This book analyzes the competitive forces which dominate this major sector, and traces how the nature of competition has evolved during the last two hundred years. Through an analysis of key factors, including demand, related and supporting industries, firm strategy, structure and national rivalry, chance and government policy, the author explains how and why the locus of competitive advantage in textiles and apparel has moved from country to country, particularly in the period since 1945.

This book presents the first thorough economic analysis of current agricultural biotechnology regulation. The contributors, most of whom are agricultural economists working either in universities or NGOs, address issues such as commercial pesticides, the costs of approving new products, liability, benefits, consumer acceptance, regulation and its impacts, transgenic crops, social welfare implications, and biosafety.

This book is the first to reinterpret John R. Commons's Institutional Economics with a newly discovered manuscript written in 1927 in order to find its contemporary meanings in economic theories. Commons aimed to establish institutional economics to understand capitalism in the USA of that time, when people’s collective actions were gaining importance with the emergence of powerful labor unions, oligopolistic corporations, and national judicial systems. Setting three types of transactions as his central concepts for analysis, Commons described dynamics of capitalism as multiple and cumulative causal processes of transactions, through which the final goal should be achievements of a "reasonable value". He also believed that the reasonable value could be achieved by the evolution of institutions. There is no doubt that Commons's ideas proposed in Institutional Economics such as transactions and collective actions greatly inspired later economists; however, few studies have contributed to comprehensive understanding of the origin of his masterpiece. To what extent and in what sense had Commons rejected or accepted previous classical economics or marginalism for constituting his original institutional economics? What are the meanings and limitations that reasonable value may have for contemporary political economy? Institutional Economics as attempts to resolve deep economic problems at that time. Commons's efforts create important implications for us, those who are living in an era after the global financial crisis and confronting various challenges to political economy.

Economic development in the long run is seen as a process of structural change that is affected by economic growth. Malaysia is one of the middle-income economies that are going through rapid structural change. Since the mid 1980s it has changed to an industrially based economy with large-scale export of electrical and electronic components. However, thirty years after Malaysia's re-distributive policies have been exercised, regional inequality still exists. This book examines the nature and impact of regional policies in relation to the patterns of demographic and economic structural change and in relation to growth, distribution and income disparities across regions in Peninsular Malaysia. The book also explores the degree to which differences in regional manufacturing distribution and concentration have contributed to regional inequality. It concludes with a number of recommendations for regional policies that will reduce this inequality.