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Markets and the Environment, Second Edition (Foundations Contemporary Environmental)
by Dr Sheila M. Olmstead Mr Nathaniel O. KeohaneA clear grasp of economics is essential to understanding why environmental problems arise and how we can address them. So it is with good reason that Markets and the Environment has become a classic text in environmental studies since its first publication in 2007. Now thoroughly revised with updated information on current environmental policy and real-world examples of market-based instruments, the primer is more relevant than ever.The authors provide a concise yet thorough introduction to the economic theory of environmental policy and natural resource management. They begin with an overview of environmental economics before exploring topics including cost-benefit analysis, market failures and successes, and economic growth and sustainability.Readers of the first edition will notice new analysis of cost estimation as well as specific market instruments, including municipal water pricing and waste disposal. Particular attention is paid to behavioral economics and cap-and-trade programs for carbon.Throughout, Markets and the Environment is written in an accessible, student-friendly style. It includes study questions for each chapter, as well as clear figures and relatable text boxes. The authors have long understood the need for a book to bridge the gap between short articles on environmental economics and tomes filled with complex algebra. Markets and the Environment makes clear how economics influences policy, the world around us, and our own lives.
Markets and the State: Microeconomic Policy in Australia
by Malcolm AbbottThis book illustrates essential microeconomic concepts and theories through the examination of related policy formulation in Australia since the 1980s. It provides a fresh approach to the subject of microeconomics from the perspective of both market and government failures. By looking at how Australia has transformed over the course of time, the book traces and tracks these changes and relates them to the broader microeconomic reforms. It also looks at the structure of Australian economic public policy formulation and process. The book uses standard microeconomic techniques to analyse the impact of these Australian policies and examines the role of government in the implementation of these policies, making it a very useful teaching vehicle for learning about microeconomics and microeconomic policies.
Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data: Hackers' Bazaar
by Martin C. Libicki Lillian Ablon Andrea A. GolayCriminal activities in cyberspace are increasingly facilitated by burgeoning black markets for both tools (e.g., exploit kits) and take (e.g., credit card information). This report, part of a multiphase study on the future security environment, describes the fundamental characteristics of these markets and how they have grown into their current state to explain how their existence can harm the information security environment. Understanding the current and predicted landscape for these markets lays the groundwork for follow-on exploration of options to minimize the potentially harmful influence these markets impart. Experts agree that the coming years will bring more activity in darknets, more use of crypto-currencies, greater anonymity capabilities in malware, and more attention to encrypting and protecting communications and transactions; that the ability to stage cyberattacks will likely outpace the ability to defend against them; that crime will increasingly have a networked or cyber component, creating a wider range of opportunities for black markets; and that there will be more hacking for hire, as-a-service offerings, and brokers. Experts disagree, however, on who will be most affected by the growth of the black market (e.g., small or large businesses, individuals), what products will be on the rise (e.g., fungible goods, such as data records and credit card information; non-fungible goods, such as intellectual property), or which types of attacks will be most prevalent (e.g., persistent, targeted attacks; opportunistic, mass "smash-and-grab" attacks).
Markets for Federal Water: Subsidies, Property Rights, and the Bureau of Reclamation
by Richard W. WahlThis book clearly and authoritatively addresses significant issues of water policy in the western United States at a time when the growing scarcity of western water and the role of the Bureau of Reclamation in the allocation of that resource are becoming increasingly urgent issues. In this scholarly study, Wahl combines his insider's knowledge of the Interior Department's dam-building, regulatory, and water-pricing decisions with an objective analysis of the efficiency dilemma. The study begins by tracing the origins of the reclamation idea and the expansion of subsidies in the program since 1902. The author then recommends major changes in reclamation law and in the Bureau of Reclamation's policies for administering its water supply contracts. He uses four case studies to illustrate the application and potential benefits of his proposals.
Markets for Managers: A Managerial Economics Primer
by Anthony J. EvansSuccessful managers possess an understanding of economic and market principles as they relate to business itself. Markets for Managers presents managerial economics in a casual, accessible format that will help management professionals take economic realities into account when running their companies or divisions. The book takes a global perspective while covering the full range of micro- and macroeconomic principles that managers around the world need to know. Complete with online resources that include further reading and a YouTube playlist, this guide puts business management practice within its economic context to produce a practical tool for managers. By understanding market operation and what might cause market failure, management professionals can lead companies that respond to market pressures and align operating strategies with economic realities. Monetary and fiscal policies affect businesses of all sizes, and in Markets for Managers, business leaders can learn how to read the ever-shifting fiscal landscape.
Markets for Schooling: An Economic Analysis (Routledge Research In Education Ser. #No.5)
by Peter Davies Nick AdnettNick Adnett and Peter Davies develop an economic analysis of schooling markets, emphasizing both the strengths and weaknesses of orthodox analyses. They explain the economic and social contexts that have generated the widespread desire to reform state schooling and develop a systematic analysis of the key policy components examining both theory and
Markets in Fashion: A phenomenological approach (Routledge Studies in Business Organizations and Networks #Vol. 31)
by Patrik AspersInterest in contemporary cultural industries has grown in the past decade, as they take on a greater significance in our increasingly consumer-led society. Focusing on the world of fashion photography, this book presents an interdisciplinary approach in which this and other aesthetic markets, such as advertising, modelling, art, music and more, can be viewed. The main thrust of this groundbreaking book, is in developing a theory for these cultural markets, characterized by insecurity, and where status and aesthetic diversity generate order and price differentiation. In these industries, services and products are offered that are a mix of the aesthetic and the economic, and for fashion photographers such as those studied here, it is necessary to carefully position themselves in the market by developing unique photographic styles and separating themselves from competitors. Yet the markets in which these industries operate differ from the type of exchange markets depicted by neoclassical economists, and therefore cannot be considered using such modes of analysis. Instead Aspers conducts his study using empirical phenomenology, an original approach presented here for the first time, which can be easily used in other empirical studies. He draws on original empirical material; participant observation and interviews generated in New York and Stockholm; which bring a depth of analysis and a relevance to this book which academics, researchers and those with a vested interest in such industries will value. Written by one of the world's brightest young economic sociologists, this fascinating book (previously published in Sweden and enthusiastically received) is endorsed by recognized industry authorities. A noteworthy book, it provides a foothold in the burgeoning sub discipline of economic sociology, and a significant analysis of the economics of the fashion photography industry.
Markets in Profile
by James F. Dalton Robert B. Dalton Eric T. JonesMarkets in Profile explores the confluence of three disparate philosophical frameworks: the Market Profile, behavioral finance, and neuroeconomics in order to present a unified theory of how markets work. The Market Profile is an ever-evolving, multidimensional graphic that gives visual form to the market's continuing auction process, revealing the myriad underlying dynamics that influence market activity. Behavioral finance posits that investors are driven more by emotional factors and the subjective interpretation of minutia than by "rationality" when making investment decisions. And neuroeconomics is the study of how investor psychology permeates and affects the financial markets. Mr. Dalton explicates the ways in which irrational human behavior influences the market's natural auction process, creating frequently predictable market structure, which results in opportunities for investors to ameliorate risk. The book will improve investors ability to interpret change in markets, enabling better, more confident investment decisions.
Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation (Near Future Series)
by Michel CallonSlicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced.If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made.Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale.The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.
Markets in the Name of Socialism
by Johanna BockmanThe worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free-market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists,Markets in the Name of Socialismreveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain about democracy, socialism, and markets. These discussions led to the transformations of 1989 and, unintentionally, the rise of neoliberalism. This book takes a truly transnational look at economists' professional ideas over 100 years across the capitalist West and the socialist East. Clearly translating complicated economic ideas and neoliberal theories, it presents a significant reinterpretation of Cold War history, the fall of communism, and the rise of today's dominant economic ideology.
Markets in their Place: Context, Culture, Finance (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)
by Russell PrinceMarkets are usually discussed in abstract terms, as an economic organizing principle, a generalized alternative to government planning, or even as powerful actors in their own right, able to shape local and national economic destinies. But markets are not abstract. Even as the idea of the market seduces politicians around the world to take advantage of their abstract qualities, they constantly run up against material reality. Markets are always somewhere, in place, and it is in place that the smooth theories of markets falter and fail. More than simply being embedded in particular places, markets necessarily emerge in the various political, social, cultural, and environmental relations that exist in and between places. Markets shape places, but the reverse is also true. This collection of essays approaches markets from the ground up, and from a part of the world often still regarded as peripheral to global capitalism: the South Pacific. With a wide variety of case studies, including on indigenous economies, childcare, agriculture, wine, electricity metering, finance, education, and housing, the authors show how complex local, social and cultural politics matter to how markets are made within and between places, and the insights that can be gleaned from studying markets in this part of the world. They explore the way superficially similar markets work out differently in different places, and why, as well as examining how market relations are constructed in places outside and on the edges of the centres of Western capitalism, and what this says back to how markets are understood in those centres. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students working in and between economic geography, cultural economy, political economy, economic sociology, and more.
Markets of Dispossession: Ngos, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo
by Julia ElyacharWhat happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives. Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in "free market" expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.
Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
by Vincanne AdamsMarkets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is an ethnographic account of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is also a sobering exploration of the privatization of vital social services under market-driven governance. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, public agencies subcontracted disaster relief to private companies that turned the humanitarian work of recovery into lucrative business. These enterprises profited from the very suffering that they failed to ameliorate, producing a second-order disaster that exacerbated inequalities based on race and class and leaving residents to rebuild almost entirely on their own. Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Adams traces the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism, which encourages the very same for-profit companies to exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing, the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.
Markets vs Public Health Systems: Perspectives from the Austrian School of Economics (Routledge Focus on Economics and Finance)
by Łukasz JasińskiProblems related to the functioning of public healthcare systems encourage the search for alternative solutions, for example to ensure improved access to medical services. However, these proposals also require appropriate theoretical support to better present and apply them. This book draws on Austrian Economics to provide a theoretical framework to support greater involvement of the private sector to improve inefficiencies in public healthcare. The Austrian School of Economics has a solid theoretical output describing and explaining the functioning of many aspects of the market economy (e.g. money, prices, interest rate, or capital). This work applies those principles to a market-based healthcare system and its individual elements, including health insurance. The study in these chapters is divided into two parts. The first part contains the theoretical aspects of the functioning of a complete market system. Particular importance is placed on presenting health insurance as a market institution and exploring its role in the market system. This examination also includes an analysis of alternative forms of financing access to medical services, such as direct payments, medical savings accounts, medical subscriptions, and charity. Additionally, solid counterarguments are provided for so-called market failures: asymmetric information, public goods, and monopolies. The second part of the book explores the theoretical aspects of interventionism and the functioning of public systems, and aims to better highlight the sources of the associated problems. This work provides an important contribution to the literature on health economics, healthcare management and policy, and Austrian Economics more broadly. It is essential reading for health economists and those holding key public positions related to healthcare.
Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State (The Middle Range Series)
by Yingyao WangChina’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a market economy, the economic bureaucracy retained a striking degree of influence and control over crafting and implementing policy. Yet bureaucrats are often dismissed as faceless and inconsequential, their role neglected in favor of party leaders’ top-down rule or bottom-up initiatives.Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics offers a new account of economic policy making in China over the past four decades that reveals how bureaucrats have spurred large-scale transformations from within. Yingyao Wang demonstrates how competition among bureaucrats motivated by careerism has led to the emergence of new policy approaches. Second-tier economic bureaucrats instituted distinctive—and often conflicting—“policy paradigms” aimed at securing their standing and rewriting China’s long-term development plans for their own benefit. Emerging from the middle levels of the bureaucracy, these policy paradigms ultimately reorganized the Chinese economy and reshaped state-market relations. Drawing on fine-grained biographical and interview data, Wang traces how officials coalesced around shared career trajectories, generational experiences, and social networks to create new alliances and rivalries. Shedding new light on the making and trajectory of China’s ambitious economic reforms, this book also provides keen sociological insight into the relations among bureaucracy, states, and markets.
Markets within Planning: Socialist Economic Management in the Third World
by Marc Wuyts Edmund V. FitzgeraldPublished in 1988, Markets within Planning is a valuable contribution to the field of Economics.
Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)
by Nancy NeimanA series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – reinvigorated the debate about markets and social justice. Since then, counter-hegemonic movements all over the globe are attempting to redefine markets and the meaning of economic enterprise in people’s daily lives. Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalization advocates and anti-globalization movements, those on the political right and those on the left, all facing off to argue the benefits or harms brought about by markets. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analyzing the conditions under which markets result in just outcomes. This book explores how culture, politics, and ideology help shape market incentives in an attempt to reclaim the language of economic rationality and the policymaking legitimacy that accompanies it. Through a variety of case studies – labor relations in the U.S. meatpacking industry, the globalization process in Juaìrez, Mexico, financial reform in Cuba, and an interfaith Ugandan coffee cooperative – this book provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote just or unjust outcomes (e.g., discrimination, income inequality, environmental degradation, or racial justice, human rights, and equitable growth). This book touches on subject matter as varied as food, religion, banking, and race and gender equality, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It offers an analysis of markets based on community rather than pure individualism that has the potential to change the way we think about economic rationality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars in political science, economics, sociology, geography, gender studies, critical race studies, environmental studies, and all those interested in the critique of mainstream economics and neoliberal logic.
Markets, Constitutions, and Inequality (Critical Studies in Jurisprudence)
by Anna Chadwick, Eleonora Lozano-Rodríguez, Andrés Palacios-Lleras, and Javier SolanaThis interdisciplinary collection examines the significance of constitutions in setting the terms and conditions upon which market economies operate. With some important exceptions, most notably from the tradition of Latin American constitutionalism, scholarship on constitutional law has paid negligible attention to questions of how constitutions relate to economic phenomena. A considerable body of literature has debated the due limits of the exercise of executive and legislative power, and discussions about legitimacy, democracy, and the adjudication of rights (civil and political, and socioeconomic) abound, yet scant attention has been paid by constitutional lawyers to the ways in which constitutions may protect and empower economic actors, and to how constitutions might influence the regulation and governance of specific markets. The contributors to this collection mobilize insights from other disciplines – including economic theory, history, and sociology – and consider the relationship between constitutional frameworks and bodies of law – including property law, criminal law, tax law, financial regulation, and human rights law – to advance understanding of how constitutions relate to markets and to the political economy. This book’s analysis of the role constitutions play in shaping markets will appeal to scholars and students in law, economics, history, politics, and sociology.
Markets, Deliberation and Environment (Economics as Social Theory)
by John O'NeillWhat is the source of our environmental problems? Why is there in modern societies a persistent tendency to environmental damage? From within neoclassical economic theory there is a straightforward answer to those questions: it is because environmental goods and harms are unpriced. They come free. This position runs up against a view which runs in entirely the opposite direction, that our environmental problems have their source not in a failure to apply market norms rigorously enough, but in the very spread of these market mechanisms and norms. The source of environmental problems lies in part in the spread of markets both in real geographical terms across the globe and through the introduction of markets mechanisms and norms into spheres of life that previously have been protected from markets. In this book, John O’Neill conducts a thorough examination of these two opposing viewpoints covering a discussion of the ethical boundaries of markets, the role of private property rights in environmental protection, the nature of sustainability and the valuation of goods over time. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying courses in ecological and environmental economics.
Markets, Ethics, and Business Ethics
by Steve ScaletMarkets, Ethics, and Business Ethics provides an introductory discussion on basic, challenging concepts of business ethics: markets, property rights, law, and corporations.This title presents a balance of institutional perspectives and the concrete decisions people make within those institutions. The text studies the rules and incentives of a business system as well as the ethical decisions that people confront within their roles as consumers, investors, managers, owners, employees, and citizens.
Markets, Ethics, and Business Ethics (2nd Edition)
by Steven Scalet<p>This book introduces a study of ethics and values to develop a deeper understanding of markets, business, and economic life. Its distinctive feature is its thorough integration across personal and institutional perspectives; across applied ethics and political philosophy; and across philosophy, business, and economics. <p>Part 1 studies markets, property rights, and law, and introduces normative theories with many applications. Part 2 examines the purpose of corporations and their responsibilities. Parts 3 and 4 analyze business and economic life through the ethics and values of welfare and efficiency, liberty, rights, equality, desert, personal character, community, and the common good. <p>This second edition maintains the strengths of the first edition—short, digestible chapters and engaging writing that explains challenging ideas clearly. The material is user-friendly, with an emphasis on a strong theoretical core. Easily adaptable to the instructor’s teaching, the chapters are separable and can be shaped to the interests of the instructor with suggested course outlines and flexible application to case studies. This text is designed both for coursework in business ethics, as well as interdisciplinary programs in philosophy, politics, economics, and law. This second edition: <p> <li>revises presentation of eight normative theories, with increased emphasis on linksto business and economic life <li>incorporates recent scholarship on shareholder/stakeholder debates about the purpose of corporations, bringing this important topic up to date <li>includes a new, streamlined preface that provides a quick overview of the book before smoothly guiding the reader to the first chapter <li>uses updated examples and applications <li>revamps a useful appendix, including enhancing the popular primer on ethics <li>includes Key Terms, Discussion Questions, Biographies, and Lists of Further Readings at the end of each chapter <li>includes a new ending chapter on the value of an ethical life
Markets, Games, and Strategic Behavior: An Introduction to Experimental Economics
by Charles A. HoltEconomics is rapidly becoming a more experimental science, and the best way to convey insights from this research is to engage students in classroom simulations that motivate subsequent discussions and reading. In this expanded and updated second edition of Markets, Games, and Strategic Behavior, Charles Holt, one of the leaders in experimental economics, provides an unparalleled introduction to the study of economic behavior, organized around risky decisions, games of strategy, and economic markets that can be simulated in class. Each chapter is based on a key experiment, presented with accessible examples and just enough theory. <P><P> Featuring innovative applications from the lab and the field, the book introduces new research on a wide range of topics. Core chapters provide an introduction to the experimental analysis of markets and strategic decisions made in the shadow of risk or conflict. Instructors can then pick and choose among topics focused on bargaining, game theory, social preferences, industrial organization, public choice and voting, asset market bubbles, and auctions. <P><P> Based on decades of teaching experience, this is the perfect book for any undergraduate course in experimental economics or behavioral game theory. <P><P> New material on topics such as matching, belief elicitation, repeated games, prospect theory, probabilistic choice, macro experiments, and statistical analysis Participatory experiments that connect behavioral theory and laboratory research Largely self-contained chapters that can each be covered in a single class Guidance for instructors on setting up classroom experiments, with either hand-run procedures or free online software End-of-chapter problems, including some conceptual-design questions, with hints or partial solutions provided
Markets, Information and Communication: Austrian Perspectives on the Internet Economy (Routledge Foundations Of The Market Economy Ser.)
by Jack Birner Pierre GarrousteThe internet bubble which peaked in size in 2000 is now well and truly burst. As with all bubbles, there are varying explanations for its occurrence, but the hype which surrounds the internet has shouldered a lot of the blame. There is however, no doubt that the internet has significantly changed the way people live, think and do business.This impr
Markets, Minds, and Money: Why America Leads the World in University Research
by Miguel UrquiolaA colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success. American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education. Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research. Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.
Markets, Morals and Development: Rethinking Economics from a Developing Country Perspective
by Wahiduddin MahmudThis book presents, or rather ‘re-presents’, the intricacies of a developing economy in the light of recent theoretical developments in economics while also providing a fresh perspective on the perceived inadequacies of the discipline in addressing the discontents of the contemporary global economic order. The book argues that there is scope for economics to be a more humane discipline and more relevant to contemporary economic problems by embracing new ideas, including those from other disciplines. It shows how economic concepts including recent theoretical advances can help better understand real life economic phenomena; to rethink the ways of making the market economy address the moral issues of human well-being and social justice and; overall, how the study of economics at an introductory level and public discourses on economic issues can be made more engaging as well as more relevant to the problems of developing countries. Based on public lectures given by the author in Dhaka, and using illustrations from Bangladesh, India and other countries, the book offers an authoritative understanding of diverse economic realities by taking a fresh look at the familiar. Comprehensive and accessible, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of economics, development economics and policy, sociology and business studies as well as journalists, public intellectuals and policymakers in developing countries.