pan-African discourses has created a new pathway for engaging Pan-African ideology from academic and social perspectives. Also, the book raises questions about the recen...
African social development is often explained from outsider perspectives that are mainly European and Euro-American, leaving African indigenous discourses and ways of knowing and doing absent from discussions and debates on knowledge and development. This book is intended to present Africanist indigenous voices in current debates on economic, educational, political and social development in Africa. The authors and contributors to the volume present bold and timely ideas and scholarship for defining Africa through its challenges, possible policy formations, planning and implementation at the local, regional, and national levels. The book also reveals insightful examinations of the hype, the m...