The question of work-life balance and the difficulties of managing multiple roles is attracting considerable interest. This international collection broadens the focus of these debates and presents recent research findings that will further stimulate theoretical development and empirical studies. While much previous research has focused on the challenges faced by working mothers, the research presented in this collection introduces perspectives that have not been widely included in previous work in the field, such as the voice of children, the challenges that students face, the role of both employers and unions and how different occupational groups experience work-life balancing strategies.

As the influence of labor unions declines in many industrialized nations, particularly the United States, the influence of workers has decreased. Because of the need for greater involvement of workers in changing production systems, as well as frustration with existing structures of workplace regulation, the search has begun for new ways of providing a voice for workers outside the traditional collective bargaining relationship.Works councils--institutionalized bodies for representative communication between an employer and employees in a single workplace--are rare in the Anglo-American world, but are well-established in other industrialized countries. The contributors to this volume survey the history, structure, and functions of works councils in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Canada, and the United States. Special attention is paid to the relations between works councils and unions and collective bargaining, works councils and management, and the role and interest of governments in works councils. On the basis of extensive comparative data from other Western countries, the book demonstrates powerfully that well-designed works councils may be more effective than labor unions at solving management-labor problems.

Книга затрагивает проблематику взаимоотношения и влияния сельскохозяйственного производства на окружающую среду, а также возникающих экологических проблемах. Даются некоторые советы по повышению эффективности использования природных ресурсов в сельском хозяйстве и путях снижения степени негативного влияния на природные системы. Автор анализирует двадцать основных видов сельскохозяйственного сырья, предоставляя информацию об основных странах производителях и потребителях, видах и способах производства, анализ рыночных цепочек, влияния данного производства на окружающую среду, стратегий управления и применения лучших методов.

Книга «Мировое сельское хозяйство в беспорядке» - об основных тенденциях развития мирового сельского хозяйства. Автором показывается постепенное развитие сельского хозяйства с ростом производительности, фондовооруженности, снижением занятости и доли сектора в экономике в целом. Также, глубокому анализу подвергаются аграрные политики развитых стран и их отрицательное воздействие на развивающиеся страны.

Previous quantitative assessments of likely impacts of recent reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (in particular the Agenda 2000) differ across empirical studies. Differences are mainly due to the ways the policy instruments are taken into account (explicit modeling or implicit modeling i.e. using ad-valorem equivalents). The aim of this paper is to assess empirically the impacts of recent reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy and the consequences of the Mid-Term proposals on world cereals markets. We develop an econometric, dynamic, multi-product, partial equilibrium commodity model that focuses on arable crops. Major exporters and major importers are modeled separately, other countries being included in a rest of the world category. For the countries or regions explicitly integrated the model estimates supply, demand and trade. The model we develop has two important features:
i) the parameters estimated in the behavioral equations (supply and demand) satisfy regularity conditions and
ii) the agricultural policy instruments (in particular CAP instruments) are modeled in an explicit way.

In the empirical section, attention focuses on the world cereals market. We provide a market outlook through the year 2009 for three different scenarios: baseline projections and two scenarios based on different assumptions regarding the evolution of the Common Agricultural Policy (the Mid-Term Review scenario and the decoupling scenario). Estimated effects of the mid-term scenario on EU crop prices depend on the relationship between EU and world market prices.

This book retells the history of Western industrialization, revealing possibilities unexplored in the nineteenth century, variants of which have come to transform present day economies. It shows that economic actors have historically been more aware of the great strategic choices they faced than standard theory credits them with being, and this surprising acuity allows them to imagine and put into practice solutions which current theories of industrial organization have scarcely anticipated. The book is therefore at one and the same time a contribution to a substantive revision of the history of mechanized production and a propaedeutic in a form of explanation that approximates the knowledge of the actor to the knowledge of the theorist. The volume groups essays presented by a multinational team of historians and social scientists drawing on intensive primary research on a wide range of firms, regions, sectors and national economies in Western Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century to the 1990s.

The work of Henri Lefebvre - the only major French intellectual of the post-war period to give extensive consideration to the city and urban life - received considerable attention among both academics and practitioners of the built environment following the publication in English of The Production of Space. This new collection brings together, for the first time in English, Lefebvre's reflections on the city and urban life written over a span of some twenty years.The selection of writings is contextualized by an introduction - itself a significant contribution to the interpretation of Henri Lefebvre's work - which places the material within the context of Lefebvre's intellectual and political life and times and raises pertinent issues as to their relevance for contemporary debates over such questions as the nature of urban reality, the production of space and modernity.

A theory-based graphical analysis of WTO’s trade liberalization policies (opening of close-economy to international trade and cuts in price-supports, import-tariffs and exportsubsidies) suggests that most of such policies would yield net social gains to the society, as a whole. The adverse effects and losses in producer surpluses of some of the policies would be balanced out by greater gains in consumer surpluses and vice versa. Losses in producer surpluses due to cuts in price supports and import tariffs are also expected to be partially subsided by reductions in export subsidies mainly granted by the USA and EU; hence, policies need to be enforced, not in isolation, but in a simultaneous fashion. Trade liberalization would help minimize control of individuals on trade, leave less room for individual policy makers, tax collectors and interest groups to exploit situations in their own interest and lead the economy to be run in accordance with the supply and demand forces based on the last lasting general tendency of human nature. This would help to achieve a sustainable and stable agricultural growth; however, more durable sustained growth would depend as how effectively trade liberalization is pursued and enforced the world over. Opening of closed economy for exportables, and withdrawal of export subsidies by foreign exporters would be proproducers and would directly contribute to poverty alleviation. Opening of economy for importables, withdrawal of price supports and tariff-cuts on imports would yield savings to consumers and would positively contribute towards poverty reduction.

This paper provides a summary measure of the possible new commitments in the area of market access undertaken by the European Union and the United States, using the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) as the tariff aggregator. Indicators such as the TRI, based on welfare theory, integrate economic behavioural assumptions within a balance of trade framework. We take the 2000 bound tariffs as the starting point and attempt to assess how much liberalisation in agriculture could be achieved in the European Union and the United States as a result of the present negotiations. We compute the index for agricultural commodity aggregates assuming a specific (Constant Elasticity of Substitution) functional form for import demand. The present levels of the TRI under the actual commitments of the Uruguay Round are computed and compared with three hypothetical cases: a repetition of the same set of commitments of the Uruguay Round, a uniform 36 percent reduction of each tariff, an harmonization formula based on the “sliding scale” scheme. This makes it possible to infer how reducing tariff dispersion would help improve market access in future trade agreements.