Book Reviews

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 204-207

Georg von Krogh of ETH Zurich reviews “The Comingled Code: Open Source and Economic Development” by Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins: Explores the role of open source software in economic development. Discusses software and growth; the history of open source; the supply side--comingling open source and proprietary software; the demand side--assessing trade-offs and making choices; assessing government policies toward software; and the takeaways. Lerner is Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School. Schankerman is Professor of Economics and Research Associate with the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Glossary; index.

Author(s):  
Paul Stevens

This chapter is concerned with the role of oil and gas in the economic development of the global economy. It focuses on the context in which established and newer oil and gas producers in developing countries must frame their policies to optimize the benefits of such resources. It outlines a history of the issue over the last twenty-five years. It considers oil and gas as factor inputs, their role in global trade, the role of oil prices in the macroeconomy and the impact of the geopolitics of oil and gas. It then considers various conventional views of the future of oil and gas in the primary energy mix. Finally, it challenges the drivers behind these conventional views of the future with an emphasis on why they may prove to be different from what is expected and how this may change the context in which producers must frame their policy responses.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 7411-7422 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Brewer

Abstract. This review covers the development of ocean acidification science, with an emphasis on the creation of ocean chemical knowledge, through the course of the 20th century. This begins with the creation of the pH scale by Sørensen in 1909 and ends with the widespread knowledge of the impact of the "High CO2 Ocean" by then well underway as the trajectory along the IPCC scenario pathways continues. By mid-century the massive role of the ocean in absorbing fossil fuel CO2 was known to specialists, but not appreciated by the greater scientific community. By the end of the century the trade-offs between the beneficial role of the ocean in absorbing some 90% of all heat created, and the accumulation of some 50% of all fossil fuel CO2 emitted, and the impacts on marine life were becoming more clear. This paper documents the evolution of knowledge throughout this period.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (03) ◽  
pp. 419-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

Alfred D. Chandler entered my professional life incrementally rather than dramatically.As a student of economic history at CambridgeUniversity in Britain in the early 1970s, I barely encountered his name. British universities had their own long traditions in business and economic history, including a strong interest in entrepreneurship and in government policies toward industry. Most British scholars were not especially enthusiastic about ideas from across the Atlantic, whether the methodological approach of the new economic history of Robert Fogel, or Chandler's organizational synthesis. Cambridge was an especially closed academic world, with a strong assumption that little that happened outside its delightful campus could be really important. It was not until 1979, when I was recruited by the Business History Unit at the London School of Economics (LSE), headed by Chandler's (then) acolyte Leslie Hannah, that I read Strategy and Structure, nearly two decades after it was published.


2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
Stuart A. Brown

Academic blogging is now a widely used medium for scholarly communication. A substantial body of literature exists on the potential opportunities and challenges that blogging affords to scholars, yet the role of blog editors in facilitating research dissemination and public engagement remains largely overlooked. This paper draws on insights from the development of academic blogs by the London School of Economics between 2010 and 2020. It discusses the demands on blog editors and sets forth a framework for academic institutions and scholars to support editors in their efforts to realize the benefits of academic blogging.


Author(s):  
Bryan S. Turner

Edward Shils’ Portraits offers various intellectual biographies of major figures that played a large role in his life, mainly at the University of Chicago. The list is diverse including economists, sociologists, natural scientists, and historians of the ancient world. The diversity illustrates the breadth of Shils’ academic work. The famous Committee for Social Thought was a key institution in Shils’ intellectual development and, while Portraits can be read as a history of the University of Chicago during the twentieth century, Shils was a trans-Atlantic intellectual with close connections to Peterhouse College Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Portraits is a celebration of the Chicago tradition created by Robert Maynard Hutchins University President (1929-1945) for the in-depth study of ‘great books’, but Shils concludes with a nostalgic reflection on the end of the ‘age of books’. The narrative is haunted by the figure of Max Weber, whose rationalization thesis has been borne out with the rise of the bureaucratic corporate university and the narrow specialization of research.


Author(s):  
Kai Wegrich

This chapter comments onImplementation, a book by Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky. It traces its roots to the Economic Development Agency’s Oakland project, designed to promote economic development in cities by increasing employment opportunities for minorities. It considers Pressman and Wildavsky’s account of why the Oakland program failed, as well as their central argument with regards to the role of politics and policy-making in implementation. It discusses the decline of implementation studies as the dominating subfield of public policy research and highlights some key concerns raised by Pressman and Wildavsky that continue to be influential. The chapter concludes by looking at debates about the merits of non-hierarchical coordination, informal interaction, and emergent networks.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1 (460)) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Piotr Koryś

The article discusses the role of plants in Poland’s economic development over the last 500 years. The author presents the role of five plants in the history of Poland’s development: cereals (wheat and rye), potatoes, sugar beet and rape. The specificity of the economic development of modern Europe has made Poland one of Europe’s granaries and an important exporter of cereals. This shaped the civilization of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and contributed to its fall due to institutional specificity. In the 19th century, potatoes played an important role in the population development of Polish lands, as they helped feed the rapidly growing population. The spread of sugar beet cultivation created the conditions for the development of modern sugar industry in the second half of the 19th century. It became one of the first modern branches of the food industry in Poland and contributed to the modernization of the village. Quite recently, oilseed rape was to become a plant that would bring back the times of agricultural sheikhs – no longer the nobility would trade in cereals on the European markets, but entrepreneurs producing a vegetable substitute for diesel oil.


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