External-finance

Very comprehensive. A masterpiece.

All of the modern books available on the aweful state of Egyptian economy have been written by Western experts, with consequent bias towards the opinion of crafting Egypt's economy to conform to globalisation and the interests of Western economies. The only exception is this book, written by an Egyptian, and written soley from the perspective of the interests of Egypt's populace. It is nothing short of fantastic!! Prof Amin discusses the root causes of Egypt's dire economic circumstances, to the rental nature of the Egyptian economy (a feature of the cancerous social mentality affecting Egyptians nowadays), Sadat's disastrous economic policies, and most of all to the present government's adoption of Structural Adjustment policies. Galal Amin crushes these views and the policy of Structural Adjustment, and suggests ways out of "Egypt's economic predicament".

I have always been interested in how to reform the Egyptian economy and political landscape, and never thought a book existed on it. I mean... whoever would be interested in the Egytian economy and bother to write a book about it?? Galal Amin's book is essential reading if you rate Egypt's economy and people important and believe they could change to be so much greater.

The title of this book is misleading, it was to be called Long-Range Marketing. In fact it is about the increasingly popular subject of long-range planning and strategy - albeit that it comes at this from the marketing perspective. It's importance is that - for the first time - it describes ways of incorporating the longer-term into the planning of most companies; where previously it has been the province of the larger ones (such as Shell, who worked with the author). The new approaches can provide reasonable input in less than a day. In this way it very effectively addresses the problem of short-termism which bedevils so many organisations.

This book is a must in understanding globilization, the hoarding of the dollar abroad, the potential repercutions of a liberal trade policy and solutions for a soft-landing. Due to a lack of understanding of this subject the first chapter was laborsome, but soon I became facinated with this subject. Overall, this book significantly elevated my understanding of the subject and provides an insightful view into this transparent issue.

One of the most common (mis)interpretations of the east Asian currency crises of the late 1990s is that they were caused by George Soros and other speculators, hedge fund principals for the most part, who shorted those currencies and the respective bonds in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I was happy to se that Mr. Pettis knows better. He writes that he was in regular contact with three large macro hedge funds in 1997, in his capacity as an emerging markets specialist for Bear Stearns, "including the most famous of these, and our discussions about Asia generally centered on ways to gain protected access to LONG rupiah positions. There was very little interest in shorting the currency."

Indonesia and its rupiah provides a particularly vivid example of the capital structure trap that Pettis adumbrates so admirably in this book.

Michael Pettis has succeeded in mystifying the collapse of EM economies. His approach is new and indeed very methodical. I found the book intellectually challenging and have learned quite a lot reading it. I highly recommend it for those who want to understand how LDC economies rise and fall. Having a background in corpporate finance is crucial to enjoying the book though.

This is a MUST READ for institutional investors worldwide! For the first time I have a confident sense of what is at the core of emerging market instability. Now if only some government policy makers would read this (even they would understand it!), the causal conditions might start to improve.

Though Third World debt does not currently appear on the public radar screen, it continues to concern Wall Street power-brokers and ad-hoc groupings of conscience, such as Jubilee 2000. Mc Ewan's book, though
somewhat dated, provides invaluable background on sources of the problem and prospects for something more than temporary bandaid solutions.

The text is distinguished by a particularly lucid account of the 1945 Bretton Woods Agreement, the international conference that institutionalized American hegemony over global economics during the lengthy post-war period. By fixing exchange rates around the dollar as international currency, US bankers were able - as the text makes clear - to displace many domestic problems onto foreign economies. This is a crucial aspect of so-called American prosperity that few well-meaning citizens are aware of, but which has affected overseas relations in sometimes decisive ways.

In its dynamics, Latin American debt appears to be particularly unpayable. Growth in south of the border economies - as McEwan shows - has been critically undermined by excessive capital export required to service International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. This international banker, now the target of world-wide protest, imposes payback conditions that include curtailed government expenditures and increased foreign exports, measures that drain these peasant economies of whatever growth potential is left over. Particularly disturbing is the informed observation that so long as these basic terms of trade remain unaltered, debt foregiveness, like aspirin on a cancer, can produce little more than temporary relief. People of conscience need to read this book.

In his new book, Economic Development and Political Reform: The Impact of External Capital on the Middle East, Bradley Louis Glasser analyzes the impact of exogenous state revenues on political and economic liberalization in selected Middle Eastern polities. In essence, Glasser focuses on achieving a broader understanding of how and why political liberalization evolves differently in different countries and at different time periods. His study contends that economic conditions and policies often shape the scope of political-liberalization or democratization processes in the region, and that the impact of internal political dynamics or political elites in this process must be understood only through a broader economic perspective. Throughout his book, Glasser builds upon the modern "rentier state" hypothesis which argues that high levels of exogenous revenues (oil, pipeline, and canal revenue, foreign aid, etc.) have inhibited the liberalization of Middle Eastern states. He expands this notion to argue that states lacking exogenous revenues have experienced acute fiscal crises that have led to center-right and neoliberal electoral coalitions. On the other hand, he contends that regimes with greater exogenous resources have been able to weather economic crises successfully and hence have developed more heterodox, populist parliamentary majorities.
Glasser primarily cites political and historical evidence from Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, and Kuwait in his analysis, emphasizing that his analytical framework can apply equally well to each of the nations' varied regime types. Glasser interprets and analyzes various historical data, economic and political trends, and statistical revenue information to develop his hypothesis, placing each of his exemplar polities within a categorical framework based on the percentage exogenous revenues contribute to the states' total revenue.
Representing "minimally rentier" states, or those whose exogenous revenues comprise less than 20 percent of total GNP, are Turkey and Morocco. Both nations faced serious economic crises and resources gaps in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were forced to embrace the neoliberal economic policies of international creditors and organizations. Subsequently, both regimes manufactured a system of popular representation that deliberately favored center-right bourgeois groups, enabling them to dominate parliament. The category of minimally rentier states can be broken down further into two sub categories. In Turkey, representative of the relatively democratic alternative, the military Junta engineered the parliamentary majority of orthodox, center-right bourgeois groups between 1982 and 1984. In Morocco, representative of an authoritarian alternative, the monarchy ensured that orthodox parties and groups dominated the parliament, pursuing policies of macroeconomic liberalism.
Egypt represents the second category of "semi-rentier" states in Glasser's framework. Exogenous revenues in Egypt were approximately 45 percent of total state revenues during the 1980s. The higher level of external revenue enabled an insecure regime to pursue populist policies and postpone liberal economic reforms. The critical 1984 elections in which the government managed to secure the dominance of populist, center-left groups were representative of this posture. Unlike minimally rentier states, Egypt was able to use exogenous rents to weather economic shocks, and forestall macroeconomic orthodoxy and the favoring of bourgeois groups, while preserving a center-left, populist parliamentary majority using similar electoral controls to those used in Morocco and Turkey (redistricting, etc.). However, Egypt still faced the dangers of economic stagnation and decline, and therefore was forced to incorporate center-right groups in an oppositional role within parliament to ensure their support and resources.
Glasser's third category, the "highly rentier" state, is represented by Kuwait. Such a state receives at least 75 percent, and often, as in the case of Kuwait, more than 90 percent, of their revenues from exogenous sources. These (typically Gulf) states often use the display of a parliamentary process to undermine the power of the bourgeois groups. These groups, whose resources are unimportant to the state, may threaten the political power of the regime, and hence the regime spends the state's abundant exogenous resources on populist measures that legitimize the regime in the eyes of the citizenry. Pursuing this strategy in Kuwait, the ruling Al Sabah regime was able to marginalize bourgeois groups in the parliament throughout the 1980s, since it did not require their participation in realizing economic development policy.
Although Glasser did an exceptional job of analyzing the applicability of his framework in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, and Kuwait, the applicability of the concept to the region as a whole and the general organization of the work are at times vague and uncertain. Glasser anticipates this criticism, however, and provides the reader with several assumptions including that his interpretation is limited to the period of regional economic turbulence in the 80s and 90s, and to polities that to some degree have implemented strategies of electoral participation or empowerment during the period. With such a narrow regional, chronological, and political focus, Glasser's framework, to some degree, lacks sufficient generality to be applied to nations other than the four he directly studies. He briefly describes other states in which his framework is a useful analytical tool, but, in general, the scope of the paradigm is rather narrow. Also, the work tends to be a somewhat redundant in its analysis, and the organization of data could have been aided by a focus on one nation at a time without scattering similar, linked information throughout separate sections. These criticisms are somewhat minor, however, and the overall quality of Glasser's argument and evidence far outweighs them.
With Economic Development and Political Reform, Glasser breathes new life into rentier state literature. Throughout the 1990s, analysts have begun to focus pessimistically on Middle Eastern "exceptionalism," as 20th century global trends towards democratization and liberalization fail to emerge in the region. General rentier hypotheses were formulated, contending that exogenous revenues have inhibited liberalization in the Middle East, but little understanding exists on actually how and why political liberalization has evolved differently in the region as a direct result of economic conditions and policies. Glasser fills this void by convincingly expanding and reshaping rentier state concepts to explain how and why exogenous revenues shape electoral outcomes, regime economic policies, and political liberalization in general. In fact, the book might very well signal the beginning of a subtle shift in the entire direction of rentier state political analysis in the Middle East-a move towards incorporation of the region's process of liberalization into current literature on democratic transition, rather than exclusion and focus on Middle Eastern "exceptionalism."
Glasser's work is highly relevant to our time as the United States and other Western democracies grapple with the problem of how to approach the increasingly complex issue of political and economic reform in the Middle East. His analysis boldly elucidates the notion that imposing both political and economic reform in the Middle East may in fact be impossible. If exogenous Western financial donations to Middle Eastern states-intended to help reform the states economically-contributes to statist and populist regimes hostile to political liberalization (as Glasser's work suggests), then economic stability and democratization may in fact be mutually exclusive. This has potentially dramatic ramifications for international financial organizations such as the WTO and World Bank, which are only gradually beginning to form a complete understanding of the sociopolitical impact of economic policies in the region. In bringing these issues to light throughout his book, Glasser reveals his advocacy of a more flexible and heterodox Western conception of development and liberalization that would dramatically relieve policy dilemmas currently plaguing Middle Eastern states.

For organizations well into a TQM program, performance assessments provide the direction needed to evaluate the effectiveness of reengineering, quality, and other improvement strategies.

This book offers practical advice and specific direction on a vital aspect of any quality management program - the assessment of organizational performance. Measuring a company's performance provides individuals and organizations with an essential tool to reach and maintain excellence, and to implement continual improvement strategies. Performance-Based Assessments presents a clear approach to assessing operations so organizations can redirect misguided efforts before it's too late.

Benefits:

Learn how performance assessments result in realistic and meaningful improvements Develop an appropriate mix of external, internal, and self-assessments to measure the success of your programs Create win-win results for your organization by using performance-based assessments Contents:

An Introduction to Performance-Based Assessments The Management System Features of Assessment Activities Getting Started Designing an Assessment Strategy Focusing on the Issues Presenting the Results Developing an Action Plan for Improvement Implementing the Plan

This book has the best, clearest summary of key issues in financial globalization, Third World debt and free-market reforms that I have ever seen (and I've seen a lot). I recommend it for academics who study globalization in their research, anti-globalization activists, and concerned world citizens in general--you'll find yourself using it as a reference!

Paul is one of the famous personalities in the world of finance. Any person who has not heard of him has got no right to be in the field of finance. For most of the Fortune 500 corporation in US, about 70-80% of revenues is coming from abroad(read foreign currency). By reading this book one gets a real perspective on the latest things happening in the field of foreign currency.