Violent conflict weakens governance, undermines economic development and threatens both national and regional stability. Trade shocks can also have stark impact on conflict. This book sets out to empirically test these linkages between trade shocks and conflict via cross-country and intra-country analysis.

"For the past three decades, economic growth, with strong contributions from the private sector, has been the main driver of poverty reduction around the world. The experience of China, Vietnam, and other high-growth countries dramatically demonstrates how integration with global markets and enhanced competitiveness can develop dynamic and resilient economies. These economies improve the earnings of the less well-off by creating more, better-paying jobs. They also converge with advanced economies by achieving productivity gains. Achieving the World Bank Group’s Twin Goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity requires unprecedented efforts by developing countries to unleash private sector-led growth and job creation. Governments and the private sector around the world are actively seeking more effective ways of boosting the volume and value of trade, enhancing the investment climate, improving competitiveness in sectors, and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship—all elements of successful growth strategies. The establishment of the Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice signals the World Bank Group’s commitment to systematically strengthen its engagement on these issues. "

We are Trading Away Our Future and most economists have been caught with their heads in the sand. They think that the trade deficits are the result of free market forces. But the trade deficits are caused by foreign government currency manipulations and the foolish subsidies that the US tax system gives to foreign savings. The American People know that something is wrong. They know that the Chinese and Japanese governments manipulate their currencies to steal American industries. They are intrigued by Governor Huckabee's endorsement of the Fair Tax, a proposal that would abolish the IRS, renew American investment, Strengthen the dollar, and help solve the trade deficits. If nothing is done, then resolutely nondemocratic China will replace the United States as the world's premier power. In this book the Richmans explain solutions that are within our grasp. It is not yet too late!

Explores the linkage between trade, peace and conflict in South America, Southern Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia. Highlights the significance of regional trade agreements for peace building between the countries.

This book explains the causes and consequences of the intersection of two transformative global forces - trade and conflict – since 1500. The nine historical case studies – interspersed over 500 years and spanning the globe - make a major historical contribution to the enduring debate about whether trade makes peace more likely.

Germán Jiménez-Montes sheds light on the role of foreigners in the Spanish empire. The book examines how a group of Dutch, Flemish and German merchants came to dominate the supply of timber in Seville.

Investigates the activity of the Maritime Administration in handling the ship purchasing and construction contracts of Aristoteles S. Onassis, and considers the civil and criminal litigation against Onassis by the Justice Department.

The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and transregional perspective on the Kashmir dispute. Spanning South and Central Asia, Kashmir has been at the center of geopolitical conflicts and rivalries among India, Pakistan and China for decades, with members of heterogeneous local communities negotiating the complexities of regional state formations, national power assertions and geopolitical competitions. Taken together, the chapters in this handbook examine diverse people’s struggles to establish processes of democratic accountability in relation to the colonial-era state consolidations, postcolonial military occupations, interstate wars, intrastate armed conflicts and cold war and post-cold war politics that have shaped and transformed social and political identities in the region. Contributors chart out varied and bold new directions by attending to local constellations of situated knowledges and practices through which people living in different parts of the disputed region make sense of the conditions and contingencies of their political lives. The handbook further initiates a dialogue on the ways in which state power and border regimes have shaped scholarship and undermined the pursuit of shared intellectual and political projects across physical and epistemological boundaries.

In the wake of million-dollar scandals brought about by Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and their like, Wall Street seems like the province of rampant individualism operating at the outermost extremes of self-interest and greed. But this, Mitchel Abolafia suggests, would be a case of missing the real culture of the Street for the characters who dominate the financial news. Making Markets, an ethnography of Wall Street culture, offers a more complex picture of how the market and its denizens work. Not merely masses of individuals striving independently, markets appear here as socially constructed institutions in which the behavior of traders is suspended in a web of customs, norms, and structures of control. Within these structures we see the actions that led to the Drexel Burnham and Salomon Brothers debacles not as bizarre aberrations, but as mere exaggerations of behavior accepted on the Street. Abolafia looks at three subcultures that coexist in the world of Wall Street: the stock, bond, and futures markets. Through interviews, anecdotes, and the author’s skillful analysis, we see how traders and New York Stock Exchange “specialists” negotiate the perpetual tension between short-term self-interest and long-term self-restraint that marks their respective communities—and how the temptation toward excess spurs market activity. We also see the complex relationships among those market communities—why, for instance, NYSE specialists resent the freedoms permitted over-the-counter bond traders and futures traders. Making Markets shows us that what propels Wall Street is not a fundamental human drive or instinct, but strategies enacted in the context of social relationships, cultural idioms, and institutions—a cycle that moves between phases of unbridled self-interest and collective self-restraint.