Written by a team of international experts, drawn from various traditions of political theology, this outstanding resource brings together 35 newly-commissioned essays in the field. Demonstrates that Christian theology is inherently political and shows how theology impacts on present-day political issues. Considers the interface of theology with political ideologies, including the contribution of theology to feminist, ecological, black and pacifist movements. Assesses the contribution of the major political theologians and theological movements. Explores the political aspects of Christian sources such as scripture and liturgy.

This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more volatile than those of manufactured products, even though most of the existing evidence does not actually attempt to measure the volatility of prices of individual goods or commodities. Rather the literature tends to focus on trends in the evolution and volatility of ratios of price indexes composed of multiple commodities and products. This approach can be misleading. Indeed, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that on average prices of individual primary commodities may be less volatile than those of individual manufactured goods.

Managing Innovation is a three-part series covering contemporary technology and innovation management research areas. Each volume comprises key articles from both the International Journal of Innovation Management and the International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, published by World Scientific, and provides an international, disciplinary approach across its broad coverage of topics.Relevant for both academics and practitioners, this volume answers how organisations can develop innovative approaches from a perspective that encompasses technological advances, changes in the market and individual entrepreneurs.

This paper provides estimates of output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, as well as for spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar’s worth of economic activity. Although not all green and non-ecofriendly expenditures in the dataset are strictly comparable due to data limitations, estimated multipliers associated with spending on renewable and fossil fuel energy investment are comparable, and the former (1.1-1.5) are larger than the latter (0.5-0.6) with over 90 percent probability. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses arguing that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss are not at odds with continuing economic advances.

This book gathers the proceedings of the 7th International Conference, with the theme “Culture and Tourism in a Smart, Globalized and Sustainable World,” held on Hydra Island, Greece, on June 17–19, 2020, published with the support of the International Association of Cultural and Digital Tourism. Highlighting the contributions made by numerous writers to the advancement of tourism research, this book presents a critical academic discourse on sustainable practices in the smart tourism context, improving readers’ understanding of, and stimulating future debates in, this critical area. In addition to the knowledge economy and the concept of smart destinations, the book addresses new modes of tourism management and development, as well as emerging technologies, including location-based services, the Internet of things, smart cities, mobile services, gamification, digital collections and the virtual visitor, social media, social networking, and augmented reality.

This paper develops a model based on Schumpeter's process of creative destruction. It departs from existing models of endogenous growth in emphasizing obsolescence of old technologies induced by the accumulation of knowledge and the resulting process or industrial innovations. This has both positive and normative implications for growth. In positive terms, the prospect of a high level of research in the future can deter research today by threatening the fruits of that research with rapid obsolescence. In normative terms, obsolescence creates a negative externality from innovations, and hence a tendency for laissez-faire economies to generate too many innovations, i.e too much growth. This "business-stealing" effect is partly compensated by the fact that innovations tend to be too small under laissez-faire. The model possesses a unique balanced growth equilibrium in which the log of GNP follows a random walk with drift. The size of the drift is the average growth rate of the economy and it is endogenous to the model ; in particular it depends on the size and likelihood of innovations resulting from research and also on the degree of market power available to an innovator.

IMF lending practices respond to economic conditions but are also sensitive to political-economy variables. Specifically, the sizes and frequencies of loans are influenced by a country's presence at the Fund, as measured by the country's share of quotas and professional staff. IMF lending is also sensitive to a country's political and economic proximity to some major shareholding countries of the IMF -- the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We measured political proximity by voting patterns in the United Nations and economic proximity by bilateral trading volumes. These results are of considerable interest for their own sake but also provide instrumental variables for estimating the effects of IMF lending on economic performance. Instrumental estimates indicate that the size of IMF lending is insignificantly related to economic growth in the contemporaneous five-year period but has a significantly negative effect in the subsequent five years.