The role of public sector activity in capital accumulation and fraction synthesis assists with economic development, public policy, and sustainable growth. By strategically investing in areas like infrastructure, education, healthcare, and public transit, governments aim to facilitate human capital and increase business profits. As more governments and companies aim for improved economic activity, improved research is required to explore the pivotal role of cohesive frameworks for capital accumulation, while understanding the various fractions of capital. Public Sector Activity in Capital Accumulation and Synthesis of Capital Fractions explores the complexities surrounding privatization, offering a critical and historically informed perspective that challenges the limited view presented by mainstream economics. This book covers topics such as accumulation theories, capitalism, and public property, and is a useful resource for economists, academicians, researchers, scientists, business owners, and historians.

The role of public sector activity in capital accumulation and fraction synthesis assists with economic development, public policy, and sustainable growth. By strategically investing in areas like infrastructure, education, healthcare, and public transit, governments aim to facilitate human capital and increase business profits. As more governments and companies aim for improved economic activity, improved research is required to explore the pivotal role of cohesive frameworks for capital accumulation, while understanding the various fractions of capital. Public Sector Activity in Capital Accumulation and Synthesis of Capital Fractions explores the complexities surrounding privatization, offering a critical and historically informed perspective that challenges the limited view presented by mainstream economics. This book covers topics such as accumulation theories, capitalism, and public property, and is a useful resource for economists, academicians, researchers, scientists, business owners, and historians.

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

This book contains a number of papers presented at a workshop organised by the World Bank in 1997 on the theme of 'Social Capital: Integrating the Economist's and the Sociologist's Perspectives'. The concept of 'social capital' is considered through a number of theoretical and empirical studies which discuss its analytical foundations, as well as institutional and statistical analyses of the concept. It includes the classic 1987 article by the late James Coleman, 'Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital', which formed the basis for the development of social capital as an organising concept in the social sciences.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

The past decade has witnessed a decline in saving throughout the developed world—the United States has the dubious distinction of leading the way. The consequences can be serious. For individuals, their own economic security and that of their families is jeopardized. For society, inadequate rates of saving have been blamed for a variety of ills—decreasing the competitive abilities of American industry, slowing capital accumulation, increasing our trade deficit, and forcing the sale of capital stock to foreign investors at bargain prices. Restoring acceptable rates of saving in the United States poses a major challenge to those who formulate national economic policy, especially since economists and policymakers alike still understand little about what motivates people to save. In National Saving and Economic Performance, edited by B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven, that task is addressed by offering the results of new research, with recommendations for policies aimed to improve saving. Leading experts in diverse fields of economics debate the need for more accurate measurement of official saving data; examine how corporate decisions to retain or distribute earnings affect household-level consumption and saving; and investigate the effects of taxation on saving behavior, correlations between national saving and international investment over time, and the influence of economic growth on saving. Presenting the most comprehensive and up-to-date research on saving, this volume will benefit both academic and government economists.

What are the cutting edge debates in global political economy? This book presents an invaluable overview of all the major contemporary debates and approaches at the forefront of European and North American global political economy. The book covers the following topics: * the six central concepts of global political economy: state, firm, capital, power, labour and globalisation * theories at the frorefront of GPE: rational choice, neo-institutionalism, neo-Marxism, constructivism and postmodernity * recent developments in theoretical approaches such as game theory, modern rational and public choice theory, development theory, historical sociology * how global political economy is best understood in terms of three traditions of political economy: Marxism, rationalism and hermeneutics/institutionalism No other book provides such succinct summaries, by international experts in the field, of such topical and wide-ranging issues. This book represents an essential textbook, ideal for students and lecturers in International Political Economy and International Relations.