The high-quality academic books, upper-level student texts and journal articles on our Business, Management and Economics list offer fresh perspectives on the economy, the future of work and organisations, and the relationship between business and addressing global social challenges.
The list is home to a number of series including Organizations and Activism and Feminist Perspectives on Work and Organization, all of which are edited by leading scholars from the field, along with our journals in the area: Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Work in the Global Economy and Global Political Economy.
Business, Management and Economics
The Soul of Classical Political Economy curates ten previously unpublished works by James M. Buchanan. The editorial introductions to these are independently valuable as scholarly works; they shed light on the context in which the papers, essays and letters were written, and draw important connections across Buchanan’s different writings. In this review essay, I consider Buchanan on classical liberalism, Knut Wicksell and the role of the economist in light of these newly available writings. The book and review essay should prove of interest not only to historians of economics, but also to scholars and economists generally, as Buchanan’s views on the classical tradition provide important philosophical support for the entire neoliberal enterprise, particularly as it relates to public policy, public economics and public choice.
We analyse the impact of public spending on tax evasion using a two-period model in which the government and taxpayers make their decisions in terms of level and quality of expenditures to set and taxes to pay. Results predict that tax evasion increases with government inefficiency.
We present an analytical literature review on optimal sin taxes. After identifying the distinctive features of sin goods, we develop a simple, encompassing model of the taxation of sin goods that allows for treating the main models found in the literature as subcases. We derive the optimal sin tax rates, while also considering the subsidisation of healthy goods. We then discuss the Pareto-improvement result obtained in the theoretical literature, confronting it with the debate on the regressivity of this kind of taxation. We highlight the crucial role of the interaction of tastes, self-control problems and poverty when deriving policy conclusions from theoretical models.
This Theory into Practice piece uses theoretical underpinnings of Ness as well as Cleaver and Sivanandan to explore the role of two independent trade unions that emerged in the UK in the mid 2010s, namely the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) in 2012 and the United Voices of the World (UVW) in 2014. Despite being of relatively small size (each has a membership of under 10,000) and with few financial resources, they have been praised for their ground-breaking and ‘significant high-profile wins’ in ‘David and Goliath’ battles. In this article I discuss why low paid, largely migrant workers have organised within these independent unions; and the extent to which they have applied syndicalist tactics and strategies. The analysis is rooted in my practice, as someone who was involved in the IWGB from the start and then co-founded the UVW in 2014.
Using a variety of novel data sources from the RegData project, we show that population levels and the amount of regulation are highly correlated across countries and time, and that more-populated US states, Australian states and Canadian provinces tend to be more heavily regulated than less-populated states and provinces. A doubling of population size is associated with a 22 to 33 per cent increase in regulation. This provides support for the theory that the fixed costs associated with regulating partly determine where and when regulations occur.
In a long review of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2019 The Narrow Corridor McCloskey praises their scholarship but criticizes their relentless statism—their enthusiasts for a bigger and bigger Stato, so long as it is somehow “caged.” Their case is mechanical, materialist, and structuralist, none of which is a good guide to history or politics. Their theory of social causation mixes up necessary with sufficient conditions, though they are not unusual among political scientists an economists in doing so. They downplay the role of ideas, which after all made the modern world through liberalism. They recognize how dangerous the modern “capable” state can be, what they call The Leviathan, after Hobbes. But their construal of “liBerty” is the provision of goodies to children by a beneficent Leviathan. It is not the adultism that in fact made the modern world of massive enrichment and true liberty. Their vision is deeply illiberal, and mistaken as science.
Blithering idiot. You agreed to write an article-length review on the new book by Acemoglu and Robinson. Acemoglu has published more in the last five years than you have in your whole career. You’re pretty sure Robinson was one of your letter writers. Hither have you come? What if you make a fool of yourself? What if you say something that upsets them? … You have to do this. Manoel Bittencourt flew you to Johannesburg. You drank his scotch while making him listen to the latest Soen album. You owe him. It’s just a book review. You can do this.
Based on Bill Freund’s latest book, this review essay critically reviews the author’s discussion of: the institutional and network fibres underlying the mid-20th-century South African developmental model; how and why it developed; how and why it transformed through the course of that century; and how it was dismantled by the end of that century. The essay also tries to assess the significance of that model for South African development in the post-1994 democratic era, as well as the economic and public policy choices exercised by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government under conditions of fiscal constraint.
