International Economics

Die Fronten sind verhärtet: hier die Anhänger des Degrowth, die negative Wachstumsraten für unverzichtbar halten - dort die Mehrheit der Wachstumsgläubigen, die noch immer von zweistelligen Zuwächsen träumt. Radikale Rhetorik und Konzepte scheinen mehr denn je nötig zu sein, um sich Gehör zu verschaffen. Doch gibt es wirklich keine Lösungen dazwischen? Für Jorgen Randers und Graeme Maxton ist es höchste Zeit, Realitäten anzuerkennen und Denkblockaden zu überwinden.

In September 2014, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba raised $25 billion in the world’s biggest-ever initial public offering. Since then, millions of investors and managers worldwide have pondered a fundamental question: What’s really going on with the new wave of China’s disruptors? Alibaba wasn’t an outlier - it’s one of a rising tide of thriving Chinese companies, mostly but not exclusively in the technology sector. Now Edward Tse reveals how China got to this point, and what the country’s rise means for the United States and the rest of the world.

We all know the bad news. The heady promise of the Arab Spring has given way to repression, civil war, and an epic refugee crisis. Economic growth is sputtering. Income inequality is rising around the world. And the threat of ISIS and other extremist groups keeps spreading. We are living in an age of unprecedented, irreversible decline - or so we're constantly being told. Jonathan Tepperman's The Fix presents a very different picture.

If the 20th century was the American century, then the 21st century belongs to China. Now the one and only Jim Rogers shows how any investor can get in on the ground floor of "the greatest economic boom since England's Industrial Revolution". In this indispensable new book, Rogers, one of the world's most successful investors, brings his unerring investment acumen to bear on this huge and unruly land now being opened to the world and exploding in potential.

As individuals, companies, and countries struggle to recover from the economic crisis, many are narrowly focused on forecasts for the next week, month, or quarter. Yet they should be asking what the global economy will look like in the years to come—where will the long-term risks and opportunities arise? These are the questions that Daniel Altman confronts in his provocative and indispensable book.

Looking at how Britain pays its way in the world today. Like Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain or Michael Palin’s Himalaya, the book will have a coherence and life beyond the television series, looking at some issues in greater depth, and telling additional stories to illustrate some of the ideas. This book is about the things that Britain produces in order to pay its way in the world, from physical goods that we can see and feel, to intangible services that are much harder to quantify.

Hoy en día, las revoluciones tecnológicas y digitales transforman de manera drástica y abrupta casi todas las facetas de nuestra vida, y cambian la forma de hacer las cosas, de producir y, también, de consumir. Es la llamada disrupción. Pero, ¿qué es realmente la disrupción? Para entenderlo haz lo siguiente: coge tu smartphone y piensa en todas las heroicidades que puedes hacer con él, en cuáles podrías llegar a hacer si lo dominaras por completo, y quiénes hacían todo eso hace no mucho y de qué manera.

Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today's financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered.

La crisi globale pone sfide inedite all'Europa e richiede un convinto rilancio del processo di integrazione. Il volume guarda all'economia europea da una duplice prospettiva: la prima parte ripercorre le principali tappe dell'integrazione e delinea le caratteristiche e il funzionamento del modello economico e sociale europeo; la seconda ricostruisce l'intreccio dei fattori che hanno portato alla grave crisi internazionale e ne valuta l'impatto sul futuro dell'integrazione.

This book is a critical assessment of five years of the brand of economics Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed, often referred to as "Modinomics". Brought into power with the biggest political mandate in almost three decades, did the NDA government succeed in gainfully transforming India's economic trajectory or did it squander a once-in-a-generation opportunity? The book conjectures it is the latter, and analyses why the Modi government's stewardship of the economy is a "great disappointment".

What would be the "right" price for your loved one - and can you avoid putting others at risk by paying it? What prevents criminals from maltreating hostages? How do you (safely) pay a ransom? Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business uncovers how a group of insurers at Lloyd's of London have solved these thorny problems for their customers. Based on interviews with industry insiders (from both sides), as well as hostage stakeholders, it uncovers an intricate and powerful private governance system ordering transactions between the legal and the criminal economies.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

As a $3-trillion economy, India is on her way to becoming an economic superpower. Between 1991 and 2011, the period of our best growth, there was also a substantial decline in the number of people below the poverty line. Since 2011, however, there has been a marked retreat in the high growth performance of the previous two decades. What happened to the promise? Where have we faltered? How do we change course? As professional economists as well as former civil servants, Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah have spent most of their lives thinking about and working on these questions.

A spirited and incisive survey of economic geography, A World Made for Money begins with the author stopped at a red light in Norman, Oklahoma. Observing the landscape of drugstores and banks, and for that matter the stoplight and roads themselves, Bret Wallach observes, "Everything I see has been built to make money" or, at the very least, to facilitate making money. This, he argues, is a global phenomenon that nonetheless has occurred only within the past hundred years or so.

America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era. Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral part of American capitalism.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

When Corporations Rule the World explains how economic globalization has concentrated the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It documents the devastating human and environmental consequences of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their own narrow ends.

In this David-and-Goliath story about Ireland’s role as prime real estate for the world’s largest tech multinationals, and the considerable impact it has had on us as individuals, investigative journalist Aoife Barry does a deep-dive into the butterfly effect the presence of tech companies has had on the nation and exposes the real-life consequences it has had on us as individuals.

Who can foretell India's future? Mr. Joshi is a fortune teller in a slum in south Delhi who uses a soothsaying green parrot to make predictions. When Adam Roberts visited him in 2012, Joshi's parrot declared that India was destined to become the most powerful nation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Through vivid storytelling and insight, Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation examines the problems and promises of fast-growing India to reveal how it might reach its full potential and become, as Mr. Joshi's parrot predicted, a truly powerful nation.

Diciamoci la verità, l'italiano medio si è accorto che i cinesi potrebbero diventare padroni a casa nostra quando i due blasoni del calcio milanese e nazionale sono passati in mani cinesi. Ma pochi sanno, tranne gli addetti ai lavori, chi sia Zhang Jindong, il nuovo proprietario dell'Inter, o Yonghong Li, il magnate che ha preso il posto di Berlusconi alla guida del Milan. Sempre in pochi hanno capito se l'acquisto della Pirelli sia un vantaggio per noi o per il colosso statale ChemChina.