The Limits of The Market
The Pendulum Between Government and Market
Reviewer: Rosemary Connell
The old discussion of 'Market or State' is obsolete. There will always have to be a mix of market and state. The only relevant question is what that mix should look like. How far do we have to let the market go its own way in order to create as much welfare as possible for everyone? What is the responsibility of the government in creating welfare? These are difficult questions. But they are also interesting questions and Paul De Grauwe analyses them in this book.

Globalisation: A MOOC from FutureLearn
Reviewer: Ian Bright
Understanding globalisation – a topic that dominates political and economic discourse worldwide – is important for anyone who cares about our planet’s future and wants to help shape it. This online course introduces economic globalisation, and its impact on society past and present.
Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce, former joint Head, Government Economic Service
In June 2016, the United Kingdom shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. As this book reveals, the historic vote for Brexit marked the culmination of trends in domestic politics and in the UK's relationship with the EU that have been building over many years. Drawing on a wealth of survey evidence collected over more than ten years, this book explains why most people decided to ignore much of the national and international community and vote for Brexit. Drawing on past research on voting in major referendums in Europe and elsewhere, a team of leading academic experts analyse changes in the UK's party system that were catalysts for the referendum vote, including the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the dynamics of public opinion during an unforgettable and divisive referendum campaign, the factors that influenced how people voted and the likely economic and political impact of this historic decision.

Too much stuff: Capitalism in crisis
Reviewer: Rebecca Harding, Delta Economics
Where has capitalism gone wrong? Why are advanced capitalist economies so sick and why do conventional policy solutions, such as reduced taxes and increased money supply, produce only wider income disparity and inequality? We now live in a new world in which we enjoy the highest living standard in history, acquiring ever more goods and services as necessary luxuries. Yet current policies only serve to expand public debt and exacerbate socio-economic inequality. In Too much stuff, Yamamura upends conventional capitalist wisdom to provide a new approach.

Connectedness and Contagion
Protecting the financial system from panics
Reviewer: William Allen, NIESR
The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008. Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis – that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures. In this book, Hal Scott argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system.

How Change Happens
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce
This book bridges the gap between academia and practice, bringing together the best research from a range of academic disciplines and the evolving practical understanding of activists to explore the topic of social and political change. Drawing on many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, one of the world's largest social justice NGOs, as well as the author's insights from studying and working on international development, it tests ideas on How Change Happens and offers the latest thinking on what works to achieve progressive change.

The 99 Essential Business Questions
To take you beyond the obvious management actions
Reviewer: Vicky Pryce
The authors bring combined experience from across a wide range of business sectors to solve your professional problems! The 99 Essential Business Questions will provide you with the answers you're looking for - but it only contains questions and scenarios, ideas and strategies. This is not a straightforward question and answer book. The right questions, and your answers, provide you with the insight to take the right decisions and act in a way that goes beyond the blatantly obvious.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
Reviewer: Rebecca Harding
The authors discuss how the troubles faced by the Euro have led its member states to focus on national, as opposed to collective, responses, a reaction explained by the resurgence of the battle of economic ideas: rules vs. discretion, liability vs. solidarity, solvency vs. liquidity, austerity vs. stimulus. Weaving together economic analysis and historical reflection, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas provides a forensic investigation and a road map for Europe's future.

Unequal Democracy
The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker
The first edition of Unequal Democracy was an instant classic, shattering illusions about American democracy and spurring scholarly and popular interest in the political causes and consequences of escalating economic inequality. This revised and expanded edition includes two new chapters on the political economy of the Obama era.Larry Bartels offers a sobering account of the barriers to change posed by partisan ideologies and the political power of the wealthy. He also provides new analyses of tax policy, partisan differences in economic performance, the struggle to raise the minimum wage, and inequalities in congressional representation. President Obama identified inequality as "the defining challenge of our time." Unequal Democracy is the definitive account of how and why our political system has failed to rise to that challenge. Now more than ever, this is a book every American needs to read.

Unlikely Partners
Chinese Reformers, Western Economists and The Making of Global China
Reviewer: Christine Shields, Independent Consultant
Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China's productive exchanges with the West.

The Power of Networks
Six Principles That Connect Our Lives
Reviewer: Mark Cleary, Kinetic Economics
What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Why do Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube use fundamentally different rating and recommendation methods–and why does it matter? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected in six steps or less? And how do cat videos–or anything else–go viral? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand and use, whether at home, the office, or school. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart but accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the technical and social networks we use every day–from cellular phone networks and cloud computing to the Internet and social media platforms.

The Curse of Cash
Reviewer: Ian Bright
Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Economics, Association of American Publishers Selected for Canada's Financial Post Best Personal Finance and Economics Books of 2016 One of Bloomberg's Best Books of 2016 One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Economics Books of 2016 Longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2016 "In a brilliant and lucid new book, The Curse of Cash, the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff gives a fascinating and thorough account of the argument against cash."–John Lanchester, New York Times Magazine

The Great Convergence
Information Technology and the new globalisation
Reviewer: Bridget Rosewell, Volterra Partners
Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalisation that is drastically different from the old. Because globalisation is now driven by fast-paced technological change and the fragmentation of production, its impact is more sudden, more selective, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable. As The Great Convergence shows, the new globalisation presents rich and developing nations alike with unprecedented policy challenges in their efforts to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion.

Dynamic Economic Decision Making
Strategies for Financial Risk, Capital Markets, and Monetary Policy
Reviewer: Dame Kate Barker
Financial decision-making requires one to anticipate how their decision will not only affect their business, but also the economic environment. Unfortunately, all too often, both private and public sector decision-makers view their decisions as one-off responses and fail to see their decisions within the context of an evolving decision-making framework.
In Decision-Making in a Dynamic Economic Setting, John Silvia, Chief Economist of Wells Fargo and one of the top 5 economic forecasters according to Bloomberg News and USA Today, skillfully puts this discipline in perspective.

Progress
Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
Reviewer: Ian Stewart, Chief Economist, Deloitte
It’s all over our televisions, newspapers and the internet. Every day we’re bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is – Brexit, financial collapse, unemployment, poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. Indeed, our world now seems to be on the brink of collapse, and yet contrary to what most of us believe, our progress over the past few decades has been unprecedented.

The political origins of inequality
Why a More Equal World is Better for Us All
Reviewer: Christine Shields, Shields Economics
Inequality is the defining issue of our time. But it is not just a problem for the rich world. It is the global 1% that now owns fully half the world's wealth-the true measure of our age of inequality. In this historical tour de force, Simon Reid-Henry rewrites the usual story of globalization and development as a story of the management of inequality.

Platform Revolution
How Networked Markets Are Transforming The Economy
Reviewer: Mark Cleary, Kinetic Economics
Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber-these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value.

The Man Who Knew
The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan
Reviewer: Ian Harwood, Independent Economic & Investment Consultant
Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, this is the biography of one of the titans of financial history over the last fifty years.

The Wealth of Humans
Work and its Absence in the Twenty‑first Century
Reviewer: Andrew Sentance, Senior Economic Adviser, PwC and former MPC member
To work is human, yet the world of work is changing fast, and in unexpected ways. With rapid advances in information technology, huge swathes of the job market - from cleaners and drivers to journalists and doctors - are being automated: a staggering 47% of American employment is at risk of automation within the next two to three decades. At the same time, millions more jobs are being created. What does the future of work hold?

The Disruption Dilemma
Reviewer: David Lancefield, Partner, PwC
"Disruption" is a business buzzword that has gotten out of control. Today everything and everyone seem to be characterized as disruptive – or, if they aren't disruptive yet, it's only a matter of time before they become so. In this book, Joshua Gans cuts through the chatter to focus on disruption in its initial use as a business term, identifying new ways to understand it and suggesting new tools to manage it.
