Colibris

One of the most important forces driving economic performance in the United States and other countries during the 1990s was the rise of information technology. The new technology has had such a significant impact on the economy that “the new economy” emerged as a popular term in both the media and academia.

This book, written in an accessible style, examines basic questions about the effects of information technology on various aspects of the economy. The topics include the relationship between innovation and the stock market value of the innovating firm; competition policy; demand factors as determinants of growth; institutional aspects of the innovation process; and the effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilizing the economy.
Puteti comanda aceasta carte acum. In 48 de ore cartea este la dumneavoastra acasa, la locul de munca sau la oricare alta adresa.

Dramatic advances in life expectancy mean that today’s retirees must plan on living into their eighties, their nineties, and even beyond. Longer life expectancies are the symbol of a prosperous society, but this progress also means that some retirees will need to plan conservatively and cut back substantially on their living standards or risk living so long that they exhaust their resources. This book examines the role that life annuities can play in helping people protect themselves against such outcomes.

A life annuity is an insurance product that pays out a periodic amount for as long as the annuitant is alive, in exchange for a premium. The book begins with a history of life annuity markets during the twentieth century in the United States and elsewhere. It then explores recent trends in annuity pricing and money’s worth, as well as the economic value generated for purchasers of these products. The book explains the potential importance of inflation-protected annuities and stock-market-linked variable annuities in providing more complete retirement security. The concluding chapters examine life annuities in various institutional settings and the tax treatment of annuity products.

For most of recorded history, men’s pay has tended to be higher than women’s. This both reflects and underpins gender roles, with men’s authority more highly valued socially as well as economically. In this text, the authors look at why gender pay inequality matters.

They argue that no amount of training, maternity and parental leave, or child care provisions will change women’s economic status if pay treatment remains unequal - if the market values men’s time more than women’s. The book is the result of an extensive study of the relative wages of British men and women between 1978 and 1991. Using two large and detailed longitudanal data sets, one of women and men born in 1946, and the other of women and men born in 1958, the authors examine the evolution of the pay gap over time and evaluate the success of policies designed to establish equal pay.

Although the book focuses mainly on Britain, the results are of interest to labour economists in other countries, as well as to reseachers in other fields studying the changing role of women in the labour force.

A refreshed and redesigned edition of this popular handy-sized guide to dreams and their meanings. Throughout history and across many different cultures, dreams and dreaming have had much importance attached to them. From the Ancient Greeks to Sigmund Freud and today’s mind/body/spirit gurus, people have sought to use the interpretation of dreams as a means of unlocking the mysteries of the subconscious.

This updated edition of Collins Gem Understanding Dreams allows you to unlock the secrets of dreams and dreaming. The easy-to-use A–Z listing of over 1000 of the most common dream symbols enables you to discover their meanings within seconds of waking up. You will also be able to discover whether your dream foretells good or bad news, is a warning or a manifestation of a particular longing or a desire.

Collins Gem Understanding Dreams is ideal for keeping in your bedside cabinet or under your pillow. So, if you’ve been dreaming of flirting or flogging, dolls or doors, stars or starvation, this is the only guide to interpreting dream symbols you will need.

Want information, but don’t know where to start? There are millions of Internet Websites of varying quality and value. How do you know which are worthwhile and which don’t bear a second look? Search engines only cover a small proportion of the Web. So, how do you ensure you are not missing the best and most useful Websites? And how do you know which Websites you need, when you don’t know what’s out there? Websites from A to Z will help.

By highlighting tried and tested sites from a range of useful categories, Websites from A to Z will save you time, effort and energy, to ensure you get the most from the Internet.

Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein were contemporaries. Freud created psychoanalysis, and Wittgenstein was perhaps the greatest 20th century philosopher. Both thinkers are essentially concerned with our inveterate tendency to deceive ourselves.

Freud approaches this problem from a psychiatric angle - the cure of neurosis, psychosis, perversion and so on. He assumes that his readers can see through the self-deceptions of the neurotics he describes. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, takes an ironical approach to himself and his readers, believing that we are almost certainly deluded, even if we have been analyzed by an orthodox analyst.

He makes us feel that language, understanding and knowledge are but a thin net over an abyss. “Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis” brings these two great, enormously influential Viennese thinkers together in the arena of a postmodern encounter. The question at issue is - which of these two philosophies is the better form of relevant “therapy” for us today? Or is it ever a matter of “contest” between them?

This workbook accompanies the second edition of Stephen Turnovsky’s Methods of Macroeconomic Dynamics. New problems have been added to most of the chapters, particularly those that are new to the second edition of the book. In general, those exercises near the beginning of the book and the first few exercises of each chapter are the easiest to solve.

Stephen J. Turnovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Washington.

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. But systematic analysis leads to clearer understanding and wiser decisions. Thinking about the future also makes social scientists focus their research into the past and present more fruitfully, with more attention to key predictors of change.

This book considers how we might think intelligently about the future. Taking different methodological approaches, well-known specialists forecast likely future developments and trends in human life. The questions they address include: How many humans will there be? Will there be enough energy? How will climate change affect our lives? What patterns of work will exist? How will government work at the local, national, and world level? Will inflation remain under control? Why have past forecasts been so bad? The book concludes with a discussion of the intellectual and historical context of futurology and a look at the accuracy of predictions that were made for the year 2000.

The seventy-year-old Soviet tradition of “wages without work” soon turned into “work without wages” when the planned economy began switching to a market system in 1992. Lack of budget discipline, the breakdown of contractual obligations at all levels, and the failure of state agencies to enforce laws among businesses led to pervasive wage nonpayment to workers in both the public and private sectors. In this book Padma Desai and Todd Idson combine econometric rigor, policy analysis, and empirical evidence to analyze wage nonpayment patterns across demographic groups defined by gender, age, and education, and in various occupations, industries, and regions of Russia. They also examine wage nonpayment to Russia’s military personnel, in the wider context of a disintegrating military. Focusing on the roots and scale of wage nonpayment, the book is an indispensable guide to understanding Russia’s economic restructuring and of the social costs of the transition born by the general population.

Among the questions addressed are: How did Russia’s factory managers decide who, among various categories of workers, would not get paid? Did wage denial push people below the poverty line? How did families survive when denied wages? Did strikes lead to reduced wage arrears? The authors describe a variety of survival strategies on the part of Russian families, including informal paid activity, the selling of family assets, home production for consumption and sale, and the receiving of cash from relatives.