Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of Microfinance

Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of Microfinance PDF Author: Bruce H. Yenawine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317323955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
In life, Benjamin Franklin sought to manage debt, organize credit, build capital and promote virtue. After death, he continued this work by leaving a codicil to his last will and testament, bequeathing £2,000 to Boston and Philadelphia. This study examines Franklin’s codicil and the financial history of America over the 200 years since his death.

Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of Microfinance

Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of Microfinance PDF Author: Bruce H. Yenawine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317323955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
In life, Benjamin Franklin sought to manage debt, organize credit, build capital and promote virtue. After death, he continued this work by leaving a codicil to his last will and testament, bequeathing £2,000 to Boston and Philadelphia. This study examines Franklin’s codicil and the financial history of America over the 200 years since his death.

New Frontiers of Philanthropy

New Frontiers of Philanthropy PDF Author: Lester M. Salamon
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199357544
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 769

Get Book

Book Description
With the resources of both governments and traditional philanthropy barely growing or in decline, yet the problems of poverty, ill-health and environmental degradation ballooning daily, it is increasingly clear that new models for financing and promoting social and environmental objectives have become urgently needed. Fortunately, however, a significant revolution appears to be underway in the way in which social and environmental purposes are being financed. The heart of this revolution is a massive explosion in the instruments and institutions being deployed to mobilize private resources in support of social and environmental objectives. Where earlier such support was limited to charitable gifts, now a bewildering array of new instruments and institutions has surfaced-loans, loan guarantees, private equity, barter arrangements, social stock exchanges, bonds, secondary markets, investment funds, and many more-all of them designed to leverage not just the tens of billions of dollars of philanthropic grants but the hundreds of billions, indeed trillions, of dollars of private investment capital. While the changes under way are inspiring and by no means trivial, however, they remain largely uncharted in any systematic fashion. This monograph, and of the companion volume for which it also serves as the introductory chapter, is designed to overcome this problem, to provide the first comprehensible and accessible roadmap to the full range of important new developments taking place on the frontiers of philanthropy and social investment. In the process, it seeks to broaden awareness of these developments, increase their credence and traction, and make it possible to maximize the benefits they can generate while acknowledging the limitations and challenges they also face.

Calculated Values

Calculated Values PDF Author: William Deringer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674985974
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Get Book

Book Description
Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power of numbers to find answers, settle disputes, and explain how the world works. Whether evaluating economic trends, measuring the success of institutions, or divining public opinion, we are told that numbers don’t lie. But numbers have not always been so revered. Calculated Values traces how numbers first gained widespread public authority in one nation, Great Britain. Into the seventeenth century, numerical reasoning bore no special weight in political life. Complex calculations were often regarded with suspicion, seen as the narrow province of navigators, bookkeepers, and astrologers, not gentlemen. This changed in the decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Though Britons’ new quantitative enthusiasm coincided with major advances in natural science, financial capitalism, and the power of the British state, it was no automatic consequence of those developments, William Deringer argues. Rather, it was a product of politics—ugly, antagonistic, partisan politics. From Parliamentary debates to cheap pamphlets, disputes over taxes, trade, and national debt were increasingly conducted through calculations. Some of the era’s most pivotal political moments, like the 1707 Union of England and Scotland and the 1720 South Sea Bubble, turned upon calculative conflicts. As Britons learned to fight by the numbers, they came to believe, as one calculator wrote in 1727, that “facts and figures are the most stubborn evidences.” Yet the authority of numbers arose not from efforts to find objective truths that transcended politics, but from the turmoil of politics itself.

Measuring the Impact of Microcredit Programs in Albania

Measuring the Impact of Microcredit Programs in Albania PDF Author: Forcim Kola
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862711
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
This book highlights a range of perspectives concerning the economic and social impact of microfinance products (especially microcredit) on their clients’ lives, scientifically analysing four distinct impact levels: namely, the individual level, the household level, the enterprise level, and the community level. Microcredit services enable low income people to move their family away from poverty and towards higher living standards, by increasing their business activity, improving their employment opportunities, and contributing to sustainable economic growth and development. Investigating the Albanian market, by assessing the impact of Albanian microfinance programs at each of the four above-mentioned impact levels, this book explores whether being a client of MFIs microfinance programmes brings positive changes to their lives and their community. The book uses various data collection techniques, such as surveys, interviews, quantitative measurements of financial data, and data processing methodologies including paired t-tests and a comparison-based data analysis methodology using a control group in order to support or reject the above hypothesis.

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic PDF Author: Sandra M. Gustafson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226311295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
Deliberation, in recent years, has emerged as a form of civic engagement worth reclaiming. In this persuasive book, Sandra M. Gustafson combines historical literary analysis and political theory in order to demonstrate that current democratic practices of deliberation are rooted in the civic rhetoric that flourished in the early American republic. Though the U.S. Constitution made deliberation central to republican self-governance, the ethical emphasis on group deliberation often conflicted with the rhetorical focus on persuasive speech. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas about the deliberative basis of American democracy through the works of Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Gustafson shows how writers and speakers have made the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation central to their autobiographies, manifestos, novels, and orations. Examining seven key writers from the early American republic—including James Fenimore Cooper, David Crockett, and Daniel Webster—whose works of deliberative imagination explored the intersections of style and democratic substance, Gustafson offers a mode of historical and textual analysis that displays the wide range of resources imaginative language can contribute to political life.

Finite Mathematics

Finite Mathematics PDF Author: Carla C. Morris
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119015502
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 535

Get Book

Book Description
Features step-by-step examples based on actual data and connects fundamental mathematical modeling skills and decision making concepts to everyday applicability Featuring key linear programming, matrix, and probability concepts, Finite Mathematics: Models and Applications emphasizes cross-disciplinary applications that relate mathematics to everyday life. The book provides a unique combination of practical mathematical applications to illustrate the wide use of mathematics in fields ranging from business, economics, finance, management, operations research, and the life and social sciences. In order to emphasize the main concepts of each chapter, Finite Mathematics: Models and Applications features plentiful pedagogical elements throughout such as special exercises, end notes, hints, select solutions, biographies of key mathematicians, boxed key principles, a glossary of important terms and topics, and an overview of use of technology. The book encourages the modeling of linear programs and their solutions and uses common computer software programs such as LINDO. In addition to extensive chapters on probability and statistics, principles and applications of matrices are included as well as topics for enrichment such as the Monte Carlo method, game theory, kinship matrices, and dynamic programming. Supplemented with online instructional support materials, the book features coverage including: Algebra Skills Mathematics of Finance Matrix Algebra Geometric Solutions Simplex Methods Application Models Set and Probability Relationships Random Variables and Probability Distributions Markov Chains Mathematical Statistics Enrichment in Finite Mathematics An ideal textbook, Finite Mathematics: Models and Applications is intended for students in fields from entrepreneurial and economic to environmental and social science, including many in the arts and humanities.

Locavesting

Locavesting PDF Author: Amy Cortese
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118085787
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
How individuals and communities can profit from local investing In the wake of the financial crisis, investors are faced with a stark choice: entrust their hard-earned dollars to the Wall Street casino, or settle for anemic interest rates on savings, bonds, and CDs. Meanwhile, small businesses are being starved for the credit and capital they need to grow. There's got to be a better way. In Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It, Amy Cortese takes us inside the local investing movement, where solutions to some of the nation's most pressing problems are taking shape. The idea is that, by investing in local businesses, rather than faceless conglomerates, investors can earn profits while building healthy, self-reliant communities. Introduces you to the ideas and pioneers behind the local investing movement Profiles the people and communities who are putting their money to work in their own backyards and taking control of their destinies Explores innovative investment strategies, from community capital and crowdfunding to local stock exchanges With confidence in Wall Street and the government badly shaken, Americans are looking for alternatives. Local investing offers a way to rebuild our nest eggs, communities, and, just perhaps, our country.

In All Fairness

In All Fairness PDF Author: Richard A. Epstein
Publisher: Independent Institute
ISBN: 1598133373
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book

Book Description
Growing concern about inequality has led to proposals to remake American society according to ill-conceived and coercive "egalitarian" values that are fundamentally unfair. This unique book reveals the modern romance with equality as a destructive flirtation. The elites who advocate such notions claim they champion the poor—but more often than not the nostrums of this managerial class undermine, rather than advance, mass prosperity and human well-being. The authors of In All Fairness challenge all of the prevailing egalitarian ideas, including the claim that the country is riven by inequality in the first place. After all, our economy thrives with a division of labor that allows individuals who are unequal in interests and talents to pursue their own unique goals. Looked at in this way, equality is far more widespread than overheated rhetoric might lead one to expect—as factual data show. But it is an equality of a particularly valuable type—one arrived at, not by top-down attempts to impose economic uniformity, but by our respecting inviolable rules of fair play and the dignity of each person, a dignity that requires everyone to respect the voluntary transactions of others. This approach holds equity, liberty, diversity, and prosperity together. Would we want it any other way in America and anywhere around the world? The authors draw on economics, philosophy, religion, law, political science, and history to provide answers to a perennial question that especially agitates the American public today: Can the coercive powers of the state be used to achieve a kind of arithmetic equality? The authors, each in their own way, make a strong case that they should not be used in this fashion. Love inequality or loathe it, In All Fairness is full of key insights about the connections among fairness, liberty, equality and the quest for human dignity. You won't think about wealth and poverty, equality and inequality, in the same way ever again.

Handbook on the Economics of Philanthropy, Reciprocity and Social Enterprise

Handbook on the Economics of Philanthropy, Reciprocity and Social Enterprise PDF Author: Stefano Zamagni
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1849804745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Get Book

Book Description
The recent era of economic turbulence has generated a growing enthusiasm for an increase in new and original economic insights based around the concepts of reciprocity and social enterprise. This stimulating and thought-provoking Handbook not only encourages and supports this growth, but also emphasises and expands upon new topics and issues within the economics discourse. Original contributions from key international experts acknowledge and illustrate that markets and firms can be civilizing forces when and if they are understood as expressions of cooperation and civil virtues. They provide an illuminating discourse on a wide range of topics including reciprocity, gifts and the civil economy, which are especially relevant in times of crisis for financial capitalism. The Handbook questions the current phase of the market economy that arises from a state of anthropological pessimism. Such anthropological cynicism is one of the foundations of the contemporary economic system that is challenged by the contributors. This highly original and interdisciplinary Handbook will provide a fascinating read for academics, researchers and students across a wide range of fields including economics, public sector economics, public policy and social policy.

Convergence and Divergence of National Financial Systems

Convergence and Divergence of National Financial Systems PDF Author: Patrice Baubeau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317315901
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays aims to form a focused, original and constructive approach to examining the question of convergence and divergence in Europe.