This book analyzes the institutions--incentives and constraints--that guide the behavior of persons involved in the implementation of aid programs. While traditional performance studies tend to focus almost exclusively on policies and institutions in recipient countries, the authors look at incentives in the entire chain of organizations involved in the delivery of foreign aid, from donor governments and agencies to consultants, experts and other intermediaries. They examine incentives inside donor agencies, the interaction of subcontractors with recipient organizations, incentives inside recipient country institutions, and biases in aid performance monitoring systems.

The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid

Business & Money

Seabright, Paul

Martens, Bertin

Mummert, Uwe

Murrell, Peter

Economics

Cambridge University Press

This book analyzes the institutions--incentives and constraints--that guide the behavior of persons involved in the implementation of aid programs. While traditional performance studies tend to focus almost exclusively on policies and institutions in recipient countries, the authors look at incentives in the entire chain of organizations involved in the delivery of foreign aid, from donor governments and agencies to consultants, experts and other intermediaries. They examine incentives inside donor agencies, the interaction of subcontractors with recipient organizations, incentives inside recipient country institutions, and biases in aid performance monitoring systems.

Human beings are the only species in nature to have developed an elaborate division of labor between strangers. Even something as simple as buying a shirt depends on an astonishing web of interaction and organization that spans the world. But unlike that other uniquely human attribute, language, our ability to cooperate with strangers did not evolve gradually through our prehistory. Only 10,000 years ago--a blink of an eye in evolutionary time--humans hunted in bands, were intensely suspicious of strangers, and fought those whom they could not flee. Yet since the dawn of agriculture we have refined the division of labor to the point where, today, we live and work amid strangers and depend upon millions more. Every time we travel by rail or air we entrust our lives to individuals we do not know. What institutions have made this possible?
 In The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright provides an original evolutionary and sociological account of the emergence of those economic institutions that manage not only markets but also the world's myriad other affairs.
 Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, and cities to provide the foundation of social trust. But how long can the networks of modern life survive when we are exposed as never before to risks originating in distant parts of the globe? This lively narrative shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives.

The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

Princeton University Press

A novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern world Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one other--spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power. This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People

As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes, Paul Seabright argues that there is--but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and cooperation developed in our remote evolutionary past, how it shaped the modern world, and how it still holds us back, both at home and at work.
 Drawing on biology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, Seabright shows that conflict between the sexes is, paradoxically, the product of cooperation. The evolutionary niche--the long dependent childhood--carved out by our ancestors requires the highest level of cooperative talent. But it also gives couples more to fight about. Men and women became experts at influencing one another to achieve their cooperative ends, but also became trapped in strategies of manipulation and deception in pursuit of sex and partnership. In early societies, economic conditions moved the balance of power in favor of men, as they cornered scarce resources for use in the sexual bargain. Today, conditions have changed beyond recognition, yet inequalities between men and women persist, as the brains, talents, and preferences we inherited from our ancestors struggle to deal with the unpredictable forces unleashed by the modern information economy.
 Men and women today have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve equal power and respect. But we need to understand the mixed inheritance of conflict and cooperation left to us by our primate ancestors if we are finally to escape their legacy.

The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present

Reference

The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it.
 Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, cities, and the banking system to provide the foundations of social trust that we need in our everyday lives. Even the simple acts of buying food and clothing depend on an astonishing web of interaction that spans the globe. How did humans develop the ability to trust total strangers with providing our most basic needs?

The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life - Revised Edition

In 1989 the European Council of Ministers approved a Regulation establishing a new system of merger control for the European Community. This is the first independent review of the EC Merger Regulation and has wide implications for other issues such as regulatory capture and transparency. It uses the latest research methodology from economics to analyse the decisions taken by the Commission and also reports a detailed survey of firms which have submitted merger proposals and the law firms that have advised them. The full text of the Regulation is reprinted along with summary statistics for all of the cases investigated up to the end of March 1993. Economists, lawyers, and practitioners in the business and policy communities concerned with regulation and merger policy will need this book."I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the political economy of merger control in the EC and in the US. The authors show clear mastery of complex legal issues that underpin merger control, and offer an up-to-date and highly readable guide through the policy thicket." -Janusz Ordover, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, US Department of Justice

Merger in Daylight: The Economics and Politics of European Merger Control

Nuttall, Robin

Neven, Damien

Centre for Economic Policy Research

This book examines the implementation of competition policy during the 1990s in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. It looks at the economic predicament of countries in transition, considering how far this has required the state to actively police the competitive process. It assesses the extent to which initial economic and political conditions have constrained the involvement of the state in such activity. It then analyzes the statutes of the countries and the structure of the institutions established to implement competition policy. A comprehensive discussion of the case law and the experience of policy in practice is used to suggest lessons for the task of competition policy, both in these countries and in others undergoing the transition from central planning. This book will be valuable not just for those interested in competition policy but for all students of the political economy of transition.

Competition Policy and the Transformation of Central Europe

Fox, Eleanor

Center for Economic Policy Research

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Seabright, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Seabright, Paul

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Seabright, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid

The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid

The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People

The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present

The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life - Revised Edition

The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present

Merger in Daylight: The Economics and Politics of European Merger Control

Competition Policy and the Transformation of Central Europe