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Despite profound differences, both the German Historical School and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School have in common a theoretical and cultural heritage in Central European traditions of social thought and philosophy. Although both schools often are perceived as quintessentially German traditions of economic and social research, their methodological presuppositions and critical intent diverge strongly. Since the objective of the Frankfurt School was to carry the theoretical critique initiated by Marx into the twentieth century, and since its members did so on a highly abstract level of theoretical criticism, the suggestion may be surprising that in terms of their respective research agendas, there was a common denominator between the German Historical School and the Frankfurt School critical theory. To be sure, as will become apparent, the common ground was rather tenuous and indirect. We must ask, then: in what respects did their theoretical and analytical foundations and orientations overlap? How did the German Historical School, as a nineteenth-century tradition of economic thinking, influence the development of the Frankfurt School?

Adam Smith, it is generally acknowledged, founded the modern discipline of political economy with the study entitled An Inquiry into The Wealth of Nations (1776) which he built upon the ethical system he presumed to exist in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Ricardo took Smith's observations somewhat further with his publication of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). When John Stuart Mill wrote his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, his considerations of economic processes were intimately connected with the political. By the time Marx published Das Kapital as a critique of political economy in 1867 the term was entrenched in both academic life and in common parlance and political circles. The study of economics was an integral part of the study of the state. Ironically, however, political economy was about to be upstaged by the development of economics as a separate and positivist discipline. William Stanley Jevons had published his “Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy” in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in the previous year. This was much more widely read at the time than Das Kapital. By 1890, Alfred Marshall had published his Principles of Economics. The book began with these words: “Political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” The great tradition of seeing economics as an integral part of politics and vice versa was disappearing. However, though economists were anxious to convert that part of political economy known as economics and see it as a scientific discipline, the reality, that is the integrated nature of the state and the economy, remained. Simply because certain ideologues decided to separate politics from economics did not mean that the state in any sense disentangled itself from the economy or the economy from the state.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936) gave us the macroeconomic theory for an economy of a sovereign nation state. Concerned students of macroeconomics may study earlier works. Did Karl Marx's Das Kapital and the Physiocrats' A Tableau Economique offer to teach us some aspects of macroeconomics? One may venture to suggest that Arthashatra by Kautilya, written in Sanskrit some two thousand years ago, was an ancient treatise on macroeconomics.

This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the culmination of classical political economy, Marxism. It was historical in two senses, distinguishing capitalism as a historically specific mode of social production involving by value production and understanding that its contradictions drive forward capitalism’s own history in a central way. This approach must further develop and specify uneven and combined development as the dominant pattern in the unfolding of capitalist international relations, one that is constitutive of its component states themselves. Secondly, it must understand the logic of the actions undertaken by capitalist states as emerging from the struggles involved in the formation of capitalist states and from the contradictions that are set in train once capitalism is established. Finally, it must see in the ways that class and national struggles and resulting state actions have modified the functioning of capitalism the possibilities of replacing the disorder, contestation and war that are the spontaneous result of capitalism for international relations the basis for a cooperative order in relations between states, an order which can also be the means for realising the permanent revolution and solidifying its gains on the international or world plane.

Literature on economic cooperation among sovereign nation state economies has been extensive. In the post-WWII decades, the two Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) each with 184 Member States, have been instituted to sustain the global financial system for the noncommunist free-market economies. Under the umbrella of the United Nations, which currently has a membership of 192, the institutions, such as United Nations Conference on Trade, Aid and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Institute for Research and Training (UNITAR), World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Organization (WFO), have their respective economic assignments. The World Trade Organization (WTO), currently with 148 memberships, has been much involved in the negotiation of global trade agreements; an international regime of free and competitive trade has been a subject of substantive negotiations. The WTO came out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

This paper examines the transformation of Syrian political economy from 1970 until 2005. I argue that Syria has undergone two important phases of political and economic transformation, from building a centralized state and economy in the early 1970s to embarking on the path of market economy in the early 1990s. With the logic of competitiveness guiding the direction of economic development, the socio-economic changes of the mid-1980s and after have corresponded with an important process of class and state formation. After a brief discussion of the current transition in Syria, the following sections of the paper attempt to provide a critical study of the different strategies for economic development. Section two examines the process of state and economic centralization of the 1970s and 1980s and highlights the contradictions of this period. Section three assesses the impact of economic liberalization through a study of competitiveness in the economic policies of the 1990s and 2000. The final section examines the economic and political impasse that Syria has been faced with. In conclusion, I argue that the current path of market economy as the strategy for capital accumulation has not resolved the socio-economic problems that Syria has faced in the last two decades. This strategy will continue to face contestation by marginalized groups such as factions of the Baath Party, landless peasants, workers and small producers as Syria becomes even more integrated into the regional and global economy.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop criteria of effectiveness of state management of the process of implementing the information economy’s optimization model, determine the corresponding indicators, and offer the method of evaluation of the effectiveness of state management of the process of implementing the information economy’s optimization model.

This research applies the methods of induction, deduction, structural and functional analysis, and graphical presentation of information.

Based on the peculiarities of the information economy’s optimization model, three main criteria of the effectiveness of state management while implementing this model are distinguished: flexibility of the normative and legal provision of information economy; balance of the level and rate of development of the noosphere components; and success of the protection, usage, and preservation of information’s uniqueness. To distinguish these criteria it is offered to evaluate the effectiveness of state management of the process of implementation of the information economy’s optimization model by progressive comparison of the sum of results with the sum of limitations and costs for each direction of state management of the process of implementation of the information economy’s optimization model, related to the provision of observation of the above criteria. The author determines the indicators that conform to the offered criteria of effectiveness of state management of the process of implementation of the information economy’s optimization model systematized in connection to these criteria, and offers the formula for calculating the final indicator of the effectiveness of state management of the process of implementation of the information economy’s optimization model.

The offered criteria of effectiveness of state management of the process of implementing the information economy’s optimization model, the corresponding indicators, and the compiled methodology of evaluating the effectiveness of this process are recommended for usage as methodological provision of monitoring and control of implementation of the information economy’s optimization model.

Purpose – This chapter illustrates how an economic sociology of work exposes the deeply embedded nature of the informal economy and the social and political lives of its growing mass of unprotected workers under globalization. In particular, the premises of economic sociology offer a comprehensive definition of the informal economy that I term, “relational.” In contrast to definitions based on modernization and neoliberal assumptions of isolated economies, relational definitions of the informal economy expose the structures, networks, and political institutions that intertwine informal workers with the formal economy, society, and the state. Operationalizing the relational definition in labor surveys ensures the inclusion of previously invisible informal workers, especially those who operate at the intersection of the informal and formal economy. As well, it ensures the collection of data on the precise ways in which informal workers are socially and politically embedded, including their collective action efforts, the meaning they attach to their labor, and the social networks that determine their life chances.

Methodology – To illustrate this point, I apply a relational definition of informal labor to the case of India, using the National Sample Survey on Employment and Unemployment, as well as findings from interviews with organized informal workers.

Findings – By doing so, I provide an internationally comparative measure of India's informal workforce, illustrate informal workers’ social conditions relative to those of formal workers, highlight the expansion of the informal workforce since the government enacted liberalization reforms, and expose the unique political action strategies Indian informal workers are launching against the state.

Implications/Originality – These findings help us understand Indian informal workers in an internationally comparative context, yielding empirical insights on their social conditions and political organizations for the first time. As well, they call for an important refinement to existing definitions of the informal economy that to date have relied only on Latin American and African experiences.

In this paper, we conduct a conceptual and bibliographic analysis of the literature that deals with the international strategy of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with particular attention to SOEs from emerging economies (EEs). We first review the state of the art in defining the concepts of EEs and SOEs. We then conduct a detailed bibliographic analysis of the literature pertaining to SOEs’ involvement in international activities, whether as outward foreign investors or as potential local partners of inward-investing multinational enterprises. The analysis covers general trends in the literature, prominent research questions and outcome variables, use of theories, and choices pertaining to methodology (type of research and effects, empirical contexts). We document a literature that is fast-growing and well balanced in some respects. In other respects, we advance recommendations pertaining to (a) consistency and precision in the use of the concepts of “state-owned enterprise” and “emerging economy”; (b) search for specific evidence on the outward activities of EE SOEs in less-developed economies and even in other EEs, and on their performance; (c) understanding of relative propensities of local SOEs and inward investors to collaborate, and what happens when SOEs encounter each other across borders; (d) opportunities to strengthen the theoretical foundations and contributions of this research; and (e) minding the mix of home and host countries in studies and avoiding undue generalization from what has become a predominantly China-centric literature.