An Economic History of New Zealand to 1939 by Muriel F Lloyd Prichard

$25.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: very good

Wages and the Poor by Brian Easton

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: very good

Markets and States in Tropical Africa - The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies by Robert H. Bates

$10.00 NZD

Category: Africa | Reading Level: good

Following independence, most countries in Africa sought to develop, but their governments pursued policies that actually undermined their rural economies. Examining the origins of Africa's "growth tragedy," Markets and States in Tropical Africa has for decades shaped the thinking of practitioners and sc holars alike. Robert H. Bates's analysis now faces a challenge, however: the revival of economic growth on the continent. In this edition, Bates provides a new preface and chapter that address the seeds of Africa's recovery and discuss the significance of the continent's success for the arguments of this classic work. ...Show more

Double Entry by Jane Gleeson-White

$10.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: good

How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world - and how their invention could make or break the planet. A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned a cultural revolution. Prepare to have your idea of accounting changed forever. 'The rise and metamorph osis of double-entry bookkeeping is one of history's best-kept secrets and most important untold tales ... Through its logic we have let the planet go to ruin-and through its logic we now have a chance to avert that ruin.' Our world is governed by the numbers generated by the accounts of nations and corporations. We depend on these numbers to direct our governments, organisations, economies, societies. But where did they come from-and how did they become so powerful?The answer to these questions begins in the Dark Ages, with the emergence in northern Italy of a new form of accounting called double-entry bookkeeping. The story of double entry reaches from the Crusades through the Renaissance to the factories of industrial Britain and the policymakers of the Great Depression and the Second World War. At its heart stands a Renaissance monk, mathematician and magician, and his celebrated treatise for merchants. With double entry came the wealth and cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance, a new scientific worldview, and a new economic system: capitalism.Over the past one hundred years accounting has flourished to an astonishing degree, despite the many scandals it has left in its wake. The figures double entry generates have become a sophisticated system of numbers which in the twenty-first century rules the global economy, manipulated by governments, financial institutions and the quant nerds of Wall Street.And the story of double entry is still unfolding-because today it might be our last hope for life on earth. ...Show more

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael J. Graetz; I. Shapiro

$30.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

This fast-paced book by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro unravels the following mystery: How is it that the estate tax, which has been on the books continuously since 1916 and is paid by only the wealthiest two percent of Americans, was repealed in 2001 with broad bipartisan support? The m ystery is all the more striking because the repeal was not done in the dead of night, like a congressional pay raise. It came at the end of a multiyear populist campaign launched by a few individuals, and was heralded by its supporters as a signal achievement for Americans who are committed to the work ethic and the American Dream. Graetz and Shapiro conducted wide-ranging interviews with the relevant players: members of congress, senators, staffers from the key committees and the Bush White House, civil servants, think tank and interest group representatives, and many others. The result is a unique portrait of American politics as viewed through the lens of the death tax repeal saga. Graetz and Shapiro brilliantly illuminate the repeal campaign's many fascinating and unexpected turns--particularly the odd end result whereby the repeal is slated to self-destruct a decade after its passage. They show that the stakes in this fight are exceedingly high; the very survival of the long standing American consensus on progressive taxation is being threatened. Graetz and Shapiro's rich narrative reads more like a political drama than a conventional work of scholarship. Yet every page is suffused by their intimate knowledge of the history of the tax code, the transformation of American conservatism over the past three decades, and the wider political implications of battles over tax policy. ...Show more

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

$12.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: good

In Freakonomics Steven Levitt asks a series of provocative and profound questions about contemporary living and helps us to see the familiar world through a completely original lens. He examines everything from education to traffic jams, from food to guns, from sports to getting elected, from betting to parenting, pushing back the boundaries of economics along the way. Levitt turns conventional economics on its head, stripping away the jargon and calculations of the ‘experts’ to explore the riddles of everyday life. He reaches some astonishing conclusions, showing us that Freakonomics is all about how people get what they want. Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin. The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so. The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos. In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. ‘The next crime wave will get so bad,’ he said, ‘that it will make 1995 look like the good old days.’ Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. ‘We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,’ Clinton said, ‘or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities.’ The smart money was plainly on the criminals. And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated—especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite. The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft. Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop— which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions—they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003. These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad. These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom. There was only one problem: they weren't true. There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey. Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey’s name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist.) So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet. It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk. Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause? Zero. First published 2005. ...Show more

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Revised Edition 2006) by Steven D. Levitt; Stephen J. Dubner

$10.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: good

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical question s for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life--from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing--and whose conclusions turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They usually begin with a mountain of data and a simple question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives--how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they explore the hidden side of . . . well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a great deal of complexity and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and--if the right questions are asked--is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world. ...Show more

Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth by Lester R. Brown

$16.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the view that the Sun revolved around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolved around the Sun. His paper led to a revolution in thinking--to a new worldview. Eco-Economy discusses the need today for a similar shift in our worldview. The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Lester R. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems. Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day--more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world's forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it will not work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world--and it will not work for the rest of the world. But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the Earth's ecosystem so that economic progress can continue. In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands. Eco-Economy is a road map of how to get from here to there. ...Show more

Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy by Hazel Henderson

$14.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: very good

With insight, clarity, warmth and enthusiasm, Hazel Henderson announces the mature presence of the green economy. Mainstream media and big business interests have sidelined its emergence and evolution, but it is now a significant and rapidly growing sector. Throughout Ethical Markets Henderson weaves st atistics and analysis with profiles of entrepreneurs, environmentalists, scientists, and professionals. Based on interviews conducted on her longstanding US public television series, these profiles celebrate those who have led the highly successful growth of green businesses around the world. Ethical Markets is the ultimate sourcebook on today's thriving green economy. ...Show more

The New Zealand CPI at 100: History and Interpretation by Sharleen Forbes and Antong Victorio (eds)

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: very good

Very few New Zealanders have lives unaffected by the Consumers Price Index, or CPI. It is used by the New Zealand government to adjust student allowances, welfare benefits and superannuation; by the Reserve Bank to guide monetary policy; by the old Court of Arbitration, and by employers and employees, t o negotiate wages; and by the media to inform the public about the effects of price changes on their standard of living. Some authors in this book document the New Zealand CPI as a history of conflicting machinations between unions, employers, public officials and lobby groups. Others view it as a mirror of domestic social norms and important international developments that eventually developed into a beacon with considerable public trust. Still others emphasise its technical evolution, from a crude selection of prices necessary for a just wage, to a modern indicator of consumer satisfaction and economic management. Whichever way you look at it, the CPI is a fascinating window into New Zealand's social and economic history. ...Show more

A Few Hares to Chase: the Life and Economics of Bill Phillips by BOLLARD ALAN

$14.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Reading Level: Very Good

How did an electrician from New Zealand with a few mediocre grades in sociology write the second most cited economics article in the world, build the MONIAC - a revolutionary computing machine - and quickly rise to become one of the world's leading economists? From a remote Dannevirke farm to wartime PO W camps to London's intellectual world, the Bill Phillips story is a true New Zealand tale of adventurous spirit and can-do energy. ...Show more

No Ordinary Deal: Unmasking the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement by Jane Kelsey

$25.00 NZD

Category: Economics | Series: Series 21 - Into a New Century | Reading Level: Very Good

The Trans Pacific Partnership is no ordinary free trade deal. Billed as an agreement fit for the twentyfirst century, no one is sure what that means. For its champions in New Zealand a free trade agreement with the US is a magic bullet - opening closed doors for Fonterra into the US dairy market. Presid ent Obama sells it as the key to jobs and economic recovery, while protecting home markets. Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd hails it as a foundation stone for an APEC-wide free trade agreement. None of these arguments stacks up. All eight participant countries except Vietnam are heavily liberalised, deregulated and privatised.* They already have twelve free trade deals between them. No-one really believes that US dairy markets will be thrown open to New Zealand, or that China, India and Japan will sign onto a treaty they had no role in designing. No Ordinary Deal unmasks the fallacies of the TPP. Experts from Australia, New Zealand, the US and Chile examine the geopolitics and security context of the negotiations and set out some of the costs for New Zealand and Australia of making trade-offs to the US simply to achieve a deal. 'Trade' agreement is a misnomer. The TPP is not primarily about imports and exports. Its obligations will intrude into core areas of government policy and Parliamentary responsibilities. If the US lobby has its way, the rules will restrict how drug-buying agencies Pharmac (in New Zealand) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (in Australia) can operate, and the kind of food standards and intellectual property laws we can have. Foreign investors will be able to sue the government for reducing their profits. The TPP will govern how we regulate the finance industry or other services, along with our capacity to create jobs at home. Above all, No Ordinary Deal exposes the contradictions of locking our countries even deeper into a neoliberal model of global free markets - when even political leaders admit that this has failed. The Contributors: Jane Kelsey, Bryan Gould, Patricia Ranald, Lori Wallach, Todd Tucker, José Aylwin, Paul Buchanan, John Quiggin, Warwick Murray, Edward Challies, David Adamson, Geoff Bertram, Tom Faunce, Ruth Townsend, Susy Frankel, Jock Given, Ted Murphy, Bill Rosenberg, Nan Seuffert ...Show more