Prosperity – Better Business Makes the Greater Good
Author: Colin Mayer – University of Oxford
What is business for? Day one of a business course will tell you: it is to maximise shareholder profit. This single idea pervades all our thinking and teaching about business around the world but it is fundamentally wrong, Colin Mayer argues. It has had disastrous and damaging consequences for our economies, environment, politics, and societies. In Prosperity, he presents a radical and carefully considered prescription for corporations, their ownership, governance, finance, and regulation. Drawing together insights from business, law, economics, science, philosophy, and history, he shows how the corporation can realize its full potential to contribute to economic and social wellbeing of the many, not just the few.
Rated Agency – Investee Politics in a Speculative Age
Author: Michel Feher
The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than with appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations. In this book, in clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization.
Rated Agency is the most astute analysis of financialized capitalism I have ever read. While so many, even on the left, long to rewind history, Feher has reckoned with the past, and imaginatively charted a path forward into the future.
Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago
Global Value Chains and Development – Redefining the Contours of 21st Century Capitalism
Author: Gary Gereffi – Duke University
This book by Gary Gereffi, one of the founders of the Global Value Chains (GVC) framework, traces the emergence of arguably the most influential approach used to analyze globalization and its impacts. It studies the conceptual foundations of GVC analysis, the twin pillars of ‘governance’ and ‘upgrading’, along with detailed case studies of China, Mexico and other emerging economies as main beneficiaries of export-oriented industrialization, and addresses potential solutions to the deleterious impact of globalization on workers and communities.
Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth
Editors: Adam Posen and Jeromin Zettelmeyer – Peterson Institute for International Economics
In this volume, a dozen renowned scholars analyze the impact of sustained lower productivity growth on public finances, social protection, trade, capital flows, wages, inequality, and, ultimately, politics in the advanced industrial world. They conclude that slow productivity growth could lead to unpredictable and possibly dangerous new problems, aggravating inequality and increasing concentration of market power. Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth also proposes ways that countries can cope with these consequences.
