Beyond Tradeoffs PDF Download

Author: Nancy Birdsall
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 9780815791294
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Latin American income distribution is among the most unequal in the world. Both the poor and the wealthy have paid a price for this inequality, which is in part responsible for the region's low growth rates. The essays in this book propose new ways of reducing inequality, not by growth-inhibiting transfers and regulations, but by enhancing efficiency—eliminating consumption subsidies for the wealthy, increasing the productivity of the poor, and shifting to a more labor and skill-demanding growth path. In Beyond Tradeoffs, Latin American experts demonstrate how market-friendly measures in key policy areas can simultaneously promote greater equity and greater efficiency. By identifying win-win strategies, the authors challenge the conventional wisdom that there is always a tradeoff between these two objectives. Extensive macroeconomic reforms in the region have provided opportunities to implement such strategies across many sectors. The volume aims at building a "Latin consensus" on a second round of reforms—reforms that address the urgent issue of inequality without undermining efficient growth. Contributors include Jonathan Coles, Rene Cortazar, Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Luis Londoño, Nora Lustig, Moises Naím, and Joseph Stiglitz. Copublished with the Inter-American Development Bank

Author: Sarah Kaplan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503610438
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Companies are increasingly facing intense pressures to address stakeholder demands from every direction: consumers want socially responsible products; employees want meaningful work; investors now screen on environmental, social, and governance criteria; "clicktivists" create social media storms over company missteps. CEOs now realize that their companies must be social as well as commercial actors, but stakeholder pressures often create trade-offs with demands to deliver financial performance to shareholders. How can companies respond while avoiding simple "greenwashing" or "pinkwashing"? This book lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them. Suggesting that the shared-value mindset may actually get in the way of progress, bestselling author Sarah Kaplan shows in The 360° Corporation how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation.

Author: Bruce Schneier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387217126
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Many of us, especially since 9/11, have become personally concerned about issues of security, and this is no surprise. Security is near the top of government and corporate agendas around the globe. Security-related stories appear on the front page everyday. How well though, do any of us truly understand what achieving real security involves? In Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier invites us to take a critical look at not just the threats to our security, but the ways in which we're encouraged to think about security by law enforcement agencies, businesses of all shapes and sizes, and our national governments and militaries. Schneier believes we all can and should be better security consumers, and that the trade-offs we make in the name of security - in terms of cash outlays, taxes, inconvenience, and diminished freedoms - should be part of an ongoing negotiation in our personal, professional, and civic lives, and the subject of an open and informed national discussion. With a well-deserved reputation for original and sometimes iconoclastic thought, Schneier has a lot to say that is provocative, counter-intuitive, and just plain good sense. He explains in detail, for example, why we need to design security systems that don't just work well, but fail well, and why secrecy on the part of government often undermines security. He also believes, for instance, that national ID cards are an exceptionally bad idea: technically unsound, and even destructive of security. And, contrary to a lot of current nay-sayers, he thinks online shopping is fundamentally safe, and that many of the new airline security measure (though by no means all) are actually quite effective. A skeptic of much that's promised by highly touted technologies like biometrics, Schneier is also a refreshingly positive, problem-solving force in the often self-dramatizing and fear-mongering world of security pundits. Schneier helps the reader to understand the issues at stake, and how to best come to one's own conclusions, including the vast infrastructure we already have in place, and the vaster systems--some useful, others useless or worse--that we're being asked to submit to and pay for. Bruce Schneier is the author of seven books, including Applied Cryptography (which Wired called "the one book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published") and Secrets and Lies (described in Fortune as "startlingly lively...¦[a] jewel box of little surprises you can actually use."). He is also Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., and publishes Crypto-Gram, one of the most widely read newsletters in the field of online security.

Author: John W. Boudreau
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 142210415X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In Beyond HR: The New Science of Human capital, John Boudreau and Peter Ramstad show you how to do this through a new decisions science-talentship. Through talentship, you move far beyond merely reactive mind-set of planning and budgeting for headcount and hiring and retaining talent.

Author: Joseph S. Nye
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815798199
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
A Brookings Institution Press and Visions of Governance for the 21st Century publication Far from being another short-lived buzzword, "globalization" refers to real changes. These changes have profound impacts on culture, economics, security, the environment—and hence on the fundamental challenges of governance. This book asks three fundamental questions: How are patterns of globalization currently evolving? How do these patterns affect governance? And how might globalism itself be governed? The first section maps the trajectory of globalization in several dimensions—economic, cultural, environmental, and political. For example, Graham Allison speculates about the impact on national and international security, and William C. Clark develops and evaluates the concepts of "environmental globalization." The second section examines the impact of globalization on governance within individual nations (including China, struggling countries in the developing world, and the industrialized democracies) and includes Elaine Kamarck's assessment of global trends in public-sector reform. The third section discusses efforts to improvise new approaches to governance, including the role of non-governmental institutions, the global dimensions of information policy, and Dani Rodrik's speculation on global economic governance.

Author: Kevin Maney
Publisher: Currency
ISBN: 0385525958
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A Fresh and Important New Way to Understand Why We Buy Why did the RAZR ultimately ruin Motorola? Why does Wal-Mart dominate rural and suburban areas but falter in large cities? Why did Starbucks stumble just when it seemed unstoppable? The answer lies in the ever-present tension between fidelity (the quality of a consumer’s experience) and convenience (the ease of getting and paying for a product). In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between fidelity and convenience–between the products we love and the products we need. Rock stars sell out concerts because the experience is high in fidelity-–it can’t be replicated in any other way, and because of that, we are willing to suffer inconvenience for the experience. In contrast, a downloaded MP3 of a song is low in fidelity, but consumers buy music online because it’s superconvenient. Products that are at one extreme or the other–those that are high in fidelity or high in convenience–-tend to be successful. The things that fall into the middle-–products or services that have moderate fidelity and convenience-–fail to win an enthusiastic audience. Using examples from Amazon and Disney to People Express and the invention of the ATM, Maney demonstrates that the most successful companies skew their offerings to either one extreme or the other-–fidelity or convenience-–in shaping products and building brands.

Author: John D. Graham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674773042
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
We see the stories in the newspaper nearly every day: a drug hailed as a breakthrough treatment turns out to cause harmful side effects; controls implemented to reduce air pollution are shown to generate hazardous solid waste; bans on dangerous chemicals result in the introduction of even more risky substitutes. Could our efforts to protect our health and the environment actually be making things worse? In Risk versus Risk, John D. Graham, Jonathan Baert Wiener, and their colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis marshal an impressive set of case studies which demonstrate that all too often our nation's campaign to reduce risks to our health and the environment is at war with itself.

Author: Susan Eckstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520237455
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"This splendid collection by two of our leading political sociologists pioneers new directions in the study of social justice in Latin America. What Justice? Whose Justice? is impassioned scholarship at its best. It brings together detailed studies of rights and institutions, inequality and struggle, citizenship and indigenous politics, war and peace. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in what the so-called triumph of democracy over dictatorship in the region really means today in the lives of the still dispossessed."—Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico "This book offers a stimulating interdisciplinary analysis of the gripping problems of justice, inequality, and citizenship, and of citizen responses to these issues in contemporary Latin America. It is essential reading on these interrelated themes."—Scott Mainwaring, co-editor of Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America "First-rate contributors address the quality of democracy in several Latin American countries in these readable and provocative essays. The volume focuses particularly on the relation between democracy and the law, on the importance of the past, and on informal politics and indigenous political movements. A must-read for all those who are tracking the course of democracy in the region and who are concerned about its political future."—Jane S. Jaquette, co-editor of Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe "For anyone who still assumes that markets plus elections suffice to resolve the problems of injustice that are the political, social, and economic patrimony of Latin America, this book will be a firm wake-up call. At the same time, the excellent case studies in this book make it clear that the current global neoliberal regime is no more effective at suppressing local struggles for justice than the more traditional forms of domination that came before it. It is valuable and provocative reading for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary political dynamics of justice and injustice."—Peter Evans, editor of Livable Cities?

Author: David Birch
Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
ISBN: 190799467X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Technology is changing money: it has been transformed from physical objects to intangible information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone is a security device that can identify you – and link information about you to your money. To see where these developments might be taking us, David Birch looks back over the history of money, spanning thousands of years. He sees in the past, both recent and ancient, evidence for several possible futures. Looking further back to a world before cash and central banks, there were multiple ‘currencies’ operating at the level of communities, and the use of barter for transactions. Perhaps technology will take us back to the future, a future that began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by physical commodities of any kind. Since then, money has been bits. The author shows that these phenomena are not only possible in the future, but already upon us. We may well want to make transactions in Tesco points, Air Miles, Manchester United pounds, Microsoft dollars, Islamic e-gold or Cornish e-tin. The use of cash is already in decline, and is certain to vanish from polite society. The newest technologies will take money back to its origins: a substitute for memory, a record of mutual debt obligations within multiple overlapping communities. This time though, money will be smart. It will be money that reflects the values of the communities that produced it. Future money will know where it has been, who has been using it and what they have been using it for.

Author: Boris Pleskovic
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821349816
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Annotation This 12th Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics focuses mainly on four areas: new development thinking, crises and recovery, corporate governance and restructuring, and social security including public and private savings.