International Economics

Published in 1980, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy went against the accepted wisdom of the time that said firms should focus on expanding their market share. Porter claimed they should, in fact, analyze the five forces that mold the environment in which they compete: new entrants, substitute products, buyers, suppliers, and industry rivals. Then they could rationally choose one of three "generic strategies" - lowering cost, differentiating their product, or catering to a niche market.

This book is written by trading expert Andrew Johnson. It is doing very well on Amazon and CreateSpace. It is dominating in its categories. Some big promotions are coming up for this book and the series. This is a great opportunity to get involved before the promotion.

Se a partire dal 2001 tutti parlavano dei Paesi BRIC - Brasile, Russia, India e Cina - come dei nuovi motori rombanti dell'economia mondiale, dopo il loro recente rallentamento si è cominciato a parlare di MINT, un acronimo che mette assieme Messico, Indonesia, Nigeria e Turchia, definendoli come i nuovi giganti emergenti dell'economia mondiale. Perché proprio Messico, Indonesia, Nigeria e Turchia? Cosa hanno di speciale questi quattro paesi per aver attirato l'interesse degli operatori economici di tutto il mondo?

The international media has been predicting the 21st Century as China's century. This book explains why. Subjects include international relations, the economy, trade, government, technology, and media.

When Charles P. Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises was first published in 1978, the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Established economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally, and these economists often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language. Kindleberger rebelled against convention. Using a more literary and descriptive style, he came up with a new view.

Because the potential returns appear to be greater in poorer countries than in the developed world, modern economic theory implies that rich countries should continually invest in poor countries until returns balance out. In fact, this doesn't happen. Economist Robert E. Lucas Jr. asks why in his groundbreaking 1990 article, "Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?" The question has become known as the Lucas paradox. Lucas analyzes this, focusing especially on the role of human capital.

Max Weber was the first to identify beliefs and practices that influenced economic behavior. He found Catholics generally less motivated to succeed in business than Protestants because of their religious belief that everyone could achieve salvation. The branch of Protestants known as Calvinists, on the other hand, believed God determined everyone's salvation status before birth. Nothing a person might do on earth could save a soul marked for damnation.

Mahbub ul Haq died in 1998, three years after the publication of his important work, Reflections on Human Development. The book appeared at the end of Haq's impressive career in international development and described his revolutionary contribution to the discipline. In it, Haq argues that the goal of any society should be to improve the lives of its citizens, therefore economic development should support that aim.

Economist Amartya Sen's 1997 work Development as Freedom presents a "middle way" approach to how we should look at international development, based on the idea that its success or failure cannot be measured by income alone. Having grown up in India, Sen brings his own understanding of what poverty really means to the issue, arguing that above all, the process and goal of development must be human freedom. He backs up this idea through his concept of "capabilities."

One of the most influential books on economics ever written, Thomas Robert Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population remains one of the most controversial too. This 1798 work inspired naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to develop the theory of natural selection. But it has also sparked criticism - Karl Marx famously called Malthus a "lackey of the bourgeoisie." Yet this hasn't stopped leading present-day environmentalists from taking up Malthus's ideas.

In his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes argued that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment. Employment is not determined by the price of labor; it is directly linked to demand in the economy. Keynes believed market economies are by nature unstable and so require government intervention. Spurred on by the social catastrophe of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes set out to change the way the world thinks about economics.

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland. Intended to respond to a growing number of environmental concerns faced by the global community, it recognized the need for long-term strategies to manage natural resources. It says we must act collaboratively to protect the environment, while at the same time stimulating economic and social development.

In his 2007 book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the Black Swans of his title can appear at any time, in the form of financial crises, wars, and other unexpected events that have profound, irreversible consequences. Taleb draws on philosophy, mathematics, economics, and other disciplines to explain in plain English why we seldom prepare for these events adequately. The way our brains process knowledge lull us into believing the future will resemble the past.

Since it was first published in 1973, A Random Walk Down Wall Street has been a highly influential best seller. Burton G. Malkiel demolishes the idea that investment "experts" can predict stock price changes and thereby "beat the market." With all available information that could affect the value of a company's shares known almost instantly to all investors, Malkiel says, shares quickly find the price that reflects that information. This is known as the efficient market hypothesis.

More than 200 years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, governments around the world continue to address many of the issues discussed in the book. The most powerful states in the world are still committed to international trade, but questions are repeatedly asked about the role of governments in the economy and the effectiveness of the free market.

Friedman did not just demonstrate that monetary policy plays a vital role in broader economic stability. He also argued that economists got their monetary policy wrong in the 1950s and 1960s by misunderstanding the relationship between inflation and unemployment. In Friedman's view, previous generations of economists had no justification for believing that governments could permanently decrease unemployment by allowing inflation - and vice versa.

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