Every day, in every sector of our economy, a business shuts down while another starts up, jobs are created while others are cut, and workers are hired while others are laid off. This constant flux, or turbulence, is a defining characteristic of our free market system, yet it mostly inspires angst about unemployment, loss of earnings, and the overall competitiveness of corporations. But is this endless cycle of fluctuation really so bad for America? Might something positive be going on in the economy as a result of it? In this penetrating work, three esteemed economists seek to answer these questions by exploring the real impact of volatility on American workers and businesses alike. According to the authors, while any number of events--shifts in consumer demand, changes in technology, mergers and acquisitions, or increased competition--can contribute to economic turbulence, our economy as a whole is, by and large, stronger for it, because these processes of creation and destruction make it more flexible and adaptable. The authors also acknowledge and document the adverse consequences of this turbulence on different groups of workers and firms and discuss the resulting policy challenges. Basing their argument on an up-close look into the dealings and practices of five key industries—financial services, retail food services, trucking, semiconductors, and software—the authors demonstrate the positive effects of turbulence on career paths, employee earnings, and firm performance. The first substantial attempt to disentangle and make clear the complexities of this phenomenon in the United States, Economic Turbulence will be viewed as a major achievement and the centerpiece of any discussion on the subject for years to come.

This book studies economic development in two of the world's fastest growing developing countries, Tanzania and Vietnam, by examining the interplay between market liberalization, institutions, and the distribution of power in society.

Proposing international trade as a path for achieving the SDGs, this curated collection envisions a more equitable and sustainable world, one where the benefits of international trade are fairly distributed, where economic crises are met with resilience and innovation and where the SDGs are not just aspirations but lived realities.

This book incorporates a selection of eight revised papers presented at the Conference on "Managing Economic Crisis in Southeast Asia", organized jointly by the Saw Centre for Financial Studies, NUS Business School and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, in January 2010. The chapters deal with the management of the 2008-09 economic crisis in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the region as a whole. They represent an analysis of the impact of the economic crisis and the stimulus packages that were swiftly put in place by the governments to mitigate the economic recession and to pave the way for a quick recovery. The success of the monetary and fiscal policy measures in engendering a strong economic recovery in these countries is also discussed in considerable depth. The book, with contributions from experts on the topics covered, will be extremely valuable to businessmen, analysts, academics, students, policy-makers and the general public interested in seeking a greater understanding of the sub-prime crisis that led to the global economic recession.

One striking weaknesses of our financial architecture, which helped bring on and perhaps deepen the Panic of 2008, is an inadequate appreciation of the past. Information about how the system functioned and the reliability of organizations and institutional controls were drawn from a relatively narrow group of recent examples. History and Financial Crisis: Lessons from the 20th Century is an attempt to broaden the range of historical sources used by policy makers to understand and treat financial crises. Many recent discussions of the 2008 panic and the economic turmoil have found the situation to either be unprecedented or greatly similar to that of 1931. However, the book's wide range of contributors suggest that the economic crisis of 2008 cannot be categorised in this way. This book was originally published as a special issue of Business History.

This book provides a critique of the neoclassical explanations of the 2008 financial collapse, of the ensuing long recession and of the neoliberal austerity responses to it. The study argues that while the prevailing views of deregulation and financialization as instrumental culprits in the explosion and implosion of the financial bubble are not false, they fail to point out that financialization is essentially an indication of an advanced stage of capitalist development. These standard explanations tend to ignore the systemic dynamics of the accumulation of finance capital, the inherent limits to that accumulation, production and division of economic surplus, class relations, and the balance of social forces that mold economic policy. Instead of simply blaming the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players, as neoliberals do, or lax public supervision, as Keynesians do, this book focuses on the core dynamics of capitalist development that not only created the financial bubble, but also fostered the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players and subverted public policy. Due to its interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in economics, finance, politics and sociology.

The presence of turbulence in multiple areas of our society--food, fuel, and finances-being but three critical areas presently being impacted means that long-held assumptions are no longer true, that the past is not prologue, and that the future is not clear. And enter into this unstable present the discipline of evaluation-a discipline formed and shaped in the past fifty years of stability, little turbulence, and strong assumptions that everything will go according to plan. If things do not go well, it is because of either a poor theory of change on how to bring about positive outcomes, or weak efforts at implementation. It is not because of the stormy present upsetting our quiet past. As it is, conventional evaluation behavior and beliefs are ill suited for these times. The transformational nature of the 'Arab Spring' is just one arena in which it is clear that a business as usual approach to evaluation is entirely inappropriate. The papers in this volume are from the 2011 Global Assembly of the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS). Nearly 350 development evaluators from eighty-five countries came together in Amman, Jordan to discuss and analyze the consequences of turbulence on evaluation. The intent of these papers is to systematically assess what changes have come during this time of turbulence and how these changes are impacting the craft of development evaluation. To be clear: this book is not about how to assess the impacts of crises on development and on people's lives. It is about the meaning of a changed world and changed assumptions on the concepts and methods used in evaluation.