The economic and social development that Bangladesh has achieved in the past two decades has made Bangladesh a development paradox. This book tries to explain this paradox through a political economy lens. The book explains the linkages between the state, changing society and emerging private sector, and examines whether the social transformation taking place in Bangladesh has the potential to live up to the expectations of a middle- income country. The early part of the book unravels the myriad relations between the state, society and market to project the aspirations of a newly independent nation. It analyzes how political turmoil, militarization of politics, politicization of institutions, reforms initiatives, industrial and social development policies, and the power nexus influenced the nature of the political economy of Bangladesh. The book goes on to examine how domestic appetite for capital and raw materials, the digital revolution, and the capacity of the local market to absorb expanded economic activities have created an environment that catalyzes innovation and entrepreneurship. The book also explains how the country has attempted to transform from an agrarian to a manufacturing- based economy, with rapid growth in the ready- made garment industry, pisciculture, pharmaceuticals and the ICT sector. Bangladesh’s journey from an emerging economy towards a developed country would interest those researching on development economics and those in policy making.

This landmark textbook introduces students to the principles of regional science and focuses on the key methods used in regional analysis, including regional and interregional input-output analysis, econometrics (regional and spatial), programming and industrial and urban complex analysis, gravity and spatial interaction models, SAM and social accounting (welfare) analysis and applied general interregional equilibrium models. The coherent development of the materials contained in the set of chapters provides students with a comprehensive background and understanding of how to investigate key regional problems. For the research scholar, this publication constitutes an up-to-date source book of the basic elements of each major regional science technique. More significant, it points to new directions for future research and ways interregional and regional analytic approaches can be fused to realise much more probing attacks on regional and spatial problems - a contribution far beyond what is available in the literature.

In this concise, clear introduction, the authors describe the theory of spatial diffusion, its method of measurement and many of its applications. The seminal work of Torsten Hagerstrand, who introduced the original spatial model of diffusion, is outlined. The authors then summarise the developments that have been made to Hagerstrand's formulation, and make suggestions for future research.

Within both the social and environmental sciences, much of the data collected is within a spatial context and requires statistical analysis for interpretation. The purpose of this book is to describe current methods for the analysis of spatial data. Methods described include data description, map interpolation, and exploratory and explanatory analyses. The book also examines spatial referencing, and methods for detecting problems, assessing their seriousness and taking appropriate action are discussed. This is an important text for any discipline requiring a broad overview of current theoretical and applied work for the analysis of spatial data sets. It will be of particular use to research workers and final year undergraduates in the fields of geography, environmental sciences and social sciences.

The recent years have been characterized by stormy social protests throughout the world. These protests have some commonalities, but at the same time, their sociopolitical, psychological, and economic contexts differ essentially. An important class of such protests is known as color revolutions. The analysis of these events in social and political literature is characterized by huge diversity of opinions. We remark that the sociopolitical perturbations under consideration are characterized by the cascade dynamics leading to the exponential amplification of coherent social actions. In quantum physics, such exponential and coherent amplification is the basic feature of laser’s functioning. (“Laser” is acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). In this book we explore the theory of laser to model aforementioned waves of social protests, from color revolutions to Brexit and Trump’s election. We call such social processes Stimulated Amplification of Social Actions (SASA), but to keep closer to the analogy with physics we merely operate with the term “social laser.”