Best Business Books: Q

QFINANCE: The Ultimate Resource (4th edition) offers both practical and thought-provoking articles for the finance practitioner, written by leading experts from the markets and academia. The coverage is expansive and in-depth, with key themes which include balance sheets and cash flow, regulation, investment, governance, reputation management, and Islamic finance encompassed in over 250 best practice and thought leadership articles. This edition will also comprise key perspectives on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors -- essential for understanding the long-term sustainability of a company, whether you are an investor or a corporate strategist.Also included:Checklists: more than 250 practical guides and solutions to daily financial challenges;Finance Information Sources: 200+ pages spanning 65 finance areas;International Financial Information: up-to-date country and industry data;Management Library: over 130 summaries of the most popular finance titles;Finance Thinkers: 50 biographies covering their work and life;Quotations and Dictionary.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Peter Muller, Ken Griffen, Clifford Asness and Boaz Weinstein -- four number-crunching titans -- The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast. Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold, a good run that could come to an end on any given day? What if The Truth they sought -- the secret of the markets -- wasn’t knowable? Worse, what if there wasn’t any Truth?

In this gripping account of the quest for the energy that our world needs, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Prize . A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change. It is a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. From the jammed streets of Beijing to the shores of the Caspian Sea, from the conflicts in the Mideast to Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley, Yergin takes us into the decisions that are shaping our future. The drama of oil-the struggle for access, the battle for control, the insecurity of supply, its impact on the global economy, and the geopolitics that dominate it-continues to profoundly affect our world. Yergin tells the inside stories of the oil market and the surge in oil prices, the race to control the resources of the former Soviet empire, and the massive mergers that transformed the landscape of world oil. Yergin also reveals the surprising and sometimes tumultuous history of nuclear and coal, electricity, and the "shale gale" of natural gas, and how each fits into the larger marketplace. He brings climate change into unique perspective by offering an unprecedented history of how the field of climate study went from the concern of a handful of nineteenth- century scientists preoccupied with a new Ice Age into one of the most significant issues of our times. The Quest presents an extraordinary range of characters and dramatic stories that illustrate the principles that will shape a robust and flexible energy security system for the decades to come. Energy is humbling in its scope, but our future requires that we deeply understand this global quest that is truly reshaping our world.

How can developing countries grow their economies? Most answers to this question center on what the rich world should or shouldn't do for the poor world. In The Quest for Prosperity, Justin Yifu Lin--the first non-Westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank--focuses on what developing nations can do to help themselves. Since the end of the Second World War, prescriptions for economic growth have come and gone. Often motivated more by ideology than practicality, these blueprints have had mixed success on the ground. Drawing lessons from history, economic analysis, and practice, Lin examines how the countries that have succeeded in developing their own economies have actually done it. He shows that economic development is a process of continuous technological innovation, industrial upgrading, and structural change driven by how countries harness their land, labor, capital, and infrastructure. Countries need to identify and facilitate the development of those industries where they have a comparative advantage--where they can produce products most effectively--and use them as a basis for development. At the same time, states need to recognize the power of markets, limiting the role of government to allow firms to flourish and lead the process of technological innovation and industrial upgrading. By following this "new structural economics" framework, Lin shows how even the poorest nations can grow at eight percent or more continuously for several decades, significantly reduce poverty, and become middle- or even high-income countries in the span of one or two generations. Interwoven with insights, observations, and stories from Lin's travels as chief economist of the World Bank and his reflections on China's rise, this book provides a road map and hope for those countries engaged in their own quest for prosperity.