The quick recovery of Asian economies from recent recessions in comparison to the struggling American and European economies can be attributed in part to the positive aggregate-demand externalities of their self-employment sectors. This book presents a behavioural analysis of this effect, with a detailed focus on producer households.

Robert Lucas is one of the outstanding monetary theorists of the past hundred years. Along with Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, James Tobin, and Milton Friedman (his teacher), Lucas revolutionized our understanding of how money interacts with the real economy of production, consumption, and exchange. Lucas’s contributions are both methodological and substantive. Methodologically, he developed dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models to analyze economic decision-makers operating through time in a complex, probabilistic environment. Substantively, he incorporated the quantity theory of money into these models and derived its implications for money growth, inflation, and interest rates in the long run. He also showed the different effects of anticipated and unanticipated changes in the stock of money on economic fluctuations, and helped to demonstrate that there was not a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation (the Phillips curve) that policy-makers could exploit. The twenty-one papers collected in this volume fall primarily into three categories: core monetary theory and public finance, asset pricing, and the real effects of monetary instability. Published between 1972 and 2007, they will inspire students and researchers who want to study the work of a master of economic modeling and to advance economics as a pure and applied science.

Legislation, Technology and Practice of Mine Land Reclamation contains the proceedings of the Beijing International Symposium on Land Reclamation and Ecological Restoration (LRER 2014, Beijing, China, 16-19 October 2014).The contributions cover a wide range of topics:- Monitoring, prediction and assessment of environmental damage in mining areas- S

The increasing division and specialization of labor between the market and the nonmarket sector is a central stylized fact of long-run economic development. Over time, a large share of activities which had formerly been carried out by the private household itself has become replaced by market alternatives, raising at the same time the demand for consumer goods. The neoclassical economic framework of household production theory relates the increasing demand for household technology to rising wages and opportunity costs of time: the higher the wage rate, the more costly it is to spend time in unpaid housework activities. Consumer products are thus purchased to make household production processes more efficient and to substitute capital goods for the household’s time (time substitution hypothesis). Although this hypothesis sounds plausible at first sight, it cannot capture the essential phenomena underlying the complex process of the mechanization of the home over the past 200 years. Its major weakness lies in the treatment of consumer preferences, whose explanatory potential is explicitly factored out. Using the washing of clothes as a microcosm of household economics, this book examines long-term changes in cleanliness consumption patterns from the perspective of an evolutionary economic, psychologically informed consumer theory. Woersdorfer shows how the historical evolution of cleanliness consumption over the past 200 years is the result of the interplay of supply and demand side factors, namely, technical change in washing technology on one side and motivational driving forces and consumer learning capabilities on the other. Hence, not changing relative prices but innate consumer needs and consumer learning processes, leading to a growing understanding of how to satisfy those needs, are the essential driving forces behind the rising technological endowment of the home and the corresponding demand for household appliances. The Evolution of Household Technology and Consumer Behavior, 1800–2000 will be of interest to researchers in the field of evolutionary economics, history of technology, economic history, innovation economics and sociology.

Published in 1998. Chinese farm households have been at the centre of the rural reform process since the introduction of the Household Responsibility System in the late 1970’s. There can be little doubt that, for decades to come, they will continue to be a focus of interest both in academic and political circles. This is particularly true in relation to their role of grain sector, when we consider the prominent position of grain in China’s political economy. There is also intense global interest in the impact of the reform process on the country’s future grain self-sufficiency and trade. This book is ambitious in both its scope and remit. Its primary focus is the behaviour of the marketable surplus element of farm households’ grain supply since the beginning of the reform period. The early chapters provide very valuable insights into the nature of the rural reform process; it then looks at the impact of the reforms on the structure of rural economy in general and farm households in particular. This part of the book is rich in statistics on the reform period. In the analytical section the emphasis is on the difficult area of household modelling, covering both theoretical and empirical aspects. Despite the data limitations, which the authors acknowledge, these chapters provide very valuable analyses of the grain price changes. In particular, their use of models which capture the interdependencies between grain marketable surplus supply is a genuine contribution. This book should be read by anyone with an interest in the rural reform process in China and will be of particular relevance to students, scholars and the policy community.

Issues in Economics is structured around major policy issues and is divided into three parts: "Introduction to Issues in Economics," "Microeconomic Issues," and "Macroeconomic Issues." The first three chapters are basic introductions to the subject matter of economics with emphasis on theory, institutions, and policy. Theory and institutions becomes the framework for policy analysis. The first three chapters of the second section deal with the theory of the household, the theory of the firm and the theory of markets. The remainder of the second section deals with specific issues, such as government regulation; agricultural policy; healthcare policy; and corporate accountability. In "Macroeconomic Issues," the first chapter's focus is "Measuring Economic Activity." This chapter develops the accounting framework on which macroeconomic theory is based. The second chapter is "Aggregate Supply and Demand." It develops these concepts and the concept of normal output around which short-run output fluctuates with shifts in supply and demand. The remainder of Part III features specific policy issues, such as business cycles; stabilization policy; the role of the Federal Reserve System, the role of finance in the economy; and international policy issues. This textbook is appropriate for a freshman/sophomore level one semester introduction to economics course or issues in economics course; it can also be used to supplement a standard two semester economics textbook.

The Farm Labor Problem: A Global Perspective explores the unique character of agricultural labor markets and the implications for food production, farm worker welfare and advocacy, and immigration policy. Agricultural labor markets differ from other labor markets in fundamental ways related to seasonality and uncertainty, and they evolve differently than other labor markets as economies develop. We weave economic analysis with the history of agricultural labor markets using data and real-world events. The farm labor history of California and the United States is particularly rich, so it plays a central role in the book, but the book has a global perspective ensuring its relevance to Europe and high-income Asian countries. The chapters in this book provide readers with the basics for understanding how farm labor markets work (labor in agricultural household models, farm labor supply and demand, spatial market equilibria); farm labor and immigration policy; farm labor organizing; farm employment and rural poverty; unionization and the United Farm Workers movement; the Fair Food Program as a new approach to collective bargaining; the declining immigrant farm labor supply; and what economic development in relatively low-income countries portends for the future of agriculture in the United States and other high-income countries. The book concludes with a chapter called "Robots in the Fields," which extrapolates current trends to a perhaps not-so-distant future. The Farm Labor Problem serves as both a guide to policy makers, farmworker advocates and international development organizations and as a textbook for students of agricultural economics and economics. - Describes the unique character of agricultural labor markets providing consequential insights - Contextualizes the economics of agricultural labor with a global perspective - Examines the history of farm labor, immigration, policy and collective bargaining with a view to the future

First reference on food consumption and policy.