Bringing together the work of economists and sociologists, this collection analyses how social institutions contribute to an understanding of development.

Bringing together the work of economists and sociologists in research programmes in a number of European institutions concerned with development, this collection analyses how social institutions contribute to an understanding of development. It shows how labour markets, labour relations and employment patterns respond to institutional forces, and thereby shape development paths and determine how different groups benefit from economic growth.

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

This book picks up where Karl Polanyi's study of economic and political change left off. Building upon Polanyi's conception of the double movement, Blyth analyzes the two periods of deep seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century: the 1930s and the 1970s. Blyth views both sets of changes as part of the same dynamic. In the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by 'embedding liberalism.' In the 1970s, those who benefited least from such 'embedding' institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible. Great Transformations rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests, achieving profound new insights on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place.

This book reflects on current thinking in development economics and on what may happen over the next two decades. As well as studying development economics in retrospect, the volume explores the current debates and challenges and looks forward at the problems that affect the global capacity to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Comprising seven edited pieces of detailed empirical work drawn from recent research, this title reveals the dynamics behind the movements of poor people in South and South East Asia and Africa.

This book provides an overview of human resources development (HRD) in South Africa. It focuses on three institutional subsystems within the larger South African social system that play an important role in developing human resources, namely: * the youth labour market * the world if work with its associated enterprise training system * the national system of science and innovation The analysis shows how, ion the current South African context, contradiction and incoherence characterise the interaction between institutions in each of these three subsystems. The book also argues that the skills problem is not located only at the high-skills end but also in intermediate- and low-skill needs. Each of these skill bands are experiencing severe HRD problems which require urgent resolution. The author argues that solutions to these problems lie in cross-sect oral governmental policy co-ordination and implementation and that in the absence of such" joined-up" action, HRD problems will continue to fall between the discrete mandates of separate government departments.