Transition Economies: Transformation, Development, and Society in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

This interdisciplinary study offers a comprehensive analysis of the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Providing full historical context and drawing on a wide range of literature, this book explores the continuous economic and social transformation of the post-socialist world. While the future is yet to be determined, understanding the present phase of transformation is critical.

The book’s core exploration evolves along three pivots of competitive economic structure, institutional change, and social welfare. The main elements include analysis of the emergence of the socialist economic model; its adaptations through the twentieth century; discussion of the 1990s market transition reforms; post-2008 crisis development; and the social and economic diversity in the region today. With an appreciation for country specifics, the book also considers the urgent problems of social policy, poverty, income inequality, and labor migration…

The Race To The Bottom: Why A Worldwide Worker Surplus And Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards

As evidenced by the WTO riots in Seattle in December 1999, there is a volatile debate among Americans over how the new world economy affects our standards of living and our country’s chances for future prosperity. With giant multinational companies based in the U.S. and other wealthy countries transferring ever more factories and labs to poorer countries, the fear is that slave-wage workers overseas are undermining the bargaining power of labor in the industrialized world.In this book Alan Tonelson explains how a competition has emerged in which countries with the weakest workplace safety laws, the lowest taxes, and the toughest unionization laws win investment from American and European countries. Tonelson argues that this “race to the bottom” of labor standards has been the driving force behind the decline of American living standards for the past quarter century, and, as we have already begun to see, will cause even bigger problems for the worldwide economy as it continues…

How Inequality & Climate Change Impede Sustainable Growth

Watch this panel discussion featuring Willi Semmler with policy analysts, academics, and experts on the relationship between growing inequality and climate change and the path to a sustainable solution…

Progress and Poverty in Economics:
Henry George and How Growth in Real Estate Contributes  to Inequality and Financial Instability

INTRODUCTION
Reviving the Work of America’s Most Original Economist

Andrew Mazzone and I collaborated on a project to review the work of the 19th-century American economist Henry George, especially his landmark book Progress and Poverty (1879) to see how George’s work stood up in the light of modern economics and to determine what could be brought up to date and applied to the contemporary world. We wanted to establish that George’s work was relevant and also to criticize American academic economics for having overlooked or rejected George both in his own time—when his work was a worldwide sensation—and afterward, even today. Andrew died suddenly in the middle of the project. This book is a tribute to him and completes what we began…