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This course is intended to introduce students to the research frontier in the study of global sustainability and contemporary issues that defines the future trends of global sustainability. It also includes relevant and important topics not covered by other courses in this stream to broaden students’ academic and intellectual horizon.
This book systematically analyzes how and why China has expectedly lost and then surprisingly gained ground in the quest to solve the complicated environmental problem of air pollution over the past two decades. It poses how China’s sulfur dioxide emissions rose quickly in tandem with rapid economic growth but then dropped to a level not seen for at least four decades, and details how this stemmed from a litany of policy stumbles within the Chinese context of no democracy and a lack of sound rule of law. The book presents a goal-centered governance model that China has adopted of centralized goal setting, decentralized goal attainment, decentralized policy making and implementation.
This book presents the contribution that natural resource exploitation has made to economic development in key eras of world history. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that the examination of this issue may help us understand better the role of scarcity and frontiers in today’s economies. The book is organized in the historical line, covering the agricultural transition (10,000BC-3000BC), the rise of cities (3000BC-1000AD), the emergence of the world economy (1000-1500), global frontiers and the rise of Western Europe (1500-1914), the Atlantic economy triangular trade (1500-1860), the golden age of resource-based development (1870-1914), the age of dislocation (1914-1950), and the contemporary era (1950 to present).
This book examines the relationship between the natural resource endowment and the four main types of capital (produced, natural, human, and social), tests the degree to which the relationship between natural resources and development is a deterministic one by first exploring this relationship historically and then by constructing short-run and medium-term models of resource-abundant and resource-poor growth, and presents case studies of the development trajectories of resource-abundant countries with different permutations of natural resources and political economy since the 1960s, exploring how the growth trajectory varies with differences in the initial conditions.
This book explores the process of technical change in the goods-producing industries. Part 1 examines the role of productivity in the process of economic growth. Part 2 provides a historical and analytic review of innovation processes, discusses several technical change models, and reviews the technology adoption and diffusion. Part 3 contains five historical case studies of industries: agriculture, energy, chemicals, computers, and biotechnology, each of which provides the reader with an assessment of major technological changes and discusses these in a common framework. Part 4 deals with technology policy, analyzing technological innovation in various social and economic systems including the Japanese, German, and American.
This book is aimed to elucidate the conception of innovation. It includes 21 essays, each focusing on a specific aspect of innovation, plus an introductory essay. Part 1 focuses on the process through which innovations occur and the actors that take part. Part 2 outlines the systems perspective on innovation studies and discusses the roles of institutions, organizations, and actors in this process at the national and regional level. Part 3 explores the diversity in the manner in which such systems work over time and across different sectors or industries. Part 4 examines the broader social and economic consequences of innovation and the associated policy issues.
