Public Finance

You know him as the founder of Microsoft; the philanthropic, kind-hearted billionaire who has donated endless funds to good causes around the world. But there's another side to Bill Gates. Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Good Billionaire offers listeners a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most widely recognized individuals - a true global celebrity with a truly global audience.

We all know the bad news. The heady promise of the Arab Spring has given way to repression, civil war, and an epic refugee crisis. Economic growth is sputtering. Income inequality is rising around the world. And the threat of ISIS and other extremist groups keeps spreading. We are living in an age of unprecedented, irreversible decline - or so we're constantly being told. Jonathan Tepperman's The Fix presents a very different picture.

Journalist Nick Romeo has spent years covering the world's most innovative economic and policy ideas for the New Yorker. Romeo takes us on an extraordinary journey through the unforgettable stories and successes of people working to build economies that are more equal, just, and liveable....

As scientific and observational evidence on global warming piles up every day, questions of economic policy in this central environmental topic have taken center stage. But as author and prominent Yale economist William Nordhaus observes, the issues involved in understanding global warming and slowing its harmful effects are complex and cross disciplinary boundaries. For example, ecologists see global warming as a threat to ecosystems, utilities as a debit to their balance sheets, and farmers as a hazard to their livelihoods.

Here, for the first time, Booz China Managing Director Edward Tse parses the Chinese landscape, walking the reader through the Chinese business environment, the effects of Chinese economic power on worldwide business, and how the two mesh and interact. The China Strategy is the only book you'll need to do business in China, with China, or in competition against China.

Los retos económicos del país al que aspiramos. México en la encrucijada recopila los puntos de vista de un grupo de reconocidos especialistas sobre las medidas que deben adoptarse en distintos ámbitos en nuestro país para lograr un crecimiento económico adecuado, balanceado y sostenido. Todas las opiniones convergen en la misma dirección: ante las necesidades que enfrentamos y los errores cometidos en años previos, lo que se necesita es un ajuste de fondo en la estrategia.

In one lifetime GDP, or gross domestic product, has ballooned from a narrow economic tool into a global article of faith. It is our universal yardstick of progress. As The Little Big Number demonstrates, this spells trouble. While economies and cultures measure their performance by it, GDP ignores central facts such as quality, costs, and purpose.

From Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling author Joseph Stiglitz, author of Globalization and Its Discontents, this is the essential audio guide to the future of Europe. Solidarity and prosperity fostered by economic integration: this principle has underpinned the European project from the start, and the establishment of a common currency was supposed to be its most audacious and tangible achievement. Since 2008, however, the European Union has ricocheted between stagnation and crisis.

If Europe is to return to an innovative and dynamic economy - and if there is to be shared prosperity, social solidarity, and justice - then EU countries need to break with their current, destructive trajectory. This volume offers concrete strategies for renewal that would also reinvigorate the project of European integration, with fresh ideas in the areas of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, including central banking, public investment, corporate governance and competition policy, social policy, and international trade.

As the new century unfolds, we face a host of economic and social challenges - jobs lost to "off shoring," a huge and growing number of Americans without health insurance coverage, an expanding gap between rich and poor, stagnant wages, decaying public schools, and many others. These are difficult and complex problems, but our government's strategy for dealing with them has been essentially not to deal with them at all.

Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the gas station and the mall.

This critical account of the fair trade movement explores the vast gap between the rhetoric of fair trade and its practical results for poor countries, particularly those of Africa. In the Global North, fair trade often is described as a revolutionary tool for transforming the lives of millions across the globe. The growth in sales for fair trade products has been dramatic in recent years, but most of the benefit has accrued to the already wealthy merchandisers at the top of the value chain rather than to the poor producers at the bottom.

From inside the walls of Enron, a lone whistleblower attempted to avert the course of events leading to the largest bankruptcy in American history. On August 16, 2001, Sherron Watkins wrote an anonymous letter to Enron's Chairman, Ken Lay, laying out problems with Enron's use of partnerships to hide debt. She warned of a possible scandal that could topple the company if investors and the news media learned of the operations. Then, she revealed her identity and confronted Lay directly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a firehose of information (much of it wrong) and an avalanche of opinions (many of them ill-founded). Most of us are so distracted by the everyday awfulness that we don't see the broader issues in play. In this book, economist Joshua Gans steps back from the short-term chaos to take a clear and systematic look at how economic choices are being made in response to COVID-19. He shows that containing the virus and pausing the economy are the necessary first steps.

We all know the book: it's been hailed as one of the most important documents on how the world economy works, or doesn't work, and it's been a colossal bestseller since it first appeared in 2014, with more than 1.5 million copies sold. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes a powerful case that wealth, and accumulated wealth, tends to stay where it lands: and with the passage of time, just gets bigger…and bigger. But how many of us who bought or borrowed the book - or even, perhaps, reviewed it - have read more than a fraction of its 696 pages?

Solving the world’s biggest problems - from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance - requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. In The Spirit of Green, Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus describes a new way of green thinking that would help us overcome our biggest challenges without sacrificing economic prosperity, in large part by accounting for the spillover costs of economic collisions.

We live in a world awash in manmade chemicals, from the pesticides on our front lawns to the diesel exhaust in the air we breathe. Although experts are beginning to understand the potential dangers of these substances, there are still more than 80,000 synthetic compounds that have not been sufficiently tested to interpret their effects on human health.

Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail to note that the far greater harm caused when someone becomes a smoker is to make others more likely to smoke. In Under the Influence, Robert Frank attributes this regulatory asymmetry to the laudable belief that individuals should accept responsibility for their own behavior.

Best-selling author Chris Turner brings listeners onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the myriad ways the oil sands of Alberta impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: To both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch? This is no conventional story about the oil business. Rather, it is a portrait of the life cycle of the Patch, showing just how deeply it continues to impact the lives of everyone around the world.

A leading thinker's groundbreaking examination of women's economic empowerment. Scholar and activist Linda Scott argues that women’s systematic exclusion from economic participation has created an alternate system that she calls “The Double X Economy”: having suffered from a consistent list of severe and worldwide economic exclusions applied throughout history, women have been shaped into an entirely different economic practice. Yet the women’s economy, when empowered, is more careful, cooperative, and focused on long-term outcomes than the world's current economic order.