Richard Cantillon (1680-1734), an Irish economist, has claims to be regarded as one of the most outstanding analytical economists of the eighteenth century. F. A. Hayek wrote that Cantillon was the first to fully articulate economics as a science. In the Essay, Cantillon outlined an extraordinary model-building approach showing how the economy could be built up, through progressive stages, from a command, barter, closed economy to a market economy, which uses money and is open. He produced some outstanding monetary theory including what Mark Blaug called the Cantillon effect when demonstrating the effects of monetary expansion on inflation, output, and the balance of payments. He also highlighted the difficulties created by excessive financial innovation for a real economy and outlined the dangers of foreign borrowing by a country. Though written in the eighteenth century, the Essay has a considerable resonance for a twenty-first-century audience.

Written in non-technical terms, this book explains how the dynamics of big business have influenced national and international economies. A path-breaking study, it provides the first systematic treatment of big business in advanced, emerging, and centrally-planned economies from the late nineteenth century, when big businesses first appeared in American and West European manufacturing, to the present. Large industrial enterprises play a vital role in developing new technologies and commercializing new products in all of the major countries. How such firms emerged and evolved in different economic, political, and social settings constitutes a significant part of twentieth-century world history. This historical review of big business is particularly valuable today, when the viability of large enterprises is being challenged by small firms, networks, and alliances. These essays, written by internationally-known historians and economists, help one understand the essential role and functions of big business

By integrating institutionalist approaches to organizations with the capabilities theory of the firm, Richard Whitley suggests how we can understand this combination of diversity and integration by developing the comparative business systems framework in three major ways. First, by identifying the particular circumstances in which distinctive business systems and innovation systems become nationally established and reproduced, as well as how changing endogenous and exogenous pressures have affected the major kinds of business systems that developed in many OECD states during the postwar period. Second, by showing how variations in authority sharing with employees and business partners and in the provision of organizational careers lead institutional regimes to affect the nature of organizational capabilities that dominant firms develop and enable them to deal with different kinds of risks and opportunities in particular technologies and markets. Third, by identifying the circumstances in which multinational firms are likely to develop distinctive transnational organizational capabilities through such authority sharing and careers, and so become different kinds of companies from their more domestically focused competitors. In many, if not most, cases of cross national managerial coordination, these conditions rarely exist, and so the extent to which multinational firms do indeed constitute distinct organizational forms and strategic actors is much less than is sometimes claimed.

Each chapter covers one "stage" of development. The book is a great crash course on how Taiwan achieved its reputation as an "economic miracle." Records the various stages of Taiwan's economic development from the perspective of the political, social, and cultural trends present at each important turning point. As a result, the reader sees how all these non-economic factors shaped Taiwan's development.

Written by the Professor Lundvall who, together with Chris Freeman, first introduced the concept of the innovation system, this book brings the literature an important step forward, Based upon extraordinarily rich empirical material, it shows how and why competence building and innovation are crucial for economic growth and competitiveness in the current era. It also provides a case study of a small, very successful European economy combining wealth creation with social cohesion. The author's comparative analysis of innovation systems demonstrates that the 'new economy' can thrive and grow not only in the US-type of economy but also in European economies which exhibit a high degree of social cohesion. He warns against the polarisation that may result from a development path where the success of individuals, organisations and national economies reflects their capability to adopt new competencies and skills. He argues that if this kind of learning economy is left unattended, it will eventually undermine the social cohesion that is essential for interactive learning processes. As such, he emphasises the need to develop coherent policy strategies at the regional, national and EU level in order to cope with the new challenges of the globalising learning economy. Innovation, Growth and Social Cohesion is a highly readable, non-technical book which illustrates the basic concepts with plentiful examples and a wide variety of empirical material.