Latin American and Caribbean countries are the most urban in the developing world and have very high home ownership rates. However, many of the region's inhabitants are still poorly housed. This book examines three key contributing issues: high housing prices relative to family income, lack of access to mortgage credit, and high land prices.

This book focuses on the economic collapse of 1997, and the effect on the status of East Asia as an economic power. Noman looks at how currency depreciations, personal and state indebtedness, mass unemployment and rioting brought the paternalistic capitalist phase to an end in Asia, and analyzes Asia's complex recovery and future challenges.

Global development actors such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund claim that the shift to the poverty reduction strategy framework and emphasis on local participation address the social cost of earlier adjustment programs and help put aid-receiving countries back in control of their own development agenda. Drawing on the case of Ghana, Lord Mawuko-Yevugah argues that this shift and the emphasis on partnerships between donors and poor countries, local participation, and country ownership simultaneously represents a substantive departure from earlier versions of neo-liberalism and an attempt by global development actors and local governing and social elites to justify, and legitimize the neo-liberal policy paradigm. This book shows how the new architecture of aid has important implications in three distinct but related ways: the discursive construction and production of post-colonial societies; the changing focus of Western aid and development policy interventions; and the reproduction of the politics of inclusive exclusion. The author provides detailed and original research on the new development paradigm and develops a critical theoretical approach to re-think conventional analyses of the new discourses on aid whilst offering a fresh, alternative interpretation of changes in international aid relations.