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The book "Studies in Indian Public Finance" by M. Govinda Rao provides a comprehensive examination of public finance in India, focusing on topics such as public expenditure, tax policy and reforms, deficit and public debt, and the federal system. The author combines theoretical and practical aspects of public finance, offering insights into policies and reforms. The book also explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian economy and concludes with recommendations for reforms in public finance. While the book provides empirical evidence to support its arguments, it may overlook certain limitations placed on federal states and does not establish a clear choice between a welfare state and a market state. Overall, the book offers valuable insights for policymakers and researchers in the field of public finance. [Extracted from the article]

"The Legal Foundations of Micro-Institutional Performance: A Heterodox Law and Economics Approach" by Sarah S. Klammer and Eric A. Scorsone is a textbook aimed at graduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics and other social sciences. The authors explore the relationship between law and economics, emphasizing the importance of institutions and interdependence. They discuss the legal framework of jural correlatives introduced by Wesley Hohfeld and its influence on institutional economics. The book also introduces the authors' own framework, the Legal-Economic Performance (LEP) model, which connects law and economics empirically. Overall, this book provides valuable insights into the role of law in economic activity and offers a fertile field for research in institutional impact analysis. [Extracted from the article]

Archana Aggarwal's book, "Labouring Lives: Industry and Informality in New India," is a short and humanistic work that advocates for policies to improve the lives of laboring people in India. Aggarwal argues that manufacturing should prioritize domestic demand and that workers should be provided with social and legal protections, including minimum wages and safe working conditions. The book also highlights the struggles and vulnerabilities faced by workers in industries such as readymade garments and automotive manufacturing. While the book offers valuable insights and data, it lacks a comprehensive analysis of countermovements to neoliberal globalization and does not provide a detailed examination of the tiered structure of laboring lives in production chains. Overall, the book is recommended for those interested in labor economics and development economics. [Extracted from the article]

Thus, addressing the economics of agriculture without paying special attention to issues related to agricultural sector inefficiencies such as post-harvest crop losses, especially in countries that highly depend on agriculture, is to limit knowledge on the matter. The role of agriculture is not limited to the assurance of food security, but is largely hidden in the growth of economies, especially for countries whose economies depend on agriculture. Agriculture in the developing world is hindered by several factors, which are mainly categorised into institutional factors; poverty, geographical and climate factors; and human factors. [Extracted from the article]

The land possession and land dispossession happening in Indonesia show that neoclassical development economists are only correct one tenth of the time. Therefore, Lund explains that land claimants usually (a) refuse to pay rent to landlords and (b) occupy land by force and declare public land as theirs. Formalising land tenure relations is commonly advocated in mainstream development studies (e.g., Ali and Deininger, [1]; Beg, [2]) as a panacea for insecurity and uncertainty of land tenure. [Extracted from the article]

Deterioration of the workers can be traced through lower wage rates, low demand for labour due to labour cost-cutting, low level of human capital, skill development and casualisation in the labour market. The book consists of five chapters that thematically cover India's development trajectory since Independence, labour condition and much debated issue of social security among the informal workers of India. Lower wages in casual jobs forced workers to join informal jobs in the service sector as there is a higher wage rate in the service sector. Jha highlighted the problems of improper employment generation, weak labour institutions, informal sector and low income along with the facility of social security for all the working class. [Extracted from the article]

Indeed, all those characteristics of the development of capitalism historically everywhere can be found across Africa: the creation of a disciplined labour force, the savage labour conditions suffered by male, female and child wage labour, the waste of resources, the negative effects of extractive industries and the instabilities and inequalities associated with capitalist markets. But further discussion of the development of unions across Africa and evidence of their effects on labour conditions is a notable omission given the importance attached by the authors to the development of a strong organized working class. In 2000, Africa was dubbed the "Hopeless Continent" by I The Economist i . [Extracted from the article]

In this book, Ernesto Screpanti presents a groundbreaking rereading of Karl Marx's theory of value and exploitation. In the closing lines of his book, Screpanti emphasizes that 'Marx declares workers to be moved by the goal of abolishing the conditions, not only of their enslavement, but also of their exploitation. The divergence between labor values and production prices arises not because the profit rate is uniform in the price system, but because the profit rate exists. [Extracted from the article]

Concerning the reception of Harrod's economic dynamics by Robert Solow and others-with the ensuing dominant textbook focus on growth paths-Pérez Caldentey endorses the view that Harrod himself was partly responsible for that alleged misrepresentation. Pérez Caldentey based that assessment on the paper Harrod contributed to a conference on development and trade in the early 1960s (section 7.4), although Harrod did elaborate on that in other publications around that period. Esteban Pérez Caldentey's broad account of Roy Harrod's various contributions to economic theory and policy is an important addition to the I Great Thinkers in Economics i series edited by A.P. Thirlwall. [Extracted from the article]

Considering the wealth of knowledge collectively held by the authors of I Handbook i , it is unfortunate that readers are not exposed to how these urgent topics would be approached in the context of alternative theories of economic development. As the editors Erik S. Reinert, Jayati Ghosh, and Rainer Kattel state in the I Handbook i introduction, "this book has collected alternatives to the neoclassical economic tradition that started with David Ricardo (1817) and his theory of comparative advantage" (xiii). Other chapters allow the reader to reevaluate alternative development theories well after their prime moment of influence, like in the chapter entitled "The Dependency School and Its Aftermath", where author Jose Gabriel Palma asks, "Whatever happened to the Structuralists and the Dependentistas after the fall of Allende and the Berlin Wall?". [Extracted from the article]

The title of Amos Witztum's book suggests a more radical scrutiny of the currently prevailing version of "liberal economics" - that is, of mainstream economics with its emphasis on individualism, instrumental rationality, and competitive decentralisation. Nonetheless, Witztum is right in stressing that behavioural economics does not per se ameliorate the architectonic problems of economics. Footnotes 1 According to Witztum, modern economics has no resources for diagnosing failures of the market (in contrast to the local market failures reducible to false or missing prices). [Extracted from the article]

Periphery and Small Ones Matter: Interplay of Policy and Social Capital: By Iwan J. Azis. Analytically, the result was meant to be a structural transformation of the I entire i economy such that poverty would no longer have a distinctly rural bias (Timmer [7], [10], [11]). Michael Woolcock has been hugely influential in forcing the development profession to seriously consider local-based knowledge and the powerful role of social capital (Woolcock [12]; Woolcock and Narayan [13]). [Extracted from the article]

This question of course has massive relevance after the global financial crisis of 2007 onward, which took the global economy to the brink - and which, for many economies, has never really been resolved at a structural level even as headline accounting numbers like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have seemingly improved. At certain points in the book, the authors make trenchant and even brilliant insights on the role of the central bank in money creation, financial crises, and the development of the financial sector in general. Unfortunately, the neglect of the institution of the central bank throughout the book, and how macroeconomics has incorporated (or failed to incorporate) the institution of central banking into models of the financial sector, is a missed opportunity. [Extracted from the article]

This allows him to challenge development economics and its focus on Africa's "capital problems" (p. 18, see below) when explaining development gaps between Africa and the world. Obeng-Odoom proves that stratification economics is a perspective that can provide meaningful and actionable explanations of persistent and growing intra- and intergroup inequalities across the world, particularly in Africa. If I had to recommend one book on the contemporary political economy of Africa, it would be this one. [Extracted from the article]

I Asian Transformations i was published to mark the half-century since the publication of Gunner Myrdal's magnum opus, I Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations i , in 1968 with its very fitting title - I Asian Transformations: An Inquiry into the Development of Nations i - for the occasion. This extension has enabled Nayyar to discern divergent development experiences among Asian countries and account for underlying factors behind these critical differences among the subregions and individual countries in Asia. Whilst this volume is by no means the first attempt to examine Asia's development performances since the 1970s, it goes far beyond the conventional story of Asia's growth miracle and acceleration that is often found in mainstream economic literature and has dominated policy debates on Asian development experiences. [Extracted from the article]

Ms Robinson was never a close friend of Colin Clark, though they knew each other from Keynes's circle in the 1930s. Colin Clark (1905-1989) was an unusual man with some unusual ideas. It was during this time that Clark developed his path-breaking work on national income accounting, which was used by Keynes to give quantitative clout to, for example, his I How to Pay for the War i (1940). [Extracted from the article]

I Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders i by Pedro M. Rey-Araújo rigorously vindicates a radical political economy of/for (re)conciliation between Marxism and post-structuralist discourse theory, in order to comprehend the frictional mechanisms of socioeconomic reproduction and sociopolitical interactions. Capitalism, Institutions and Social Orders: The Case of Contemporary Spain: by Pedro M. Rey-Araújo, Abingdon, Routledge, 2021, 250 pp., £120 (hardback), ISBN 9780367480660 / £33.29 (eBook), ISBN 9781003037811 All these things said, Rey-Araújo has written an excellent book, as carefully written as it is ambitious, where he offers a rigorous, solid, and certainly influential theoretical framework, especially to those researchers situating themselves at the frontiers of political economy. [Extracted from the article]

I Capitalism Without Capital i offers a non-technical, wide-ranging scrutiny of the increasing growth of ephemeral goods and services in the economy. Indeed the opposite - ever increasing returns from the production of one work - has become an integral part of the knowledge economy, in effect turning many goods into public goods. [Extracted from the article]

All these chapters have one thing in common - the impact of the entry of multinational companies (MNCs) and foreign investment in general on the changing legal environment in Myanmar. Four chapters in the book take up the common theme of the role of civil society and local level governance in the emerging business scenario in Myanmar. Nishimura's chapter highlights the contradictions between international and domestic law in the context of SEZ development in Myanmar. [Extracted from the article]

Bartels gave us, Jones and Tadajewski write, "the unmistakable impression that early marketing academics were trained in, and influenced by, classical, and to some extent, neoclassical economics" (p. 1). Jones and Tadajewski are not saying that everything that had previously been written about the history of marketing thought and marketing practice was mistaken. Brian Jones, D.G. Tadajewski, Mark (2018), Foundations of Marketing Thought: The Influence of the German Historical School. [Extracted from the article]

With regards to firm size capability failures, Lee focuses on business groups as a fourth organizational "detour" for catching-up countries. Firms in emerging economies are stuck in an "innovation paradox" as their lack of innovation capabilities precludes them from further innovation with expected low returns. Barriers, detours and leapfrogging in innovation systems: by Keun Lee, Cambridge, UK & New York, USA, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 279 pp., £64.99 (hardback), ISBN 9781108472876, £22.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781108460705, $24.00 (eBook), ISBN 9781108633000. [Extracted from the article]

Progress Through Regression: The Life Story of the Empirical Cobb-Douglas Production Function: by Jeff E. Biddle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, 334 pp., £85, ISBN 9781108492263 In the first part, Biddle details the efforts by Paul Douglas to develop techniques to empirically estimate the production function, and defend the endeavour from critics. Jeff Biddle's I Progress Through Regression i is a biography of the Cobb-Douglas production function, and illustrates the usefulness of the biography of a scientific object to tell a history that expands beyond any single person or group. [Extracted from the article]

NDBs enjoyed prominence at the height of Keynesianist policies in the 1950s-1970s, when governments and International Financial Institutions considered NDBs as effective tools to promote economic development. The standing of National Development Banks (NDBs) among academics and policymakers has altered significantly since the 1950s. In contrast, crisis episodes such as the 2007-2009 Great Recession saw NDBs increase lending by around 7.4 per cent, while lending from private banks went down by about 3.2 per cent. [Extracted from the article]

Mark Hayes, John Maynard Keynes: the art of choosing the right model: Polity Press, Cambridge (UK), 2020, xv + 195 pp., 62.20 € Mark Hayes passed away 10 days before last Christmas, shortly after presenting his second book on John Maynard Keynes. Written by one of the last "Keynes scholar", "John Maynard Keynes. [Extracted from the article]

In addressing the shortcomings of mainstream development economics and other theories, Obeng-Odoom proposes two alternatives: socialisms and Africanisms. The strength of I Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa i lies in its unique adoption of stratification economics to analyse inequality, poverty, and economic growth in Africa. Typical of him, Obeng-Odoom introduces "The Problem" by devoting a considerable number of pages in the first part of the book to "unapologetically" criticise mainstream neoclassical development economics and its variant of new institutional economics for their superficial diagnosis of the dynamics of inequality, poverty, and economic growth in Africa. [Extracted from the article]