Economy & Finance

This book develops an original theory of decision-making based on the concept of plausibility. The author advocates plausible reasoning as a general philosophical method and demonstrates how it can be applied to problems in argumentation theory, scientific theory choice, risk management, ethics, law, economics, and epistemology.

This book analyses the key livelihood and governance challenges that the urban poor experience while navigating public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It will be of interest to scholars in the field of Sociology, Development Studies, Planning, Geography and Anthropology.

This book demonstrates how MexicöChina relations embodied a complex process of knowledge formation, confronting their socially constructed conceptions of time, space and otherness. Cultural Encounters in a Global Age will appeal to scholars of IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and cultural influences on foreign policy.

This book explores the history of women's reproductive health in Ghana, arguing that between the 1920s and 1980s, it was largely driven by discourses of development and population control. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the history of public health, development and Africa.

Agriculture plays an essential role in the growth of developing economies as agricultural production is key to food security and is closely intertwined with the livelihoods of many. This book explores the lives of smallholder agricultural farmers in India and the dire challenges that agricultural households face in India.

This book examines partnerships between commercial banks and microfinance institutions (MFIs). It demonstrates that when set up properly, these partnerships have the potential to develop and enhance the financial inclusion agenda, and further support sustainable development.

Coming together from across several disciplines, the contributors to this book reflect on the considerable problem of inequality in Zambia, comparing it with other countries both in the region and more broadly. It investigates key issues around poverty, healthcare, income, law, disability, and power inequalities.

Agriculture plays an essential role in the growth of developing economies as agricultural production is key to food security and is closely intertwined with the livelihoods of many. This book explores the lives of smallholder agricultural farmers in India and the dire challenges that agricultural households face in India.

This book offers comprehensive analysis for individual cases of poverty alleviation to facilitate respective in-depth key learnings and an overview of poverty alleviation strategies carried out in China. Best practices were selected from representative cases in China to demonstrate the development of different approaches in the poverty alleviation journey with collective stakeholders' efforts - Government, Industry, Academia, and Research, plus the local stakeholders engaged in the rural development activities. Overseas cases are referenced to show the outcome of similar strategies as comparison with the consideration of regional specific conditions.Through better understanding of the focal issues, areas and organizations - and their respective key challenges and solutions - there is the compilation for each case its analysis, comparative studies and SDG relevance. These aim at engaging the readers from institutes, governments, corporates, or social enterprises, to think about how to adopt the related SDG strategies. They also serve as the initiatives to facilitate potential cross-region and cross-disciplinary collaboration.The book acts as the guide on how:- Poverty Reduction is one of the key goals in SDGs - while solving this key challenge, multiple goals could be planned and tackled together to make an effective solution.- Multi-disciplinary strategies are put in place, demonstrated via success stories and best practices.  Key driving factors are identified with the consideration of the driving organization nature.- A system could be developed to engage different stakeholders in the society for industry development - and to avoid returning to poverty in the long term.- Future international cooperation could be facilitated to create a poverty alleviation framework applicable across different regions.

This open access book analyzes the achievements and challenges of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from the macro and industrial, real and financial, domestic and international perspectives, and explores the opportunities for future development and related public policy issues. It is a new research achievement of CICC Research and CICC Global Institute on major issues in China's new development stage.The year 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over the past decade, BRI has established more than 3,000 cooperation projects, galvanized nearly 1 trillion U.S. dollars of investment, created more than 420,000 jobs, and lifted nearly 40 million people out of poverty. BRI has made remarkable achievements in promoting connectivity and cooperative development between China and participating countries, and has been welcomed by the international community both as a public good and a cooperation platform.Compared with ten years ago, the global environment has undergone profound changes. COVID-19 epidemic has brought great impacts to the world, and the post-epidemic economic recovery is uneven, with some long-term scarring effects still emerging. New changes and constraints, such as geopolitical events, industry chain adjustment, and green transition, have also exerted far-reaching influences on the economic fundamentals and global governance. Under the new situation, international cooperation mechanisms, including BRI, are facing new problems and challenges, which need to be explored and solved in practice.This book is both academically rigorous and readable, and provides valuable references for public policy departments, enterprises, and financial institutions who seek to better understand the macro, financial and industrial trends of BRI.

This book, authored by three experts with the assistance of GPT, provides comprehensive insights into the applications of generative AI, such as GPT, in the financial sector of businesses. It offers background information, benefits, as well as the challenges and risks associated with implementation. In addition to general applications within companies, specific use cases are also presented, focusing on areas such as controlling, business intelligence, accounting, investor relations, internal audit and control systems, risk management, auditing, and data privacy. The book concludes with a discussion on strategies for utilizing GPT effectively.

The standard economic theory, despite its many advantages, has a significant weakness: it is only of limited applicability to the economic reality of practice. Therefore, the book presents a new economic theory that is completely oriented towards the reality of economic practice. In this new theory, human beings are not just actors but constitute the central element from which the theory and everything else derive: work, production, consumption, demand, supply, exchange, trade, markets, stock exchanges, money, state economics, and global economics with all their complexities. Unlike the standard model, the new theory employs a holistic approach in its methodology. With this new and differentiated economic perspective and mindset, the new theory is capable of initiating a paradigm shift in the discipline of economics.

The book discusses some of the issues related to proximity, challenges an acritical use of the concept and highlights several dimensions that may better frame the actual contribution of proximity to urban and mobility planning in different places. The contributions address the conditions required for ensuring accessibility by proximity and the different planning dimensions that can support its promotion, addressing issues related to the inclusiveness of this model, as well as the scalability and metrics of proximity we need to deal with in several different contexts. The first part of the book introduces some experimental approaches aimed at operationalising accessibility by proximity, while the second part discusses several planning issues related to the implementation of proximity at different scales.

"AI is guaranteed to change nearly every aspect of our lives, but predicting how it will do so and determining what role law and regulation should play involve huge uncertainty.  Kovac gives us an insightful roadmap, using the tools of law and economics, to our bewildering future.  In the process, he also provides a comprehensive and necessary guide to understanding the regulatory and legal challenges we will face in the very near future."-Jonathan Klick, Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania and Erasmus Chair of Empirical Legal Studies, Erasmus University RotterdamThis book takes a comparative law and economics approach to explore the role of public and private actors in regulating generative artificial intelligence. The book provides an introduction and context for the creation of new generative AI technologies, now understood to be the chief goal of the leading AI companies. As autonomous 'super-intelligences', these technologies are still an unknown entity which nevertheless have profound implications for liberal democracy, consumer choice mechanisms, mutual trust, and political legitimacy.This book explores the deep challenges posed for lawmakers and how we can achieve an optimal form of regulation and governance of such unreliable technologies. Chapters investigate possible hybrid modes of regulation, such as a co-regulatory approach between private AI companies and public actors in addressing the issue of misinformation spread. It also explores mixed types of regulation toward research on new forms of AI, arguing that different levels of systemic risk posed by different technologies must be accounted for. Different contemporary and historical contexts for the regulation of unprecedented technical innovation are also considered, and new suggestions for policy are presented. This book is a timely resource which will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in economic governance, law and regulation, artificial intelligence, and comparative law.Mitja Kovä is full time Professor of Civil and Commercial Law at the University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, at University of Ghent, Belgium, at the ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius, Lithuania, and at University of Vienna, Austria. He publishes in the fields of comparative contract law and economics, new institutional economics, consumer protection, contract theory and competition law and economics.

This open access book is a groundbreaking exploration of systemic risk in modern financial systems. Through its theoretical and empirical investigations, it reveals the multidimensionality of systemic risk, the transmission channels of crises, and the interlinkages between physical, transition, and financial risks. It introduces cutting-edge methodologies, including prediction and optimization models based on complex networks, multilayer networks and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approaches, to forecast and measure systemic risk and financial crisis. It provides insight for academics, practitioners, policy and supervisory authorities, and bankers and financial market operators on understanding the links that determine the propagation of financial crises and the emergence of systemic risks. This book is essential for those wishing to better understand systemic risk and its implications.

This book examines the rise of exclusionary neoliberalism by assessing how far-right populist actors impact economic policy change. Drawing on the case of the Austrian Freedom Party, the book illustrates how neoliberalism emerged as a far-right political project in Austria. Tracing the Freedom Party¿s ideational history, the book describes the making of the exclusionary neoliberal state through its establishment in the 1980s, its implementation in the early 2000s and how exclusionary neoliberalism was sustained after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The book thereby provides important insights on how domestic politics respond to challenges imposed by globalization and international market integration, and explains the less obvious ways in which exclusionary nationalist ideas can be deeply entangled with neoliberalism. The book will appeal to all those interested in far-right populism and its interrelation with political economy.