Research

 

You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.

Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
 

Books: Research

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Preventing Non-Communicable Diseases and Promoting Better Health for All

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Although non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancers, diabetes, and heart diseases are preventable, they have risen dramatically over the last 30 years. This is in part due to increased international trade and foreign direct investment in the tobacco, alcohol and food industries.

As governments attempt to regulate these industries, this book raises important and timely questions about the relationship between public health and international trade and investment law.

Providing a clear and succinct analysis of the relevant trade and investment regimes and the obligations they impose, this book identifies the key principles that must be considered when formulating and implementing NCD prevention strategies that are both effective and able to withstand legal challenges.

Open access
Between Subordination and Statecraft

What role do emerging markets play in the global financial system? Are they subordinated within global financial hierarchies? Or do they have autonomy, even power, to use finance to pursue state objectives?

In this edited volume, leading scholars explore these questions, focusing on state–finance interactions globally. The book combines literatures on international financial subordination, financial statecraft and comparative capitalism to analyse state–finance relationships in emerging markets, particularly the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It reveals that these states can control their domestic financial sectors despite global subordination, though their ability to do so varies significantly.

This essential volume offers profound insights into how emerging markets are reshaping global finance for scholars and policy makers.

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Re-orientating Economic Theory

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Following on from The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand and A Realist Philosophy of Economics, this new book drawn from Karl Mittermaier’s writings examines the intricate relationship between economic theory and real-world economic experiences.

Despite the centrality of subjectivism in both philosophy and economics, these fields have often overlooked each other’s insights. Mittermaier challenges this disconnect, advocating for a shift from deterministic models to a more reflective approach in economics. He examines the historical, methodological and philosophical dimensions of economic theory, highlighting its struggle to connect economic theory to empirical data and individuals’ lived experiences.

Originally penned between 1979 and 1982 and now published posthumously, this work remains a crucial contribution to contemporary economic discussions.

Open access
Possibilities for Just Futures

Despite the urgency to understand how ‘other’ cultures encounter ‘the West’ in academic and political spheres, feminist economics has yet to tackle critiques from postcolonial and decolonial feminists about Western-centric modernism in the field.

This book introduces a decolonizing approach to feminist economics, offering insights that move beyond the boundaries of modern Eurocentrism. The author explores the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and ecological degradation, while offering critical feminist and decolonizing tools. By investigating global struggles, the author illuminates our hijacked present and imagines a decolonizing feminist economic landscape that is under transformation.

Transdisciplinary and innovative, this book fills a vital gap by exploring the interplay between decolonization and feminist economics, challenging the growth logic, capitalism and Western-centrism, and imagining new possibilities for more just futures.

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Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond
Editors: and

Democratic planning allows us to effectively address the multiple crises of our time through cooperative modes of collective coordination. Given the destructive consequences of contemporary capitalism, such a structural alternative to market economies is needed more than ever.

This accessible work examines various approaches that theorise, practise and nurture a creative construction towards varieties of democratic planning. Drawing from current socio-economic and ecological movements, it explores what future non-capitalist democratic planning could look like.

Bringing together important voices in the ongoing debates from scholars to activists, this volume proposes an interdisciplinary and innovative approach to democratic planning in the 21st century and beyond.

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Focusing on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) screening, this book provides an in-depth analysis of how European states’ economic interactions with China have become a security issue.

Based on 100 interviews with scholars, journalists, policy makers, and politicians from across Europe, the book underscores the importance of the policy making process that led to the adoption of investment screening in European nations. It adopts the theory of securitization to analyse the passage of the status of Chinese FDI from economy to security. In doing so, it shows how the shifting view of Europeans is attributed to changes such as China’s growing economic presence, the persistence of non-market practices, the loss of competitiveness, and the use of economic statecraft.

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Rationality and Resistance in the Financialization of Everyday Life
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Pension policy in the UK and US is designed on the assumption that people can make informed financial decisions, can consistently invest in pensions and manage diverse portfolios. Deviating from this is often deemed irresponsible and irrational. However, this assumption overlooks uncontrollable factors like caring duties, employment breaks or income limitations. Even when individuals act as expected, unpredictable market shifts can hinder long-term planning.

This book redefines deviations to “rational behaviour” as logical responses to a dysfunctional system. Challenging existing theoretical discussions and policy approaches, it proposes a fresh perspective on rationality when it comes to financial policy and practices.

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Integrated Conceptualisation and Measurement of Economic Poverty
Author:

This book offers a holistic view of Julio Boltvinik’s vast and important work on poverty conceptualisation and measurement. While well known to Spanish-speaking audiences, this volume brings these works together to offer access for English-speaking audiences for the first time.

The book provides the foundations, application and empirical examples of Boltvinik’s Integrated Poverty Measurement Method, which could potentially transform poverty narratives globally as it has done in Mexico.

Deeply critical of available poverty approaches, it provides a challenging and radically new way of conceiving and measuring poverty, offering the only multidimensional poverty measurement method which includes time-poverty and allows all Aggregate Poverty Measures to be fully calculated.

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A realistic economics may take as some of its empirical content the institutions of an economy. In neo-classical economics, in contradistinction, it is the choices of individuals that constitute the empirical content of theory. Institutions and choices, however, belong to two different orders of fact, according to the conceptual framework developed in this book. Choices belong to the ex post order of facts, and institutions belong to the ex ante order of facts. The former are mere records of past events, whereas the latter have to do with structure and causation. Economic theory presents preferences as if they were in the nature of ex ante facts, giving rise to choices, but in the absence of observing preferences, it infers them from the choices. Accordingly, the empirical content of economics are in the nature of ex post facts. Preferences are ex ante facts to the operating individual, but to the observing theorist, they are in the domain of ex post facts. This book shows how a confusion between ex post and ex ante facts has manifested itself in micro-economics.

Open access
Rethinking Labour in Society and the Economy
Author:

Today’s economics offers us a far too narrow perspective on the role that paid work plays in our lives, as individuals and as a society.

This book examines the urgent workplace challenges we’re facing today, from automation to AI and climate change, with an interdisciplinary and historical analysis that challenges and broadens the scope of existing economic literature. Exploring the current economic proposals to address these issues, it advocates for a more egalitarian and sustainable future that builds workers’ protections into the very fabric of our economic systems.

This is a resounding call for greater economic social justice and equality at work and a valuable resource for social scientists from fields like heterodox economics, business and sociology.

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