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3 books match the query 'How It Works'

cover of Antidumping: How It Works and Who Gets Hurt

Antidumping

How It Works and Who Gets Hurt

J. Michael Finger

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Antidumping is a threat to the liberal trading system that post-World War II Western leadership struggled courageously and effectively to create. It offers a GATT-legal means to destroy the GATT system, leading to restrictions on more U.S. imports than even the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. This book presents studies of five industries whose exports have been hard hit by antidumping actions. Each of these studies avoids the legalisms and the jargon of antidumping and answers a straightforward question: was the national economic interest of either the exporting or the importing country improved by the antidumping actions that were taken? The contributors not only ask questions and present viable answers, but also provide a proposal that offers both consistence with GATT and good economics.This book will be of interest to lawyers, political scientists, economists, and business people. It has intentionally avoided the specialized language of trade regulation so that it may be more readily accessible to anyone interested in international commercial policy.
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cover of How It Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia

How It Works

Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia

Robert P. Fairbanks II

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.

To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

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cover of Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works

Real Democracy

The New England Town Meeting and How It Works

Frank M. Bryan

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them.

A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy.

Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.
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