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Achieving economic growth is one of today´s key challenges. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Best argues that to understand how successful growth happens we need an economic framework that focuses on production, enterprise, and governance. This production-centric framework is the culmination of three simultaneous journeys. The first has been Best´s visits to hundreds of factories worldwide, starting early as the son of a labor organizer and continuing through his work as an academic and industrial consultant. The second is a survey of two-hundred years of economic thought from Babbage to Krugman, with stops along the way for Marx, Marshall, Young, Penrose, Richardson, Schumpeter, Kuznets, Abramovitz, Keynes, and Jacobs. The third is a tour of historical episodes of successful and failed transformations, focusing sharply on three core elements--the production system, business organization, and skill formation- and their interconnections.

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"Today, when economic and political tremors have shaken many previously unquestioned policy assumptions to their foundations, How Growth Really Happens offers a fresh perspective on issues that could hardly be more relevant. This is a timely book, one that has the potential to become a seminal study of economic growth."--Robert H. Wade, London School of Economics

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Michael H. Best is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he was codirector of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness. He has held numerous academic fellowships and participated in development projects with the United Nations, the World Bank, and governments in more than twenty countries. He is the author of The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring and The New Competitive Advantage: The Renewal of American Industry.

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