Roads in a Market Economy


Book Description

This work, based on the propositon that roads exhibit typical command economy characteristics (congestion, chronic lack of funds), then shows roads in a market economy framework, employing concepts of ownership, market pricing and profitability to achieve




Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors, The


Book Description

This work is dedicated to my fellow Americans, some 40,000 of them per year who have died needlessly in traffic fatalities. It is my sincere hope and expectation that under a system of private roads and highways in the future, that this number may be radically reduced.







The Road Leading to the Market


Book Description

Since the reform and opening up period, the world has witnessed a transformation within China. This transformation has led millions out of poverty within China and has in recent years seen China as an important and vital engine of economic growth for the rest of the world. While China has made great strides in embarking on the road to a market economy, this book emphasizes that transformation within China to market-driven development is far from over. In this book, Zhang puts forward the idea that the reform in China has now reached a crossroads. The next steps have a bearing not only on the sustainability of past reform but even on whether China will become a veritable world power in the future. With the reform at this pivotal juncture, this book explores further reform within China and examines how the reform debate will develop. The Road Leading to the Market is a highly readable collection of essays which will appeal to researchers and students of China’s economy and a globalized economy.




The Road Leading to the Market


Book Description

Since the reform and opening up period, the world has witnessed a transformation within China. This transformation has led millions out of poverty within China and has in recent years seen China as an important and vital engine of economic growth for the rest of the world. While China has made great strides in embarking on the road to a market economy, this book emphasizes that transformation within China to market-driven development is far from over. In this book, Zhang puts forward the idea that the reform in China has now reached a crossroads. The next steps have a bearing not only on the sustainability of past reform but even on whether China will become a veritable world power in the future. With the reform at this pivotal juncture, this book explores further reform within China and examines how the reform debate will develop. The Road Leading to the Market is a highly readable collection of essays which will appeal to researchers and students of China’s economy and a globalized economy.




The Chinese Market Economy, 1000–1500


Book Description

Since the economic liberalization of the 1980s, the Chinese economy has boomed and is poised to become the world's largest market economy, a position traditional China held a millennium ago. William Guanglin Liu's bold and fascinating book is the first to rely on quantitative methods to investigate the early market economy that existed in China, making use of rare market and population data produced by the Song dynasty in the eleventh century. A counterexample comes from the century around 1400 when the early Ming court deliberately turned agrarian society into a command economy system. This radical change not only shrank markets, but also caused a sharp decline in the living standards of common people. Liu's landmark study of the rise and fall of a market economy highlights important issues for contemporary China at both the empirical and theoretical levels.







The Roman Market Economy


Book Description

What modern economics can tell us about ancient Rome The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. The Roman Market Economy uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity. Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. He traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. Temin shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. He vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, Temin argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century. The Roman Market Economy reveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.




Economic Management And Transition Towards A Market Economy: An Asian Perspective


Book Description

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the transformation of the economies of Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. However, a growing demand for policy advice, technical assistance and expertise is also coming from Asian reforming countries such as China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In addition, business communities abroad are increasingly interested in exploring investment and marketing opportunities in these reforming countries. Such developments are too important to overlook or ignore.The transformation of socialist economies towards market-based systems entails an unusually wide range of problems. Studies of related topics are complicated by the speed of the changes and the lack of clear historical precedents. Although the structural features of Asian reforming economies are in important ways different from those of the Eastern European economies, all socialist economies share similar fundamental conditions on the eve of economic reform which raise a similar set of reform issues.This volume brings together a rich collection of expertise and information in an attempt to shed some light on the transitional process in Asia. The contributions are by no means exhaustive. However, they provide the reader and analyst with an excellent starting point to the problems and prospects which are specific to Asian transforming economies.




The Privatization of Roads and Highways


Book Description

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com. The Mises Institute is pleased to introduce Walter Block's remarkable new treatise on private roads, a 494-page book that will cause you to rethink the whole of the way modern transportation networks operate. It is bold, innovative, radical, compelling, and shows how free-market economic theory is the clarifying lens through which to see the failures of the state and see the alternative that is consistent with human liberty.He shows that even the worst, off-the-cuff scenario of life under private ownership of roads would be fantastic by comparison to the existing reality of government-ownership of roads, which is awful in ways we don't entirely realize until Block fully explains it (think: highway deaths).But that is only the beginning of what Professor Block has done. He has made a lengthy, detailed, and positive case that the privatization of roads would be socially optimal in every way. It would save lives, curtail pollution, save us (as individuals!) money, save us massive time, introduce accountability, and make transportation a pleasure instead of a huge pain in the neck.Because this is the first-ever complete book on this topic, the length and detail are absolutely necessary. He shows that this is not some libertarian pipe dream but the most practical application of free-market logic. Block is dealing with something that confronts us every day. And in so doing, he illustrates the power of economic theory to take an existing set of facts and help see them in a completely different way.What's also nice is that the prose has great passion about it, despite its scholarly detail. Block loves answering the objections (Aren't roads public goods? Aren't roads too expensive to build privately?) and making the case, fully aware that he has to overcome a deep and persistent bias in favor of public ownership. The writer burns with a moral passion on the subjects of highway deaths and pollution issues. His "Open Letter to Mothers Against Drunk Driving" is a thrill to read!People have known that Block had been working on this book for many years, and some chapters have been seen in journals here and there. But there is something thrilling about seeing it all put together in one place. It comes together as a battle plan against government roads and a complete roadmap for a future of private transportation.