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The RMB Internationalization has a great impact on China’s domestic economy. This chapter applies the Gap Estimation approach to estimate the RMB overseas circulation amount from 1997 to 2015, as the indicator of RMB internationalization. Using the recently developed Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) method for the model identification and contemporaneous causality analysis. The structural vector auto regression (SVAR) model is constructed between the economic indicators (the interest rate, the CPI, and the exchange rate) and the RMB overseas circulation. The dynamic relationship and degree of mutual influence are further studied between the economic indicators and overseas circulation. The results show that there exist contemporaneous causalities of “from RMB overseas circulation to inflation rate,” “from exchange rate to overseas circulation,” and “from exchange rate to the inflation rate.” The influence of interest rate adjustment on macro economy presents the time lag effect. The internationalization of the RMB encourages the currency appreciation. The China’s Central Bank passively looses monetary policy to meet the needs of internationalization and reduce the shock of the international hot money, thereby further deepening the domestic inflation.

This study aims to identify the features and characteristics of feminist elites as well as their circulation rate in official political positions. The study questions include the role of a profession, educational level, and class of origin in the recruitment of feminist elites. It stems from the hypothesis that a direct correlation exists between the mechanism of recruiting feminist elites and their characteristics, according to the criterion of class differentiation based on social status and financial wealth. The study used a complex combination of scientific methodologies, including the elite approach, which is especially important as a result of its ability to convert arguments into measurable variables, and a comparative approach was used to compare the features and characteristics of feminist elites in two reigns. From the study, it was observed that feminist elites are characterized by caste and wealth, higher educational degree, and in addition obtaining degrees from Western universities, prevailed. This result demonstrates the higher value of Western universities. The study also found that the circulation rate of political feminist elites dramatically increased in the reign of King Abdullah compared with the appointed feminist elites in the reign of King Hussein.

The concept of “neutral money” has a long history in monetary theory and macroeconomics. Like a number of other macro concepts, its meaning has been subject to a variety of interpretations over the decades. I explore the way in which Hayek used this term in his monetary writings in the 1930s and argue that “neutrality” for Hayek was best understood as the idea that monetary institutions were ideal if money, and changes in its supply, did not independently affect the process of price formation and thereby create false signals leading to economic discoordination, and especially of the intertemporal variety. This view was rooted in his work on money and the trade cycle in the late 1920s and early 1930s and also bound up with his understanding of “equilibrium theory.” The importance of his concept of neutrality was that it served as a benchmark for judging the comparative effectiveness of different monetary regimes and policies. That use is still relevant today.

The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand, colonial governments experimented with other ways to anchor their paper monies to real values in the economy. These mechanisms included tax-redemption, land-backed loans, sinking funds, interest-bearing notes, and legal tender laws. I assess and explain the structure and performance of these mechanisms. This was monetary experimentation on a grand scale.

In the southern hemisphere, the Antarctic continent is also experiencing a net loss in ice from the extensive glaciers and ice sheets that cover it. However, the connection between changes in Antarctic ice sheets and the global warming trend are much more uncertain than in the Arctic. The complex of changes in the Antarctic climate and the ice sheets are described in a later section of this chapter.

The observed increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases since the industrial period, due to human activities, is very likely causing the warming of the climate system. Anthropogenic warming and rising sea levels will continue for centuries due to the time scales associated with climate processes and feedbacks. Even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, different types of adaptation measures are needed to cope with the inevitable change. At the same time mitigation measures aiming at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing carbon sinks must be taken in order to reduce the potential extent of global warming. This chapter covers the main aspects of the current understanding of the physical basis of climate change, including the directly measured observations and estimated projections for the 21st century. Causes and effects of climate change are also addressed. Finally, the main uncertainties of climate projections and a few general considerations on the different ways to respond to the climate change issue are discussed.

This chapter gives an interpretation of basic elements of Marx's scientific method, focusing on his exposition in the first edition of the first chapter of Capital I. It can be shown that Marx's critique of political economy rests on fundamentals that are traceable in many a philosophical endeavor. This goes especially for categories and concepts relating to the theory of science and epistemology formulated in earlier German philosophy dating back to Kant. I try to demonstrate that such fundamental categories, expressed through our basic thought determinations – universality, particularity, and individuality – are developed through the judgmental and syllogistic forms of logic common to Marx and his immediate predecessors inside philosophy – thinkers as relevant in the modern world as they were in the adolescence of capitalism. Furthermore, I want to show how the concept of time is crucial in uniting the thought-determinations in question. The investigation tries to make it clear that the scrutiny of social forms of thought pursued by Marx amounts to a valid, immanent criticism of all the fundamentals of traditional bourgeois theory of science and economics. To this effect, the chapter evaluates some characteristics of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Also, to clarify the profundity of Marx's thinking and the thoroughness of his analysis, I go back to some of the philosophical ideas which were starting points for men like Kant and Hegel, especially in the form that we meet them in the classical political philosophy of Hobbes.

It is now established by the global scientific community that climate change is a hard reality but the changes are complex in nature and to a great extent uncertain. Global circulation models (GCMs) have made significant contributions to the theoretical understanding of potential climate impacts, but their shortcomings in terms of assessing climate impacts soon became apparent. GCMs demonstrate significant skill at the continental and hemispheric scales and incorporate a large proportion of the complexity of the global system. However, they are inherently unable to represent local subgrid-scale features and dynamics. The first generation approaches of climate change impact and vulnerability assessments are derived from GCMs downscaled to produce scenarios at regional and local scales, but since the downscaled models inherit the biases of their parent GCM, they produce a simplified version of local climate. Furthermore, their output is limited to changes in mean temperature, rainfall, and sea level. For this reason, hydrological modeling with GCM output is useful for assessing impacts. The hydrological response due to change in climate variables in the Amu Darya River Basin was investigated using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The modeling results show that there is an increase in precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, potential evapotranspiration, surface runoff, percolation, and water yields. The above methodology can be practiced in this region for conducting adaptation and mitigation assessments. This initial assessment will facilitate future simulation modeling applications using SWAT for the Amu Darya River Basin by including variables of local changes (e.g., population growth, deforestation) that directly affect the hydrology of the region.

This Introduction gives a historical and theoretical overview of this volume on Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal Age, which showcases original research in political sociology of science targeting the changes in scientific and technological policy and practice associated with the rise of neoliberal thought and policies since the 1970s. We argue that an existing family of field theoretic frameworks and empirical field analyses provides a particularly useful set of ideas and approaches for the meso-level understanding of these historical changes in ways that complement as well as challenge other theory traditions in sociology of science, broadly defined. The collected papers exhibit a dual focus on sciences’ interfield relations, connecting science and science policy to political, economic, educational, and other fields and on the institutional logics of scientific fields that pattern expert discourses, practices, and knowledge and shape relations of the scientific field to the rest of the world. By reconceptualizing the central problem for political sociology of science as a problem of field- and inter-field dynamics, and by critically engaging other theory traditions whose assumptions are in some ways undermined by the contemporary history of neoliberalism, we believe these papers collectively chart an important theoretical agenda for future research in the sociology of science.