" The achievements and legacy of the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings The Imperative of Development highlights the research and policy analysis produced by the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings. The Center, which operated from 2006 to 2011, was the first home at Brookings for research on international development. It sought to help identify effective solutions to key development challenges in order to create a more prosperous and stable world. Founded by James and Elaine Wolfensohn, the Center’s mission was to “to create knowledge that leads to action with real, scaled-up, and lasting development impact.” This volume reviews the Center’s achievements and lasting legacy, combining highlights of its most important research with new essays that examine the context and impact of that research. Six primary research streams of the Wolfensohn Center’s work are highlighted in The Imperative of Development: the shifting structure of the world economy in the twenty-first century; the challenge of scaling up the impact of development interventions; the effectiveness of development assistance; how to promote economic and social inclusion for Middle Eastern youth; the case for investing in early child development; and the need for global governance reform. In each chapter, a scholar associated with the particular research topic provides an overview of the issue and its broader context, then describes the Center’s work on the topic and the subsequent influence and impact of these efforts. The Imperative of Development chronicles the growth and expansion of the first center for development research in Brookings’s 100-year history and traces how the seeds of this initiative continue to bear fruit. "

Susan Cozzens, Dhanaraj Thakur, and the other co-authors ask how the benefits and costs of emerging technologies are distributed amongst different countries _ some rich and some poor. Examining the case studies of five technologies across eight countri

Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.

Some 600 million children worldwide do not legally exist. Without verifiable identification, they—and unregistered adults—could face serious difficulties in proving their identity, whether to open a bank account, purchase a SIM card, or cast a vote. Lack of identification is a barrier to full economic and social inclusion. Recent advances in the reach and technological sophistication of identification systems have been nothing less than revolutionary. Since 2000, over 60 developing countries have established national ID programs. Digital technology, particularly biometrics such as fingerprints and iris scans, has dramatically expanded the capabilities of these programs. Individuals can now be uniquely identified and reliably authenticated against their claimed identities. By enabling governments to work more effectively and transparently, identification is becoming a tool for accelerating development progress. Not only is provision of legal identity for all a target under the Sustainable Development Goals, but this book shows how it is also central to achieving numerous other SDG targets. Yet, challenges remain. Identification systems can fail to include the poor, leaving them still unable to exercise their rights, access essential services, or fully participate in political and economic life. The possible erosion of privacy and the misuse of personal data, especially in countries that lack data privacy laws or the capacity to enforce them, is another challenge. Yet another is ensuring that investments in identification systems deliver a development payoff. There are all too many examples where large expenditures—sometimes supported by donor governments or agencies—appear to have had little impact. Identification Revolution: Can Digital ID be Harnessed for Development? offers a balanced perspective on this new area, covering both the benefits and the risks of the identification revolution, as well as pinpointing opportunities to mitigate those risks.

Technology, Globalization, and Sustainable Development offers a unified, transdisciplinary approach for transforming the industrial state in order to promote sustainable development. The authors present a deep analysis of the ways that industrial states – both developed and developing – are currently unsustainable and how economic and social welfare are related to the environment, to public health and safety, and to earning capacity and meaningful and rewarding employment. The authors offer multipurpose solutions to the sustainability challenge that integrate industrial development, employment, technology, environment, national and international law, trade, finance, and public and worker health and safety. The authors present a compelling wake-up call that warns of the collision course set between the current paths of continued growth and inevitable unsustainability in the world today. Offering clear examples and real solutions, this textbook illustrates how the driving forces that are currently promoting unsustainability can be refocused and redesigned to reverse course and improve the state of the world. This book is essential reading for those teaching and studying sustainable development and the critical roles of the economy, employment, and the environment.

This edited book is a collection of selected papers, presented at the International Conference of Political Economy (ICOPEC 2016). The deliberate employment of the term “political economy” in the title “International Conference of Political Economy” implies the fact that economics is perceived as an integral part of social phenomena in the International Conference of Political Economy (ICOPEC). Accordingly, even if economic institutions and relations form the foundations of society in the contemporary world, economic development is dependent on social power and dynamics, while economic policies, per se, are shaped by not only technical processes but also diverse interests and choices. Within this context, politics is involved in every encounter between different economic classes, social groups and genders being shaped by the visions of a better life as the subject matter of philosophy, ethics and religion and at times it finds its best expression in art. Law, on the other hand, is the embodiment of all social relations which are, in their essence, political. Thus, this conference does not reduce society to market relations only, despite positioning the economy in the heart of social relations. Above all, it considers the society as a political entity. Indeed, everything constitutes the subject matter of politics. The arguments in favour of purifying market relations from the influence of politics and the discourse that they take place on their own right serve to disguise the conflicts of interest and power asymmetries inherent therein. This conference regards man as homo politicus, as Aristoteles put it, rather than homo economicus. In 2016, ICOPEC conferences were turned into a conference series with its 7th conference and the main theme of the 7th conference was determined as “State, Economic Policy, Taxation and Development". IJOPEC Publication has undertaken to publish selected papers, presented at this conference in English and Turkish, in five different edited books. In the 90s the phenomena of globalization managed to dominate political, popular, and academic debates. While reading a newspaper or a book, watching television, surfing the Internet, or participating in a demonstration we come across the links of globalization in our everyday lives. Globalization as a wide term is variously blamed or credited with a huge range of negative effects, e. g. it is often related to social problems ranging from famine to floods, from pollution to poverty, and from rural depopulation to urban overcrowding. On the contrary, globalization can be also considered as the source of success in development, for instance decrease in the poverty levels, economic prosperity and growth, better services, and enhanced awareness of human rights. Nevertheless, some sceptics of the benefits from globalization have also described the potential ways in transforming political, economic, and social relations within and between countries. This transformation may lead to the benefit of human welfare worldwide. T İsmail Şiriner, Bryan Christiansen, Julia Dobreva (Introduction: Political Economy of Globalization: Financialization & Crises) 10 Since the 80s, we can observe a significant increase in the role of the financial sector. This progress is often referred to as financialization. Financialization has many features and affects numerous different economic entities (Epstein 2015; Stockhammer 2013). One key component is the magnificent growth of the financial sector. Greenwood & Scharfstein (2013) point out a massive rise of the financial service sector in the USA during the last 30 years. The growth can be proved either by the financial sector’s share in GDP, the quantity of financial assets, or by employment and average wages in the financial sector. But this growth is not related to the USA; although to a softer scope, similar processes can also be observed in other OECD countries (Philippon & Reshel 2013). The financial rise has its base in the deregulation and liberalization of the financial (and economic) system. From this point of view, financialization is the cause rather than the effect. This is the major difference compared to the other approaches. Financialization can affect the macro-economy through four main channels. These are income distribution, investment in capital stock, household debt, and net exports and current account balances. As a correction, it is discussed that economic structures governed by financialization should be addressed on four dimensions: a) re-regulation and reduction of the financial sector, b) redistribution of income from top to bottom and from capital to labour, c) re-orientation of macroeconomic policies to stabilize domestic demand at non-inflationary full employment levels, and eventually d) re-creation of international monetary and economic policy coordination.

The fact that our global economy is broken may be widely accepted, but what precisely needs to be fixed has become the subject of enormous controversy. In 2008, the president of the United Nations General Assembly convened an international panel, chaired by Nobel Prize–;winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and including twenty leading international experts on the international monetary system, to address this crucial issue. The Stiglitz Report, released by the committee in late 2009, sees the recent financial crisis as the latest and most damaging of several concurrent crises—of food, water, energy, and sustainability—that are tightly interrelated. The analysis and recommendations in the report cover the gamut from short-term mitigation to deep structural changes, from crisis response to reform of the global, economic, and financial architecture. The report establishes a bold agenda for policy change, that is sure to be the gold standard for understanding and contending with the international economy for many years to come. The Stiglitz Report is essential reading for anyone concerned about a secure and prosperous world.