Product Description: At the beginning of the 1990's unemployment grew in all industrialized countries: the essays in this collection focus on the causes and cures of this worrying phenomenon. The volume starts by analysing the disparities in the different national experiences and then focusing on European unemployment...read more

Product Description: In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges...read more

Product Description: In Enterprise and Inclusion in Italy, Edmund Phelps weaves together and applies to Italy his two principal interests of the past decade -the imperative of restoring initiative, enterprise and dynamism in a great many industrialized economies, most acutely needed in the eastern European economies amid the wreckage of their experiments with market socialism and communism, and the imperative of extending self-support and involvement in the business sector to the large number of marginalized workers, where his focus was on the high rates of dependency, idleness and crime among less educated in the United States...read more

Product Description: This book originated from a 2010 conference marking the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the landmark "Phelps volume," Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory, a book that is often credited with pioneering the currently dominant approach to macroeconomic analysis...read more

Product Description: Since the 1970s a gulf has opened between the pay of low-paid workers and the pay of the middle class. No longer able to earn a decent wage in respectable work, many have left the labor force, and the job attachment of those remaining has weakened...read more

Product Description: Economists may suppose that low-wage work can result in correspondingly low productivity. The best solution to high unemployment and turnover and low productivity is to pay users of low-wage labor a subsidy for each unit of labor they use...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: For two hundred years, the economic engine of capitalism helped make the United States a nation where almost anyone willing to take initiative, work hard, and save money could lead a comfortable life, raise a family, and assume an active role in the community...read more

Product Description: Comprises 14 contributions which examine the importance and impact of institutions in understanding economic behavior and performance. Some of the contributions apply new developments in game theory to topical case-studies including corruption, central bank independence, globalization, and other issues in economic governance...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Dissatisfied with the explanations of the business cycle provided by the Keynesian, monetarist, New Keynesian, and real business cycle schools, Edmund Phelps has developed from various existing strands-some modern and some classical--a radically different theory to account for the long periods of unemployment that have dogged the economies of the United States and Western Europe since the early 1970s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In the post-war period, spending on social security, health and education has grown continuously in the leading industrialized countries. The considerable size of this spending as a percentage of GDP together with the ageing population raise doubts on the sustainability of welfare spending. These doubts have been accompanied in recent years by an increasing awareness of the allocational inefficiencies and the distributive inequalities caused by the provision of some social services. The welfare state should therefore be reconstructed not only through readjustment of the social security system but also a change in unemployment benefits and the taxation of workers to avoid the perverse spiral that may be produced in the future by cuts in welfare benefits, growing unemployment and the need to further reduce the social security services.

Product Description: The proceedings of an otherwise unidentified meeting (although the volume is published in association with Rivista di Politica Economica , SIPI, Rome, and CEIS, University "Tor Vergata," Rome). Addressing the questions of why some countries have grown much faster than others in the postwar period and over a longer timespan, and what a country can do to improve its growth and performance, the contributions focus in particular on two areas: the role that globalization of certain markets has played in the convergence of productivity levels over much of the world in recent decades, and the effect on economic growth of a country's membership in a specific economic area...read more

Examines how, in Eastern Europe, privatizing firms and liberalizing their market environment generates a variety of problems, many of which are not common to the analogous attempts in industrial countries. The book is an analysis of the empirical process of privatization in Eastern Europe.

Product Description: The subject of this book is the kind of economic interaction and interdependence that has arisen among nations in the contemporary world economy, the nature and significance of the pattern of trade balances that have resulted from them, and the question of what, if anything, should be done by national governments about that pattern...read more

Product Description: Seven Schools of Macroeconomic Thought offers an excellent survey of various macroeconomic topics that feature prominently in the research agenda and have inspired both theoretical and policy debate. The book presents an authoritative and comprehensive summary and original critique of macroeconomic approaches by a scholar whose own contribution to the field is considerable...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Presents a collection of papers by economists theorizing on the roles of altruism and morality versus self-interest in the shaping of human behavior and institutions. Specifically, the authors examine why some persons behave in an altruistic way without any apparent reward, thus defying the economist's model of utility maximization...read more