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Policy makers often call for increased spending on infrastructure, which can encompass a broad range of investments, from roads and bridges to digital networks that will expand access to high-speed broadband. Some point to the near-term macroeconomic benefits, such as job creation, associated with infrastructure spending; others point to the long-term effects of such spending on productivity and economic growth. 

Economic Analysis and Infrastructure Investment explores the links between infrastructure investment and economic outcomes, analyzing key economic issues in the funding and management of infrastructure projects. It includes new research on the short-run stimulus effects of infrastructure spending, develops new estimates of the stock of US infrastructure capital, and explores incentive aspects of public-private partnerships with particular attention to their allocation of risk. The volume provides a reference for researchers seeking to study infrastructure issues and for policymakers tasked with determining the appropriate level and allocation of infrastructure spending.

Robert A. Solo’s landmark work, Economic Organizations and Social Systems, presents a sweeping re-examination of the foundations of economic theory and the paradigms that shape the teaching and practice of economics. Written originally outside the confines of the neoclassical tradition, Solo’s analysis seeks to break from convention and provide readers with a new paradigm—one that places the cognitive, cultural, historical, psychological, and political dimensions at the heart of economic understanding.This expanded edition, featuring a new preface, calls for a transformation in economics: a shift away from narrow models toward a holistic social science capable of addressing the complexities of modern economies. Solo offers a comparative analysis of three distinctive forms of economic organization: decentralized market-driven systems, organizational market-negotiated systems (such as large corporations and unions), and centralized politically-directed systems (drawing especially on the former Soviet Union). Each is assessed for efficiency, incentive structures, justice in income distribution, the quality of the social environment, and—critically—their capacity for technological development.The book goes beyond technical analysis, exploring how national economies are built from multiple, interdependent components: the enterprise, political, household, and institutional sectors. The third part delves deeply into the roles of culture, ideology, and cognition in shaping economic change, using the Russian Revolution and the developmental challenges of the Third World as major case studies.Incisively argued and widely praised on publication, Solo’s work stands as both a critique of prevailing economic orthodoxy and a blueprint for integrating economics within the broader social realities of our time—a vital resource for economists, social scientists, and all seeking to understand or reform economic thought and practice.

Around the world, markets for producing and consuming sugar and related sweeteners are heavily distorted by trade barriers, output controls, price supports, and government subsidies. These policies have significant and identifiable impacts on the economic well-being of different groups in various countries. The net effect of these global distortions is to damage world welfare at the same time that the various national policies reduce economic well-being in the countries that impose them. Sugar policy is the perfect example of how the political imperatives of support for agricultural interests dominate considerations of national welfare or international relations. The contributors provide rigorous analyses of world sugar markets and the distortions caused by policies tn the major countries. They employ several numerical modeling techniques to describe and assess the impacts of world sugar programs. These calculations are buttressed by complementary discussions of the political and economic rationales underlying sugar protection and support. The contributions to The Economics and Politics of World Sugar Policies combine survey evidence with new modeling results from econometric approaches and applied equilibrium simulations to provide new assessments of the current state of world sugar markets. Several original results are presented that shed new light on the impacts of sugar protection. This book should be of considerable interest to agricultural economists, trade-policy analysts, and specialists in international relations and development economics. It is highly relevant for understanding both the economics of agricultural protection and the politics of farm support.

Economic development and forest use, with special emphasis on understanding the components of forest degradation and exploitation in developing countries, are the focus of this book. Contributors, mostly from South or Southeast Asia, examine deforestation and tenurial rights, linkages between migration, poverty, and resource exploitation, technology diffusion among poor-subsistence households, fuelwood and energy collection pressures on open-access resources, government and public investments, and household models of labor choice and its impact on resources. Emphasis is on empirical investigation of these problems, though some conceptual material related to resource exploitation, rent distributions, and household economics is presented. The book is the first to study household resource rent models within a developing-country forestry context. The empirical models are motivated by specifying and formally testing linkages between labor, time, and other input decisions. The book also is the first self-contained study using data from several countries to study a common set of problems such as forest use pressure, the relationship between forest exploitation, household allocation of time, and rents, the adoption of technologies to mitigate exploitation of forest resources, and the importance of population pressure and spatial aspects of deforestation. The book fills a niche by bringing rigorous economic theories and hypothesis testing to social aspects of resource use. It will be of interest to a range of professionals, from academic economists working in forestry and development to resource policy professionals at international development agencies, especially those struggling with developing incentives to reduce forest degradation.