That China continues to be a communist state with no meaningful democratic practices in place is a cause of concern for the international community. The Communist Party follows a traditional process of selecting members for its leadership positions. Such being the case, it is impossible for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds to make it to…
Category: Economics
The Ways of Her Household by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Ulrich argues that housekeeping can be a challenging, complex task requiring real skill and intelligence. How so? At the beginning of the essay, Ulrich sets out the details of some of the daily chores that women in Colonial America performed each day. Unlike the electronic amenities and appliances available to women in modern times, the…
Summary of chapters 3,4 & 5 of the book ‘The Economics of Women, Men, and Work’ by Blau, Ferber & Winkler
Chapter 3 of the book is titled The Family as an Economic Unit. Here the authors discuss the importance of the concept of family for the functioning of neoclassical economic models. In the United States and other Western capitalist democracies, the neoclassical economics is the dominant paradigm for analysis and policy. In this context, it…
Alexander Hamilton’s role in establishing the US Treasury and laying the foundation for the American Economic System
Alexander Hamilton, alongside such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison is rightly considered as a founding father of the United States of America. In the second half of the eighteenth century, when British colonies in America entered a period of fervent political change, intellectuals such as Hamilton played…
Investment Through On-line Banking Services: Risks and Rewards
The growth of the Internet in the last twenty years has spurred the growth of on-line financial services as well. These days on-line banking and e-commerce have become ubiquitous, as financial transactions are carried out at users’ convenient place and time. An offshoot of this broader phenomenon is on-line investment services offered by various banks. …
Should the UK Tax system be simplified?
A good indication of how complicated the present tax system in the UK is, is learnt from the size of the most authoritative guide to the subject. Tolley’s Yellow Tax Handbook, which is being published every year since 1983 is getting bigger each subsequent year. To give an example, it totalled close to 6,000 pages…
Human trafficking in the United States and its relationship to poverty
In recent decades the issue of human trafficking into the United States has been an issue of contention in political debates. The southern border with Mexico is the primary channel through which illegal immigrants (most of them of Hispanic origin from Central American countries) attempt to sneak into the confines of the world’s most prosperous…
A comparison of the development strategies of India and China and their rates of poverty reduction
India and China are both touted to be the next economic superpowers. As both countries are home to close to a third of the world’s population, they have enormous human resources with which to capitalize on. Alongside this natural advantage in terms of human resource, the domestic and foreign policies of both nations have been…
The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism by Russell Roberts
Russell Roberts is one of the prominent economic thinkers of our times. His works are known for their insightfulness, accessibility and relevance to current economic problems. The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism is one of his best works as it excels in the above mentioned qualities. The book essentially presents to the…
Warren Buffett overturns all the main ideas of modern investment theory
Warren Buffett, alongside Benjamin Graham is considered to be the leading gurus of investment strategy. Though Benjamin Graham pioneered the notion of ‘value investing’, it was Buffett who consolidated the theory through repeated application. The consistency with which Buffett’s portfolio out-performed the average market results does prove beyond doubt the veracity of his ideas. His…