Security and development matter: they often involve issues of life and death and they determine the allocation of truly staggering amounts of the world’s resources. Particularly since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been momentum in policy circles to merge the issues of security and development to attempt to end conflicts, create durable peace, strengthen failing states, and promote the conditions necessary for people to lead healthier and more prosperous lives.

In many ways this blending of security and development agendas seems admirable and designed to produce positive outcomes all around. However, it is often the case that the two concepts in combination do not receive equal weight, with security issues getting priority over development concerns. This is not desirable and actually undermines security in the longer term. Moreover, there are major challenges in practice when security practitioners and development practitioners are asked to agree on priorities and work together.

Security and Development in Global Politics illuminates the common points of interest but also the significant differences between security and development agendas and approaches to problem solving. With insightful chapter pairings—each written by a development expert and a security analyst—the book explores seven core international issues: aid, humanitarian assistance, governance, health, poverty, trade and resources, and demography. Using this comparative structure, the book effectively assesses the extent to which there really is a nexus between security and development and, most importantly, whether the link should be encouraged or resisted.

Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails.  Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth, we may be unknowingly consuming our future. 

How China’s borderlands transformed politically and culturally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

China’s land borders, shared with fourteen other nations, are the world’s longest. Like all borders, they are not just lines on a map but also spaces whose histories and futures are defined by their frontier status. An ambitious appraisal of China’s borderlands, Shifting Sands addresses the full scope and importance of these regions, illustrating their transformation from imperial backwaters to hotbeds of resource exploitation and human development in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Xiaoxuan Lu brings to bear an original combination of archival research, fieldwork, cartography, and landscape analysis, broadening our understanding of the political economy and cultural changes in China’s borderlands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While conventional wisdom looks to the era of Deng Xiaoping for China’s “opening,” Lu shows the integration of China’s borderlands into national and international networks from Sun Yat-sen onward. Yet, while the state has left a firm imprint on the borderlands, they were hardly created by China alone. As the Chinese case demonstrates, all borderlands are transnational, their physical and socioeconomic landscapes shaped by multidirectional flows of materials, ideas, and people.

Alternative strategies of economic development have received little attention in the literature. Academics rarely compare certain strategic features or assess the performance of different strategies in terms of outcomes. This book seeks to address that gap and to provide a theoretical background to the shift from industry to human capital-intensive services as the engine of economic growth. Pioneering studies reveal interesting trends and patterns that point to the growing importance of intangible capital for the level of GDP. They also indicate a much greater role of economic freedom in bringing about this second great structural change than was the case with industrialization. With this perspective on structural change and the role of freedom, Shortcut or Piecemeal also provides an extensive assessment of four key developing countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Subjects: 1. Central planning—History. 2. Economic development—History

This Solutions Manual contains answers to most of the problems in General Equilibrium, Overlapping Generations Models, and Optimal Growth Theory. Truman F. Bewley’s indispensable textbook—a cornerstone of courses on microeconomics, general equilibrium theory, and mathematical economics—covers the main premises behind insurance, capital theory, growth theory, and social security. Detailed explanations provide guidance to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, leading to in-depth understanding of Bewley’s unified approach to macroeconomics theory.

Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex post selection and learning than on ex ante calculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.

Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change explicitly. Drawing on a deep knowledge of economic and technological history as well as the tools of economic analysis, Nelson exposes the intimate connections among government policies, science-based universities, and the growth of technology. He compares national innovation systems, and explores both the rise of the United States as the world’s premier technological power during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the diminishing of that lead as other countries have largely caught up.

Lucid, wide-ranging, and accessible, the book examines the secrets of economic growth and why the U.S. economy has been anemic since the early 1970s.

The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or "spirit," behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the "rational economic actor," but rather nationalism. Nationalism committed masses of people to an endless race for national prestige and thus brought into being the phenomenon of economic competitiveness.

Nowhere has economic activity been further removed from the rational calculation of costs than in the United States, where the economy has come to be perceived as the end-all of political life and the determinant of all social progress. American "economic civilization" spurs the nation on to ever-greater economic achievement. But it turns Americans into workaholics, unsure of the purpose of their pursuits, and leads American statesmen to exaggerate the weight of economic concerns in foreign policy, often to the detriment of American political influence and the confusion of the rest of the world.

In 1965, a group of economists at Harvard University established the Project for Quantitative Research in Economic Development in the Center for International Affairs. Brought together by a common background of fieldwork in developing countries and a desire to apply modern techniques of quantitative analysis to the policy problems of these countries, they produced this volume, which represents that part of their research devoted to formulating operational ways of thinking about development problems.

The seventeen essays are organized into four sections: General Planning Models, International Trade and External Resources, Sectoral Planning, and Empirical Bases for Development Programs. They raise some central questions: To what extent can capital and labor substitute for each other? Does development require fixed inputs of engineers and other specialists in each sector or are skills highly substitutable? Is the trade gap a structural phenomenon or merely evidence of an overvalued exchange rate? To what extent do consumers respond to changes in relative prices?