Genre: & Economics

  • Contesting Malaysia’s Integration into the World Economy (Palgrave McMillan 2021)

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      Review by Phar Kim Beng “Show me the book the man reads, I will proceed to show you the man,” affirmed George Bernard Shaw. While there is much truism to what Shaw may have once said, “Contesting Malaysia’s Integration into the World Economy,” as edited by Rajah Rasiah, Azirah…

  • The Euro And The Battle Of Ideas

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    “The Euro and the Battle of Ideas,” written by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau is premised on a very simple and powerful basis: that different historical experiences, hence ideologies of what constitutes governance, have led to different expectations of what the Euro should be. Stripped from this book…

  • The Inevitable

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    Notwithstanding Moore’s Law that the powers of computer chips will double every eighteen months, if not less, the fact remains that computers are changing the world faster than they can change themselves. Yet, Kevin Kelly noted, computers and the internet were around in 1991. In fact, they were created in…

  • Global Inequality

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    Global inequality has often been measured from the standpoint of the developed versus the developing countries; which is otherwise captured in the development study literature as the UN Human Development Index. The picture that one obtains is global inequality from the standpoint of two clusters of countries arrayed against.. The…

  • Platform Revolution

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    All roads lead to Rome, goes one saying. Why Rome? For the longest time, Rome was the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, before it broke up into the Byzantine Empire in the East that is now Turkey. Fast forward to the 21st century, all global economic exchanges seem to…

  • The Gig Economy

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    There is nothing as certain as death and taxes. But one should add retrenchment in a globalizing world. At the rate the world is becoming a giant globe of trading space, there is no guarantee that the most expensive and cheapest jobs won’t be shipped out and shipped away, permanently.…

  • The Sharing Economy

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    In a different age, Arun Sundarajan, an economist at New York University’s Stern School of Management, would have been regarded as a “leftist.” All that focus on “sharing,” would have made the book look like a Communist Manifesto. But wait, the “Sharing Economy” is not about the present. Rather, it…

  • Makers and Takers

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    Rana Foroohar, without a doubt has written an impressive book on the American economy. Unlike in the 1970s, when every USD 1 spent on investment would generate USD 3 worth of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) related activities; the table has been turned. These days, especially after the Great Recession in…

  • The Curse Of Cash

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    Kenneth S Rogoff is not your conventional economist. He teaches at Harvard University, and was once chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. But he has put forward a powerful, and provocative proposition: paper currencies in the world over, especially those in large denominations, have to be phased out, in…

  • The Dollar Trap

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    The US economy has been financialized to the degree that it takes USD 4 dollars to produce USD 1 dollar of output. This ratio will keep enlarging. Indeed, it used to be USD 1.5 dollars to produce an output of USD 1 dollar in the 1970s-1980s. The good old days…