Special Economic Zones and the Economic Transition in China (Economic Ideas Leading to the 21st Century, Vol. 5)

Book Description

The exchange rate is a crucial variable linking a nation's domestic economy to the international market. Thus choice of an exchange rate regime is a central component in the economic policy of developing countries and a key factor affecting economic growth.

Historically, most developing nations have employed strict exchange rate controls and heavy protection of domestic industry-policies now thought to be at odds with sustainable and desirable rates of economic growth. By contrast, many East Asian nations maintained exchange rate regimes designed to achieve an attractive climate for exports and an "outer-oriented" development strategy. The result has been rapid and consistent economic growth over the past few decades.

Changes in Exchange Rates in Rapidly Developing Countries explores the impact of such diverse exchange control regimes in both historical and regional contexts, focusing particular attention on East Asia. This comprehensive, carefully researched volume will surely become a standard reference for scholars and policymakers.

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant! Down to earth, practical guidance........1999-03-09

At last! A practical guide to put anyone on the road to 'free' publicity.

The grass-roots approach cuts through the mysterious air (ie: 'the crap') often hanging round PR and publicity issues and beloved by practitioners desperate to play their cards close to their chest.

Penny's advice is simple, easy to follow and should guarantee results. It won't turn everybody into PR professionals as there's a bit more too it than securing media coverage, but then, that's not the aim of the book.

As well as the sound 'can't go wrong' advice, there's templates and examples that lead readers through the process of putting together news releases etc.

Altogether a brilliant guide that brings the seemingly impossible task of generating publicity well within reach of any small business or enthusiastic individual. Brilliant. And not before time.

Book Description

Teaches communications skills for vocational job and speaking, writing, interviewing,resumes etc.

On-The-Job Communications for Business, the Professions, Government and Industry

Average customer rating:

On-The-Job Communications for Business, the Professions, Government and Industry
Ernst Jacobi
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIVRS2

Average customer rating:

Career X Roads - a view from a HR Pro

Great for Jobseekers

A helpful listing

Outdated

So-So Book

CareerXroads 2003
Gerry Crispin , and Mark Mehler
Manufacturer: MMC Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Job Hunting & Careers | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Guides | Job Hunting & Careers | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Job Hunting | Job Hunting & Careers | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Resumes | Job Hunting & Careers | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

WEDDLE's Directory of Employment-Related Internet Sites: For Recruiters and Job Seekers 2005/6 (Weddle's Directory of Employment Related Internet Sites for Recruiters and Job Seekers)

Guide to Internet Job Searching 2006-2007 (Guide to Internet Job Searching)

Recruiting on the Web : Smart Strategies for Finding the Perfect Candidate

ASIN: 0965223981

Customer Reviews:

Career X Roads - a view from a HR Pro.......2003-07-22

I've been involved with recruiting/sourcing/hiring for more than 25 years, and this is simply the best overview of job sites and job search information available. It is a "must have" for those individuals searching for a new job or career, and a resource of "best practices" in Internet Search job sites.

Great for Jobseekers.......2000-10-08

This book was touted as the best recruiters book, by Joyce Lain Kennedy (employment columinst). That is why I bought it. To my disappointment it was not the best. Internet Recruiting Edge and The Recruiter's Bible have much more information and resources. But this is a good book if you are a jobseeker.

A helpful listing.......2000-10-07

While it is not possible to publish a totally updated listing of this type (due to constant turnover), it is nevertheless a helpful listing of many of the major sites used by job seekers and recruiting entities. Put it on your bookshelf.

Wayne D. Ford, Ph.D., author, "Breakthrough Technical Recruiting" docwifford@msn.com

Outdated.......2000-07-27

Not worth my time to sort through all these sites, when many are already outdated. I need more current information.

So-So Book.......2000-07-27

I wasn't too impressed with the book. The best part about the book was that it was organized superbly, and the site information was very detailed. As far as the information goes, I came across maybe one or two sites I wasn't familiar with, but the rest are mainstream. I'm also confused who this book targets...the job seeker or the employer. I think this book is trying to do too much.

Customer Reviews:

Good message, flimsy construction........2007-02-20

My son asked right off the bat, why the pages aren't numbered and why is it falling apart. Same old Rich Dad messages.....I thought it was worth sharing with him. Pick it up at the library.

Not only for kids.......2006-06-30

Although in cartoons, as is happening to me, in my journey to financial freedom I need my wife to support me (sometimes there will be things most people won't get if they haven't read Kiyosaki before), and specially if your wife doesn't read this kind of literature, buy this book...for her! In less than an hour you'll understand the main message from Kiyosaki.

Rich Dad broke the code........2005-08-05

I ordered this book with a skeptical outlook. The other financial instruction books I purchased for my teen lasted all of ten minutes. This book arrived, she opened it, started reading, and didn't put it down until finished. She was so excited, she called me at work to tell me she had learned about assets, liabilities, expenses, and income. She said the concepts were so simple, she didn't understand why they aren't teaching this in school. Now, she's pointing out investments to me! Rich Dad actually got the attention and respect of a teenager. I'm very impressed.

Help Your Kids Save Their Pennies.......2005-06-22

This is a children's comic book that presents kids with the information that goes way beyond "Save your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves." There are also subtle lessons on values and ethics, too. It shows--pictorially, using two different styles--how a youngster can put the concepts they represent immediately to work. The book goes well beyond the "save your pennies" philosophy I was raised on. The book introduces terms that some kids never hear until they take their first economics class. I liked the presentation style that looks vaguely like a Tim Allen movie--artistic washes, subtle tones. Kids will love the brightly colored segments. More importantly--for the parents at least--they are sure to absorb some sound ideas about ensuring their own futures. The purpose of the book is clear: the sooner you learn to manage your money, the more you'll have to enjoy.

Rat Race or Financial Freedom.......2005-02-04

Robert Kiyosaki's story presents difficult financial concepts in simple English for kids ages 8 and up. The narrative is easy to follow and the illustrations are appropriate to the subject matter. At one point, I felt myself checking my own finances to see if I was on the right track to financial freedom through asset-building versus liability-building!

The book makes readers think about their financial future without resorting to scare tactics. The reader's choice is simple: either continue to run from paycheck to paycheck or create financial building blocks to pave your way to financial independence. The authors warn not to place all your eggs in one basket or spend your pennies on useless junk that will end up costing you more in the end.

The examples are generic with age-appropriate examples such as comic books, bicycles and newspaper routes. The ending is a little overdone, in my opinion, as a child without financial knowledge might not have the wherewithal to open an ice cream stand after one month. Nonetheless, the tone is upbeat and motivating. I highly recommend this comic book for any parent who is willing to help his or her child gain a healthy understanding and long-term relationship with wealth and the benefits it brings.

Christine Louise Hohlbaum, American expat author of Diary of a Mother (2003) and SAHM I Am: Tales of a Stay-at-Home Mom (May 2005), worked at Putnam Investments once upon a time. Currently, she resides near Munich, Germany with her husband and two children. http://www.diaryofamother.com

Book Description

The inside story of the Lionel Corporation as told by former employees. Traces five decades of Lionel train history as people behind the scenes describe Lionel's leaders, products, achievements, and legacy from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Customer Reviews:

Of Coal Piles, Chickens, and Memories.......2004-02-06

If one is just starting on the fascinating journey of discovery about the Lionel Corporation and the marvelous electric trains that it made, this is not the book with which to begin. Carp's collection of reminiscences by nine former Lionel employees will not acquaint the reader with a comprehensive or chronological history of the company and will add very little to whatever knowledge the reader may already bring concerning the company's products. Anyone still early in the journey will find Ron Hollander's "All Aboard! The Story of Joshua Lionel Cowen and His Lionel Train Company" the book to read.

Once the reader has the main history of the company under his belt and is familiar with the names of its movers and shakers, then is the time to open Carp's book on "the world's greatest toy train maker" and to appreciate the experiences of the former employees therein. At its economic height, Lionel was quite a large company and employed workers with many diverse skills. In Carp's book, the reader will meet assembly line foremen, tool room supervisors, administrative assistants, illustrators, electrical engineers, salesmen, photographers, publicists, and innovators in electronics-all people whose names went unknown to the children who played with Lionel trains and to most other people outside the industry. Yet these largely unknown and unseen employees all influenced the development, production and marketing of the trains and of Lionel's military products. Without employees such as those in Carp's book, Lionel could never have achieved the market dominance that it enjoyed for many years, nor would the name carry the fiercely loved emotional reactions that it still evokes among thousands of toy train aficionados and hobbyists today. In short, Carp's book shows us the Lionel Corporation from the viewpoint of employees who labored in supporting roles rather than in the limelight of the executive boardroom.

Reading this collection of memory-lane stories did reveal one proposed product that I had not run across before in any of the other company histories that have been published. I certainly would like to see a sample of that steam locomotive tender with the chickens popping out of the coal pile pursued by a would-be chicken-catcher! Reading also revealed one rather significant factual error relative to a Lionel product: Page 99 describes Lionel's Super-O track as having a "darkened center rail and ample wood ties." In reality, the center rail was bright copper, darkening over time only through normal oxidation, and the closely spaced ties were wood-grained plastic. The track used no actual wood whatsoever. While this is only one error, to be sure, it is a very blatant one, immediately obvious to anyone with common knowledge of Lionel's products.

At 112 pages, the book is also a rather thin volume, but it is nonetheless a useful addition to one's library on the Lionel Corporation and is worth the reading-just not as the first book to be read on this topic.

Personal accounts of workers at the "Old" Lionel Corp........1998-07-28

Each of 9 chapters is devoted to the quite candid account of a particular worker who describes his experiences while working at Lionel. Areas covered are engineering, sales, and management. The many photos are from Lionel archives, private collections, and taken by the employees themselves. Narratives closely conform to the many extensive, taped interviews conducted by the author over a period of years. Since I am the subject of Chapter 9, I can attest to the authenticity. Many facts are presented for the first time and should be valuable additions to the collections of toy train enthusiasts.

Book Description

Digital Play is a major study of the video and computer game industry, from its origins as a minor spin-off of the military-industrial complex to its contemporary position as a major global media business as big as Hollywood. It discusses how interactive games affect theoretical debates about the information society, gives an historical account of the rise and fall of companies such as Atari, Nintendo, and Sega and of today's savage competition between Microsoft and Sony, and offers critical analysis of gender and violence in games, the marketing strategies of game companies, intellectual property and work in the game industry, and the problems and possibilities of on-line games. Digital Play is a book for anyone interested in the cutting edge of virtual culture, or in a digital business that is transforming everyday life.

Customer Reviews:

Critical postmodern analysis.......2003-08-06

"Digital Play" critically analyzes the video and computer game industry and theorizes about its significance in contemporary society. The book is somewhat unusual in that it is the collaborative product of three authors, but the writing seems to blend perfectly and makes for a consistent and high-quality read. The end product is an accessible and entertaining book that could serve to introduce a wide audience to critical postmodern analysis.

Nick Dyer-Witheford of "Cyber-Marx" fame is one of the authors. Mr. Dyer-Witheford's influence is discernable in at least several sections where the post-Marxist themes of corporate control versus freedom that are evident in "Cyber-Marx" are used to very good effect. First, he deflates the wildly optimistic claims of techno-utopians such as Alvin Toffler, reminding us that technology remains in service to corporate profits and therefore narrows and limits the possibility of "choice, interactivity and empowerment" that digital games purportedly offer. Second, Mr. Dyer-Witheford points to piracy and hacking as evidence that freedom from corporate control and a return to "play" in its purest sense may yet remain possible.

The authors contend that video games are worthy of serious study because they represent the "ideal-type" postmodern commodity. So whereas the automobile is closely associated with the "industrial capitalism" of the Fordist era, the video game embodies the "information capitalism" of today's "perpetual innovation" society.

The ideal-type commodity does not mean that it avoids crisis, however. The authors posit that the accelerating "circuits" of technology, culture and marketing that drive postmodern society in general and the video game business in particular "can be broken or come into contradiction" in numerous ways. The authors go on to critique each of these three circuits and produce many pages of very thoughtful analysis.

For example, an interesting aspect of the industry that is often overlooked is manufacturing and the international division of labor. Electronic game equipment is often produced by proletariat labor in the poor countries of the South for the benefit of relatively wealthy consumers in the North. The authors point out that the game industry, like most capitalist enterprises that exploit the so-called free trade system in search of higher profits, will find it difficult to develop new markets for its products until it is willing to pay its third-world factory workers enough money to stimulate demand. In fact, the authors state that corporate managers should not be too surprised when intellectual property gets pirated by people who feel that they have been cheated by the economic system.

But probably the most stinging criticism concerns the close connection of games with Cold War research and development. The "militarized masculinity" that characterizes so many games originated here and has been perpetuated by corporate marketing in pursuit of profits. But the authors point out that if the industry fails to find successful alternative game genres and graphic violence continues to escalate, future interest in gaming may be jeopardized even as the potential damage to children exposed to such psychic intensity remains unknown.

In short, "Digital Play" is highly recommended to everyone interested in deconstructing the multi-faceted and increasingly fantastical world that has been brought to us by the "military and entertainment" complex.

A clever look at the global industry of interactive gaming.......2003-07-31

Books on electronic gaming and video game culture predominantly concentrate on the history of the industry or on nostalgic returns to retro gaming, often punctuated with coloured photos and screenshots. Digital Play is one of the few books currently available that provides an insightful look into the social, cultural, and economic relationships between game players, and the engaging game texts, technologies, and market forces of the information age. As interactive gaming continues to establish itself as a major global media business, it becomes increasingly important for us to employ a critical perspective of the blossoming industry. Kline, Witheford, and Peuter's Digital Play couldn't have arrived at a better time.

Digital Play is cleverly divided into three segments, each focusing on different bearings of interactive gaming but effectively converging into a single conclusive "coda." Discussion begins with a theoretical approach to analyzing gaming and its industry as it relates to circuits of interactivity including culture, technology, and marketing. Theoretical concepts collected from media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams, are successfully transferred to the medium of the videogame. What follows is a look at the existence of interactive gaming in a post-Fordist, and postmodern society of information technology and hyper-reality. This facilitates the understanding of historical circumstances of developing circuits of interactivity outlined in earlier chapters. While the first segment may seem theoretically and linguistically intense, it remains deeply involving and is ever mindful of the topic at hand: video games.

The second segment of Digital Play covers the historical background of games from their early beginnings in the military-industrial complex to the relentless corporate firefight known to many as the "console wars." However, unlike previous electronic gaming texts, the historical accounts are retold stressing the importance of technology, culture, and marketing. Digital Play thus provides a fresh and extremely entertaining parade through electronic gaming's past. What readers may find most absorbing in this stretch are the political-economic struggles endured by the gaming companies (Atari for example) who pioneered the industry only to meet with fierce competition and an unstable market for interactive entertainment.

The initial chapters of Digital Play concentrated on technology and communication studies, and the following chapters zeroed-in on history and marketing practices. However, this theoretical triad could not be complete without the presence of one more area of study: game culture as an industry and practice. In a chapter entitled "Workers and Warez" the authors examine gaming technologies on global levels of production and consumption, such as the exploitation of off-shore labourers and increasing levels of hacking, console "modding", and software piracy. Subsequent chapters provide studies in branding and licensing, violence and gender, and my personal favourite...political economy. Chapter 12 assembles the major themes of Digital Play, suggesting that Electronic Arts' best-selling game "The Sims" can be viewed as a microcosm of our own capitalist society, wrought with consumerist ideology. While we manipulate the digital Barbie dolls of our virtual technology, so too does a system of communication technologies, global enterprise, and postmodern digital culture manipulate our symbolic relationship with the logic of a capitalist system.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Digital Play and wouldn't hesitate to purchase any game-related books that any of the authors might publish in the future. Digital Play offers an engaging critical look at the gaming world's industry, technology, and culture, and should not be ignored by those looking to study interactive games from an academic viewpoint or by those simply looking for enjoyable reading.

Book Description

The linkage of development aid to the promotion of human rights, democracy and good governancewas a striking departure in the post-cold war foreign policies of Northern "donor" governments. Uniquely, this book provides a systematic and comparative investigation of policies and practices in the 1990s to promote political reform in Southern '"ecipient'"countries by four donors, the governments of Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus the European Union.The use of both carrot and stick ( that is democracy assistance and aid sanctions) is examined andsharp criticism of current practice offered.

An Analysis of the Economic Democracy Reforms in Sweden.

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An Analysis of the Economic Democracy Reforms in Sweden.
Philip Whyman
Manufacturer: Edwin Mellen Pr.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000N67JV4

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