Mexico offers a particularly interesting study of economic reform because of its successes and its ambitious scale. As that country's current Minister of Finance and Public Credit and a distinguished economist, Pedro Aspe offers an informed, inside look at attempts to modernize Mexico's economy through the 1970s and 1980s. Aspe examines how Mexico has tried to stabilize its economy with measures such as economic deregulation, fiscal reform, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and realistic budget management. He argues that these changes have had not only profound economic effects, but social and political ones as well.Aspe first discusses Mexico's experience with macroeconomic stabilization, emphasizing its social and political aspects, and noting the successes already achieved in terms of stabilization, production, and employment. In the extended analysis of the Mexican economy that follows, he focuses on the structural impact of state reform on the external sector, and on the efficiency and distributional impacts of fiscal reform. Such macroeconomic adjustments, Aspe points out, have resulted in the gradual replacement of the state in its role as leader of Mexico's economic development by the participation of an entire society - an achievement that is the result of the orderly negotiation and consensus of workers, farmers, entrepreneurs, and government.Aspe concludes with a summary of the way in which all of these changes have brought about the profound transformation of Mexico's economy.

Economic Transformation the Mexican Way (Lionel Robbins Lectures)

Business & Money

Aspe, Pedro

Aspe Armella, Pedro

Economics

MIT Press (MA)

Computational finance, an exciting new cross-disciplinary research area, draws extensively on the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, information systems, and financial economics. This book covers the techniques of data mining, knowledge discovery, genetic algorithms, neural networks, bootstrapping, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods are applied to a wide range of problems in finance, including risk management, asset allocation, style analysis, dynamic trading and hedging, forecasting, and option pricing. The book is based on the sixth annual international conference Computational Finance 1999, held at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Computational Finance 1999

Abu-Mostafa, Yaser S

In Transnational Politics of the Environment Liliana Andonova examines the effect of the Europen Union (EU) on the environmental policies of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Compliance with EU environmental regulations is especially onerous for Central and Eastern European countries because of the costs involved and the legacy of pollution from communist-era industries. But Andonova argues that EU integration has a positive impact on environmental policies in these countries by exerting a strong influence on the environmental interests of regulated industries. With her empirical study of chemical safety and air pollution policies from 1990 to 2000, she shows that export-competitive industries such as the chemical industry that would benefit from economic integration have an incentive to adopt EU norms. By contrast, industries such as electric utilities that primarily serve the domestic market remain opposed to EU environmental standards and must be prodded by their own governments to implement environmental-protection measures. These differences in domestic interests greatly influence the course of reforms and the adoption of EU standards.Transnational Politics of the Environment challenges the current focus on intergovernmental cooperation between East and West by highlighting the roles of industries, transnational norms, and domestic institutions in promoting change in environmental regulation. It offers a generalizable framework for understanding the politics of environmental regulation in emerging market economies, and helps bridge the divide between the study of domestic and international environmental politics.

Transnational Politics of the Environment: The European Union and Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe (Global Environmental Accord: Strategies for Sustainability a)

Science & Math

Andonova, Liliana B.

Earth Sciences

The Internet and American Business (History of Computing)

When we think of the Internet, we generally think of Amazon, Google, Hotmail, Napster, MySpace, and other sites for buying products, searching for information, downloading entertainment, chatting with friends, or posting photographs. In the academic literature about the Internet, however, these uses are rarely covered. The Internet and American Business fills this gap, picking up where most scholarly histories of the Internet leave off--with the commercialization of the Internet established and its effect on traditional business a fact of life. These essays, describing challenges successfully met by some companies and failures to adapt by others, are a first attempt to understand a dynamic and exciting period of American business history. Tracing the impact of the commercialized Internet since 1995 on American business and society, the book describes new business models, new companies and adjustments by established companies, the rise of e-commerce, and community building; it considers dot-com busts and difficulties encountered by traditional industries; and it discusses such newly created problems as copyright violations associated with music file-sharing and the proliferation of Internet pornography. ContributorsAtsushi Akera, William Aspray, Randal A. Beam, Martin Campbell-Kelly, Paul E. Ceruzzi, James W. Cortada, Wolfgang Coy, Blaise Cronin, Nathan Ensmenger, Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz, Brent Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein, Thomas Haigh, Ward Hanson, David Kirsch, Christine Ogan, Jeffrey R. Yost William Aspray is Rudy Professor of Informatics at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the editor (with J. McGrath Cohoon) of Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation (MIT Press, 2006 Paul E. Ceruzzi is Curator of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. He is the author of A History of Modern Computing (second edition, MIT Press, 2003) and Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005 (MIT Press, 2008)

Management & Leadership

This concise but wide-ranging monograph examines where the conditions of binding theory apply and in doing so considers the nature of phrase structure (in particular how case and theta roles apply) and the nature of the lexical/functional split. David Lebeaux begins with a revised formulation of binding theory. He reexamines Chomsky's conjecture that all conditions apply at the interfaces, in particular LF (or Logical Form), and argues instead that all negative conditions, in particular Condition C, apply continuously throughout the derivation. Lebeaux draws a distinction between positive and negative conditions, which have different privileges of occurrence according to the architecture of the grammar. Negative conditions, he finds, apply homogeneously throughout the derivation; positive conditions apply solely at LF. A hole in Condition C then forces a reconsideration of the whole architecture of the grammar. He finds that case and theta representations are split apart and are only fused at later points in the derivation, after movement has applied. Lebeaux's exploration of the relationship between case and theta theory reveals a relationship of greater subtlety and importance than is generally assumed. His arguments should interest syntacticians and those curious about the foundations of grammar.

Where Does Binding Theory Apply? (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Reference

Lebeaux, Dr David

Words, Language & Grammar

Issues of regulation and control are central to the study of biological and biochemical systems. Thus it is not surprising that the tools of feedback control theory--engineering techniques developed to design and analyze self-regulating systems--have proven useful in the study of these biological mechanisms. Such interdisciplinary work requires knowledge of the results, tools and techniques of another discipline, as well as an understanding of the culture of an unfamiliar research community. This volume attempts to bridge the gap between disciplines by presenting applications of systems and control theory to cell biology that range from surveys of established material to descriptions of new developments in the field. The first chapter offers a primer on concepts from dynamical systems and control theory, which allows the life scientist with no background in control theory to understand the concepts presented in the rest of the book. Following the introduction of ordinary differential equation-based modeling in the first chapter, the second and third chapters discuss alternative modeling frameworks. The remaining chapters sample a variety of applications, considering such topics as quantitative measures of dynamic behavior, modularity, stoichiometry, robust control techniques, and network identification. ContributorsDavid Angeli, Declan G. Bates, Eric Bullinger, Peter S. Chang, Domitilla Del Vecchio, Francis J. Doyle III, Hana El-Samad, Dirk Fey, Rolf Findeisen, Simone Frey, Jorge Gonçalves, Pablo A. Iglesias, Brian P. Ingalls, Elling W. Jacobsen, Mustafa Khammash, Jongrae Kim, Eric Klavins, Eric C. Kwei, Thomas Millat, Jason E. Shoemaker, Eduardo D. Sontag, Stephanie R. Taylor, David Thorsley, Camilla Trané, Sean Warnick, Olaf Wolkenhauer

Control Theory and Systems Biology

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making the Grade?

Harvey Blatt

The Principle of Hope is one of the great works of the human spirit. It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world. The Principle of Hope is published in three volumes: Volume 1 lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious -- the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains a remarkable account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian "wishful images" in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theater, dance, and the cinema. Volume 2 presents "the outlines of a better world." It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is nothing less than an encyclopedic account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume 3 offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper "homeland," where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.

Principle of Hope: Volume 3

Ernst, Bloch

Philosophy

* Not for sale in the U.S. and Canada

Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, Expanded (The MIT Press)

Margaret A. Boden

Behavioral Sciences

In their earlier report, Reform in Eastern Europe, the WIDER group assessed the main building blocks of a successful transition in Eastern Europe: stabilization, price liberalization, privatization, and restructuring. For the last three years this group of leading economists has been heavily involved in the reform process. In this new report, they take stock, returning to the original themes and assessing progress and prospects, particularly in Russia.Stabilization in the major Central European countries was done very much by the book. Russia, in contrast, is following a path of restructuring without stabilization. The authors discuss how far this alternative strategy is likely to get. Turning to privatization, they note that initial plans started from the assumption that the state owned the assets. As slow progress of those plans has painfully shown, this was the wrong assumption. They point out that assets have in fact many de facto claimants, from managers to workers to local authorities to ministries, and discuss how the current Russian privatization program starts and builds up from this more realistic assessment.In the face of a collapse of trade in Eastern Europe, triggered by reform in Central Europe and a similar collapse between republics following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the authors show how simple measures such as a payments union can be used to increase trade and output.Post-Communist Reform concludes with a look at restructuring in Poland. The authors focus on the behavior of the state, the growth of the private sector, the role of financial systems, and the coherence of overall government policy, ending on a note of cautious optimism.

Post-Communist Reform: Pain and Progress

Blanchard, Olivier Jean

Boycko, Maxim

Dabrowski, Marek

Blanchard, Olivier J

Dornbusch, Professor of Economics Rudiger

Layard, Professor of Economics Richard

Shleifer, Professor of Economics Andrei

Blanchard, Class of 1941 Professor of Economics Olivier

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