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453 books match the query 'Economic policy' and 10 start with h

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Hard Choices

Edited by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh and Donald Low

National University of Singapore Press, 2014

Singapore is changing. The consensus that the PAP government has constructed and maintained over five decades is fraying. The assumptions that underpin Singaporean exceptionalism are no longer accepted as easily and readily as before. Among these are the ideas that the country is uniquely vulnerable, that this vulnerability limits its policy and political options, that good governance demands a degree of political consensus that ordinary democratic arrangements cannot produce, and that the country’s success requires a competitive meritocracy accompanied by relatively little income or wealth redistribution.

But the policy and political conundrums that Singapore faces today are complex and defy easy answers. Confronted with a political landscape that is likely to become more contested, how should the government respond? What reforms should it pursue? This collection of essays suggests that a far-reaching and radical rethinking of the country's policies and institutions is necessary, even if it weakens the very consensus that enabled Singapore to succeed in its first fifty years.

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Health Benefits at Work

An Economic and Political Analysis of Employment-Based Health Insurance

Mark V. Pauly

University of Michigan Press, 1999

The majority of Americans receive their health insurance for themselves and their families through their job. The employee pays a portion of the premium but the employer chooses the type and amount of coverage offered as well as administers the plan. This book addresses the question: Who really pays for employer-arranged health insurance? Are premiums paid from company profits or do employees bear the cost through lower wages? Pauly suggests that this confusion has complicated the debate on public policy and needs to be alleviated. This work first shows how views taken by business and political leaders during the Clinton health reform proposal debate were affected by this confusion and did not follow the economic view. It then provides a novel, intuitive, but comprehensive outline of the economic theory that bears on this question. Empirical evidence consistent with the economic view is summarized, and the implications of the view for some important issues in health policy and in practical health benefits management are discussed in detail. Health Benefits at Work explores the political economy of health policy when the stakeholders have an uncertain and possibly incorrect understanding of their actual interests. For the benefits specialist, it provides an accessible treatment of the complex and often counterintuitive economics of health benefits. This will appeal to the health policy community as well as economists and anyone concerned with issues surrounding health insurance in employment settings. "This book is refreshing . . . clean and intuitive; the logic devastating." --Michael A. Morrissey

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Hegemony

The New Shape Of Global Power

John Agnew

Temple University Press, 2005

Hegemony tells the story of the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad through political pressure and the promise of goods for mass consumption. In contrast to the recent literature on America as empire, it explains that the primary goal of the foreign and economic policies of the United States is a world which increasingly reflects the American way of doing business, not the formation or management of an empire. Contextualizing both the Iraq war and recent plant closings in the U.S., noted author John Agnew shows how American hegemony has created a world in which power is no longer only shaped territorially. He argues in a sobering conclusion that we are consequently entering a new era of global power, one in which the world the US has made no longer works to its singular advantage.

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Herbert Hoover As Secretary Of Commerce

New Era Thought And Practice

Ellis W. Hawley

University of Iowa Press, 1981

In this second volume in the Hoover Centennial Seminars series, seven scholars reexamine a major segment of Herbert Hoover's public career and in doing so offer fresh perspectives on the political, administrative, and diplomatic history of the 1920s. Drawing upon new materials and new insights, they reconstruct Hoover's transformation of the Commerce secretariat, explore his thinking and action in a variety of policy areas, and explode conventional depictions of Hoover's political conservatism. These essays show a resourceful and creative mind wrestling with the central problems of twentieth-century America and projecting solutions remarkably similar to current proposals for public use of the private sector.

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Hijacking the Agenda

Economic Power and Political Influence

Christopher Witko

Russell Sage Foundation, 2021

Why are the economic interests and priorities of lower- and middle-class Americans so often ignored by the U.S. Congress, while the economic interests of the wealthiest are prioritized, often resulting in policies favorable to their interests? In Hijacking the Agenda, political scientists Christopher Witko, Jana Morgan, Nathan J. Kelly, and Peter K. Enns examine why Congress privileges the concerns of businesses and the wealthy over those of average Americans. They go beyond demonstrating that such economic bias exists to illuminate precisely how and why economic policy is so often skewed in favor of the rich.

The authors analyze over 20 years of floor speeches by several hundred members of Congress to examine the influence of campaign contributions on how the national economic agenda is set in Congress. They find that legislators who received more money from business and professional associations were more likely to discuss the deficit and other upper-class priorities, while those who received more money from unions were more likely to discuss issues important to lower- and middle-class constituents, such as economic inequality and wages. This attention imbalance matters because issues discussed in Congress receive more direct legislative action, such as bill introductions and committee hearings. While unions use campaign contributions to push back against wealthy interests, spending by the wealthy dwarfs that of unions.

The authors use case studies analyzing financial regulation and the minimum wage to demonstrate how the financial influence of the wealthy enables them to advance their economic agenda. In each case, the authors examine the balance of structural power, or the power that comes from a person or company’s position in the economy, and kinetic power, the power that comes from the ability to mobilize organizational and financial resources in the policy process. The authors show how big business uses its structural power and resources to effect policy change in Congress, as when the financial industry sought deregulation in the late 1990s, resulting in the passage of a bill eviscerating New Deal financial regulations. Likewise, when business interests want to preserve the policy status quo, it uses its power to keep issues off of the agenda, as when inflation eats into the minimum wage and its declining purchasing power leaves low-wage workers in poverty. Although groups representing lower- and middle-class interests, particularly unions, can use their resources to shape policy responses if conditions are right, they lack structural power and suffer significant resource disadvantages. As a result, wealthy interests have the upper hand in shaping the policy process, simply due to their pivotal position in the economy and the resulting perception that policies beneficial to business are beneficial for everyone.

Hijacking the Agenda is an illuminating account of the way economic power operates through the congressional agenda and policy process to privilege the interests of the wealthy and marks a major step forward in our understanding of the politics of inequality.

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Hope in the Heartlands

Rebuilding Economies to Save Democracy

John Austin

Michigan State University Press, 2027

Why did the American heartland, once the engine of the world’s most dynamic economy, become the seedbed of its angriest politics? For more than twenty years, John Austin has pursued that question in Flint, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh—and now in Europe’s industrial regions, where many communities face the same reckoning. In Hope in the Heartlands he traces his journey from a minister’s son raised in West Virginia coal country to the man who made Flint and the industrial Midwest his adopted home. He shows how he came to see economic abandonment as the root of democratic decay—and what he and a network of like-minded leaders did about it. From coining the “Blue Economy” to championing “ally-shoring”—rebuilding supply chains across allied democracies—Austin offers a field-tested agenda for renewing left-behind regions. The stakes, he argues, could not be higher.

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House Money

A History of the American Mortgage Market

Jonathan D. Rose and Kenneth Snowden

University of Chicago Press, 0

How the market that made the American Dream was made—and what that history tells us about its future and fluctuations.

When Americans poured into cities and suburbs during the twentieth century, they needed capital to build and own homes. The market that emerged did more than merely provide it: the American mortgage market became the consequential, if occasionally misunderstood, cornerstone of the US financial system.

House Money traces the history of the growth and occasional collapse of the American mortgage market over the last 150 years. Jonathan Rose and Kenneth Snowden show how three major housing-related crises (of the 1930s, 1980s, and 2000s) were not just cyclical events nor bubbles. Rather, they were episodes in a common pattern: shocks produced when the availability of capital in the market was eclipsed by the risk the market took on. Rose and Snowden chart the macro factors that produced these capital/risk asymmetries, showing that in all three crises, the macroeconomic trends—not just bubbles, not banker avarice—conspired to create a downturn despite federal and private safeguards. This illustrates Rose and Snowden’s core principle: housing markets can (and often, must) shoulder considerable risk. When the capital behind that risk evaporates, trouble becomes more likely.

Mining more than a century of economic history, Rose and Snowden show how the institutions and practices in the American mortgage market reflect the push-pulls of its past—both the private innovations and the government interventions. House Money reveals the great risk undertaken in service to American homeownership—and the perennial question of what happens when that risk goes wrong.

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How the Dismal Science Got Its Name

Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics

David M. Levy

University of Michigan Press, 2002

It is widely asserted that the Victorian sages attacked classical economics from a humanistic or egalitarian perspective, calling it "the dismal science," and that their attack is relevant to modern discussions of market society. David M. Levy here demonstrates that these assertions are simply false: political economy became "dismal" because Carlyle, Ruskin, and Dickens were horrified at the idea that systems of slavery were being replaced by systems in which individuals were allowed to choose their own paths in life. At a minimum, they argued, "we" white people ought to be directing the lives of "them," people of color.
Economists of the time argued, on the other hand, that people of color were to be protected by the rule of law--hence the moniker "the dismal science."
A startling image from 1893, which is reproduced in full color on this book's jacket, shows Ruskin killing someone who appears to be nonwhite. A close look reveals that the victim is reading "The Dismal Science."
Levy discusses this image at length and also includes in his text weblinks to Carlyle's "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" and to Mill's response, demonstrating that these are central documents in British classical economics. He explains Adam Smith's egalitarian foundations, contrasting Smith's approach to the hierarchical alternative proposed by Carlyle. Levy also examines various visual representations of this debate and provides an illuminating discussion of Smith's "katallactics," the science of exchange, comparing it with the foundations of modern neoclassical economics.
How the Dismal Science Got Its Name also introduces the notion of "rational choice scholarship" to explain how attacks on market economics from a context in which racial slavery was idealized have been interpreted as attacks on market economics from a humanistic or egalitarian context. Thus it will greatly appeal to economists, political scientists, philosophers, students of Victorian literature, and historians.
David M. Levy is Associate Professor of Economics and Research Associate, Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University.

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How the New Deal Was Run

Edited by Sarah E. Igo and Ganesh Sitaraman

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Notable historians delve into the brass tacks of launching and sustaining federal agencies.

Critics today complain that the United States government can’t do big things, can’t do them quickly, and certainly can’t do many of them at once. The New Deal offers a striking contrast. During the 1930s, the United States created a wealth of new agencies, departments, offices, and programs—all at once and in very short order—that enabled a stunning expansion of state capacity. The question is: how?

In this illuminating collection, leading American historians explore the nuts and bolts of New Deal implementation to offer answers. From the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Rural Electrification Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission, they uncover exactly how the New Dealers did so much so quickly. They detail the choices before state builders who, operating under the pressure and immediacy of the era, made decisions that had momentous consequences in the longer term.

At a time when federal agencies are under stress as never before, the contributors suggest what future administrations can learn from the New Deal’s extraordinary achievements—and how they can build state capacity and deliver for Americans once again.

Features contributions by W. Tanner Allread, Mary Bridges, Brent Cebul, Sarah E. Igo, Meg Jacobs, Richard R. John, Neil M. Maher, Sharon Ann Musher, Sarah T. Phillips, Kathryn Olmsted and Eric Rauchway, Alex Platt, Jason Scott Smith, Ganesh Sitaraman, Abby Spinak, Chloe Thurston, and Mason B. Williams.

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