What requirements must Turkey the largest country among the candidate and accession countries meet to join the European Union? What progress has been made toward meeting them? This timely volume analyzes the economic challenges confronting Turkey in its quest to accede to the European Union (EU). It focuses on the extent to which Turkey is ready to join the Single Market, comply with the EU's body of economic regulations and directives, the 'Acquis Communautaire', and meet the Maastricht criteria for fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies. This book also provides an assessment of Turkey's national program to meet the accession requirements. It describes briefly what Turkey needs to achieve on the economic policy front to satisfy the conditions for accession, the progress to date, and the likely consequences of implementing the full body of EU requirements. The book is divided into four parts: An analysis of the macroeconomic policies for EU accession An analysis of the effects of integration on key sectors: agriculture; manufacturing; services industries, including banking, telecommunications, transportation, and natural gas; and network industries An exploration of key economic policy challenges, including labor market regulation, foreign direct investment challenges, and the costs and benefits of meeting the EU environmental 'Acquis' The quantification of the impact of EU accession and consideration of the welfare effects of integration While the focus is on the specific situation of Turkey, the subject will be of value to all researchers with an interest in the challenges of deeper integration through regional agreements.

In May and June of 1968 a dramatic wave of strikes paralyzed France, making industrial relations reform a key item on the government agenda. French trade unions seemed due for a golden age of growth and importance. Today, however, trade unions are weaker in France than in any other advanced capitalist country. How did such exceptional militancy give way to equally remarkable quiescence? To answer this question, Chris Howell examines the reform projects of successive French governments toward trade unions and industrial relations during the postwar era, focusing in particular on the efforts of post-1968 conservative and socialist governments. Howell explains the genesis and fate of these reform efforts by analyzing constraints imposed on the French state by changing economic circumstances and by the organizational weakness of labor. His approach, which links economic, political, and institutional analysis, is broadly that of Regulation Theory. His explicitly comparative goal is to develop a framework for understanding the challenges facing labor movements throughout the advanced capitalist world in light of the exhaustion of the postwar pattern of economic growth, the weakening of the nation-state as an economic actor, and accelerating economic integration, particularly in Europe.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction The definitive biography of the transformational Russian leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev. "Essential reading for the twenty-first [century]." —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him "difficult to understand." Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced? Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market-oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book arrives in timely fashion as a sequel to his pathbreaking Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, published by PIIE in 2014. This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market-oriented reforms.

This book offers an extensive survey and synthesis of the economic literature on trade unions and collective bargaining and their impact on micro-and macro-economic outcomes. The authors demonstrate the effects of collective bargaining in different country settings and time periods. A comprehensive reference, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of labor policy as well as to policy makers and anyone with an interest in the economic consequences of unionism.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, British trade unions have experienced a dramatic retreat, marked by rapidly falling membership and declining industrial power. The authors examine the regional dimensions of this retreat of organised labour, paying particular attention to: The resilience of the unions' historical heartland areas. The impact of economic restructuring on local union traditions. The shrinking landscape of industrial militancy. The geographical decentralization of the new industrial relations. The link between these factors and the more general debate on regional development and regional labour markets. An important synthesis of economic geography and industrial relations work, this book marks a major contribution towards the newly emerging field of labour geography