Economics and Finance

This book explores the political economy of China-Pakistan economic corridor, a major pilot project for China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiatives. Pakistan will provide China with not only a pathway access to the Indian Ocean, Middle East and Africa, but also vital connections to the Trans-Asia railway network that links Southeast Asia, South Asia and West Asia. This book analyzes how domestic factors in Pakistan will affect China’s $46 billion investments. It will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and journalists.

This book addresses one of the most pressing geopolitical inquiries of our era: how will China's ambition manifest on the global stage? To address this question, the book considers China’s long tradition of statecraft. By doing this, it provides a unique and novel insight into the “why” behind China’s actions and sparks a crucial dialogue on “how” to best navigate China’s global rise.  

 Through a keen analytical lens, the book illuminates both the constraints and the flexibility inherent in Chinese policy-making. It underscores the geographic and historical factors that constrain China's actions, forcing its leaders into trade-offs. It also highlights the system's inherent flexibility, expanding the range of strategic options available when dealing with China. The most unique contribution consists in framing the pre-occupations of contemporary China in the context of both long-standing Chinese trends and unprecedented global changes.

This book offers a nuanced and realistic guide for senior policy makers, business leaders, academic researchers, and global citizens who seek to decipher the enigma of China's ascent and channel its trajectory towards a more positive and responsible direction.

The rapid pace of economic development and urbanization in Asia have led to several major problems such as greenhouse gas emissions, mass consumption, and depletion of natural resources. These problems pose a major threat to a sustainable future for Asia and are hindering many Asian countries' goal of becoming carbon-neutral by the middle of this century. Solving these problems requires a comprehensive understanding of the nature of energy consumption, exploitation of natural resources, and deterioration of the environment.

To accelerate the green energy transition and promote efficient resource use in Asia, a range of policy options and joint efforts among Asian countries will be required, including carbon pricing, resource tax reform, the expansion of transition finance, support for the development of low-carbon, and resource-efficient social infrastructure. However, Asia is home to many countries, each in a different stage of economic development and with its own culture and customs. Practical implementation of these policies will require bringing together researchers, policymakers, and citizens to share their knowledge and engage in discussions to generate policy ideas that are appropriate for each country.

The purpose of this book is to share theoretical and empirical knowledge and convey policy implications that can be expected to accelerate energy transition and resource use effectiveness toward a sustainable future in Asia.

This book identifies and systematically confirms the various factors that allow dangerous nuclear power projects to proceed without adequate risk assessment, even as society recognizes the magnitude of risks associated with nuclear power generation. For the first time, it employs a communication game model to explore each factor individually.

The novel feature of the book lies in its theoretical analysis of institutional factors, such as the possibility of regulatory capture by electric power companies, the likelihood of these companies concealing early warning signs, the societal demand for excessive safety leading to intolerance of even minor incidents, and the ambiguity of liability. These issues have been pointed out and discussed by many commentators, including the media, but they have never been rigorously verified through economic model analysis. Furthermore, the book discusses why trial and error, a common approach in technological development, is particularly challenging for nuclear power.

This book focuses on the political economy behind innovation in China's new industrial sectors, particularly the effects of policies and government regulation in the absence of the rule of law. In its analysis, the book aims to elucidate the mechanisms that generate innovation from multiple perspectives while utilizing insights from political science and law. The analysis in this book focuses on the following three points. First, by examining Guizhou Province's Big-data industry promotion policy, "import substitution digitization" policy, and government intellectual property strategy, we seek to empirically clarify the extent to which Chinese government industrial policy has stimulated innovation. Next, we examine in detail the issues surrounding the "rule of law" in China regarding introducing anti-monopoly laws for digital platform companies and developing the intellectual property court system. Third, it focuses on the role played by local governments in industrial policy, including the impact of industrial guidance funds on the efficiency of the regional financial sector and the impact of local bond issuance on the effectiveness of resource allocation among regions.

This book brings together selected papers from the The Vietnam-EU Economic and Trade Forum 2023 jointly organized by the VNU University of Economics and Business (UEB, Vietnam) and Krakow University of Economics (Poland). The book deals with the economic and political relationship between Asian and EU countries in the context of globalization, sustainable development, and climate change responses. This book covers a wide range of topics, such as Asian-EU economic-politic relation promotion, policies for environmental protection, green growth and climate change responses in Asian and EU countries, and education, culture, science and technology, and innovation cooperation between Asian and EU countries.

This book offers a deparochial account of global justice and addresses disenchantment stemming from its West-centricity and provincial theoretical formulations. As the recurring global poverty debate restricts the duties of alleviating poverty and inequality to the developed world, this book attempts to broaden the spectrum of duties to the superrich of the developing world. Drawing from the case study of India’s superrich as an exemplar of the potent agency of rising powers, the book examines the structural relationship between unbridled affluence and the (un)realisation of the human rights of the poor. It contends that India’s superrich, like their counterparts in other powerful developing countries, both contribute as well as benefit from the highly decentralised global economic order that (re)produces affluence of the few and deprivation of the many within these countries. In doing so, this book argues that the superrich have a positive duty to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality beyond their free-standing moral responsibility for philanthropy.

This book evaluates development progress using the lens of structural transformation in four groups of developing countries: Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs), Asia’s LDCs, landlocked Central Asian countries, and Pacific small island states. The analysis presented is contextualized in the diverse economic characteristics and geopolitical landscape of the four categories of countries. 

It emphasises critical binding factors unique for each category. Therefore, the chapter on Africa’s LDCs emphasises their path dependence determined by colonial exploitation and maintained through neo-colonial arrangements. The chapter on Asia’s LDCs highlights their democratic deficits and influences of geopolitical rivalries among global and regional powers. The chapter on landlocked Central Asian countries focuses more on the unique transition experience of those countries coming out from USSR hinterlands to independent states in the wake of the third wave of democratisation in the 1990s. Lastly the evaluation of Pacific small island states is very much influenced by the fate of geography for being small in size and remotely located.  

The diverse coverage offers readers rich political economy explanations of varied, but largely poor, structural transformation experiences. The book is nontechnical, with descriptive, narrative, and analytical approaches on comparative development, making it suitable and accessible for non-specialist audiences.

This book pays tribute to Professor Kirit Parikh through contemporary essays from experts on energy, climate change including mitigation and adaptation, agriculture, food procurement, water resources, and public health. The chapters use statistical methods and mathematical models to analyse questions of policy formulation and effectiveness.

The book picks up important SDG topics such as – current issues and policy making in the infrastructure sector of power and their relationship to India’s climate commitments; computable models of the growth and absorption of renewable generation as the focal point of policy interventions in the power sector; increasing efficiency of national grids and to support integration of renewables in South Asia; natural gas pricing policy; achieving, nutrition, self-sufficiency and foodgrains surplus; welfare implications of the minimum support price (MSP) policy for food grains; evaluating epidemiological performance of strategies against COVID-19; critical examination of economic growth; methodological issues in policy formulation; modeling the Social Accounting Matrix; algorithms for solving convex optimization models; and fossil fuel power plant operations.

The studies especially bring into focus the latest developments in climate change, the switch to renewable energy sources, and the public health crisis due to COVID-19. This collection will be of great value to policymakers and researchers, especially from a developing economy perspective.

This book theoretically summarizes China’s exploration in integrating domestic ecological civilization construction with fulfilling international obligations to address climate change, demonstrating its responsibility and wisdom in advancing sustainable development and building a community with a shared future for mankind.
 
The coming 20 years will be a crucial period for China to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects, accelerate socialist modernization, and realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. Chinese cities will simultaneously face challenges of economic development, environmental pollution, and global warming. Whether these three major challenges can be effectively addressed will determine whether China can forge a new type of urbanization with Chinese characteristics and whether its urban ecological environment can achieve sustainable development—a critical issue requiring in-depth study in the context of ecological civilization. This book systematically investigates climate change, urban ecological and environmental governance, target models for sustainable urban development, and pathways for reform.