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Critics of globalization claim that economic liberalization leads to a lowering of regulatory standards. As capital and corporations move more freely across national boundaries, a race to the bottom results as governments are forced to weaken labor and environmental standards to retain current contracts or attract new business. The essays in this volume argue that, on the contrary, under certain circumstances global economic integration can actually lead to the strengthening of consumer and environmental standards. This volume extends the argument of David Vogel’s book Trading Up, which discussed environmental standards, by focusing on the impact of globalization on labor rights, women’s rights and capital market regulations.
Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.
Society today faces a difficult contradiction: we know exactly how the physical limits of our planet are being reached and exactly why we cannot go on as we have before – and yet, collectively, we seem unable to reach crucial decisions for our future in a timely way. This book argues that our definition of prosperity, which we have long assimilated with the idea of material wealth, may be preventing us from imagining a future that meets essential human aspirations without straining our planet to the breaking point. In other words, redefining prosperity is a necessary and urgent task. This book is the fruit of a long debate among 15 scholars from diverse fields who worked together to bring ...
This timely Handbook recognises the emergence of climate change as the defining topic of our time. With public climate discourse growing more urgent every year, this Handbook brings together international experts from different economic disciplines to answer critical climate policy questions.
After two generations of emphasis on governmental inefficiency and the need for deregulation, we now see growing interest in the possibility of constructive governance, alongside public calls for new, smarter regulation. Yet there is a real danger that regulatory reforms will be rooted in outdated ideas. As the financial crisis has shown, neither traditional market failure models nor public choice theory, by themselves, sufficiently inform or explain our current regulatory challenges. Regulatory studies, long neglected in an atmosphere focused on deregulatory work, is in critical need of new models and theories that can guide effective policy-making. This interdisciplinary volume points the way toward the modernization of regulatory theory. Its essays by leading scholars move past predominant approaches, integrating the latest research about the interplay between human behavior, societal needs, and regulatory institutions. The book concludes by setting out a potential research agenda for the social sciences.
The Economics of Green Growth investigates the possibility of creating an integrated indicator covering three pillars of sustainable development: economy, society and the environment. The excessive pursuit of economic efficiency has resulted in severe environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss, and societal human issues such as inequality and disparity. The book aims to change the direction of economic growth towards one which is more sustainable. It explores beyond the conventional indicator, the GDP that measures economic growth and human well-being. It also introduces new indicators relevant to sustainable development and a green economy and discusses the key issues for these indicators.
The growing global demand for food, feed and bio-based renewable material is changing the conditions for agricultural production worldwide. At the same time, revolutionary achievements in the field of biosciences are contributing to a transition whereby bio-based alternatives for energy and materials are becoming more competitive. Creating Sustainable Bioeconomies explores the prospects for biosciences and how its innovation has the potential to help countries in the North (Europe) and the South (Africa) to move towards resource efficient agriculture and sustainable bioeconomies. Throughout the book, the situations of Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa will be compared and contrasted, and opportu...
A ‘green economy’ must be built on ‘green jobs’ - the kind of employment that is low carbon, intended to reduce energy use and expected to restore environmental quality. But attempts to define exactly what a ‘green job’ is have led to varied and often contradictory answers. There are many unresolved questions including whether we consider jobs in the nuclear fuel industry to be green jobs? Or is a worker at a glass making company which supplies the glass for the solar photovoltaic industry doing a green job given that glass making is a ‘dirty’ industry? This book deals with the relationship between "green" concepts (green jobs, green economy, green growth) and sustainable dev...
Climate tech is critical for averting planetary chaos. Half the greenhouse gas reductions required to reach “net-zero” climate targets in 2050 will need to come from technologies that have not yet been invented. Without effective government interventions, market incentives alone will not produce a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy. The commercial value of innovative climate technology, especially in its early phases, remains underpriced—far below its social value. The good news is that smart policies can change these dynamics and catalyze the necessary creativity and investment in clean technology, and its deployment. The key question is: which approaches can lead us to future c...
The global greenhouse effect may be one of the greatest challenges ever to face humankind. If fossil fuel use, and the consequent CO emissions, 2 continue to increase at their current trend, there is the possibility that over the next century there will be massive climate change and the flooding of coastal areas. The economics profession is beginning to respond to this challenge, through seeking to understand the economic processes which detennine the demand for energy, the proportion of this energy supplied by fossil fuels, and the policy instruments available for reducing fossil fuel demand while still supplying appropriate amounts of energy. This study is a contribution to that literature...