The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the global economic landscape, with the smallest and most vulnerable economies particularly hard hit. In the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the crisis has cost lives and livelihoods. It has impacted both the demand and supply sides of the economy, posing difficult policy tradeoffs. Risks to macroeconomic stability are now growing. Each country will likely exit the crisis with an even greater need for reform. Escaping the Governance Trap: Economic Reform in the Northern Triangle provides a framework for understanding the challenges of those three Central American nations, proposing that the lack of governing capacity in each country is a crucial problem. This book argues that economic reforms can help the Northern Triangle countries escape their governance traps and identifies priority areas of economic reform. Sectors covered include fiscal policy, monetary and exchange rate policy, financial access and deterrence, and structural reforms. It also highlights the role that stakeholders like the United States can play to help in these reform efforts, and how those outcomes affect the United States and the global community. All told, Escaping the Governance Trap provides an accessible, direct account of the Northern Triangle’s economic challenges and how to fix them.

The first comprehensive political science account of energy poverty, arguing that governments can improve energy access for their citizens through appropriate policy design. In today's industrialized world, almost everything we do consumes energy. While industrialized countries enjoy all the amenities of modern energy, more than a billion people in the developing world still lack energy access. Why is energy poverty persistent in some countries and not in others? Offering the first comprehensive political science account of energy poverty, Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap explores why governments have or have not been able to lead in providing modern energy to their least advantaged citizens. Focusing on access to modern cooking fuels and household electrification, the authors develop a new political-economic theory that introduces government interest, institutional capacity, and local accountability as key determinants of energy access. They draw on case studies from India, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America to offer the optimistic conclusion that governments can improve institutional capacity and local accountability through appropriate policy design. Energy poverty is a policy problem, the authors assert, and engaging with it as such offers new opportunities not only for ensuring equal energy access, but also for political, economic, and environmental development.

WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences." ― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate. Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials. Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms. Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

The world economy is caught in a money trap. Existing monetary arrangements meet the needs neither of the ageing societies of the West nor of younger emerging economies. This in-depth analysis explains how the world got into the grip of global finance - and how it can escape, with a growing demand for reform.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER | NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR. From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the conditions that could produce a catastrophic conflict between the United States and China—and how it might be prevented. China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, violence is the likeliest result. Over the past five hundred years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times; war broke out in twelve. At the time of publication, an unstoppable China approached an immovable America, and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promised to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case was looking grim—it still is. A trade conflict, cyberattack, Korean crisis, or accident at sea could easily spark a major war. In Destined for War, eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison masterfully blends history and current events to explain the timeless machinery of Thucydides’s Trap—and to explore the painful steps that might prevent disaster today. SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2018 LIONEL GELBER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: FINANCIAL TIMES * THE TIMES (LONDON)* AMAZON “Allison is one of the keenest observers of international affairs around.” — President Joe Biden “[A] must-read book in both Washington and Beijing.” — Boston Globe “[Full of] wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history . . . [A] fine book.”— New York Times Book Review

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

German bestseller about the best ways to protect oneself financially from the threats posed by government?s interference in the economy After the bursting of the real estate bubble, the U.S. pushed a monetary and fiscal policy that is, at best, blatantly wrong and, at worst, carries enormous financial risk. And because Washington knows this, America?s greatest weapon?its propaganda machine?has been called into service, diverting attention away from the fact that it was and continues to be government interference in the market economy that?s lead us to where we are now, namely at the end of one financial calamity and the beginning of yet another. A plea for the market economy, The Global Debt Trap: How to Escape the Danger and Build a Fortune details the cause of our current economic crisis and argues that political mismanagement endangers finances, health and, in extreme cases, democracy itself. ? Advocates the freedom of the individual and the capitalist economic system derived from it ? Foreword by Martin Weiss, bestselling author of The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide, by Wiley ? Other titles by Leuschel and Vogt: The Greenspan Dossier Every crisis offers opportunities for those who have prepared. The Global Debt Trap: How to Escape the Danger and Build a Fortune shows how to prepare for the aftermath of years of government interference in the market economy.