In an era where two-fifths of the global population is engaged in gaming, this industry’s technological and economic evolution is of paramount importance, promising continued growth. Beyond mere entertainment, gaming has become a primary medium for social interaction, enriched by technologies like virtual, augmented, and extended reality. Gaming has increasingly become intertwined with the financial market as game developers shift their focus from gameplay enjoyment to monetization of in-game assets and some players prioritize the potential for livelihood in gaming. This transformation has been accelerated by the integration of blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which provide users with more control over their in-game assets and enable external trading of such assets in the secondary market. This chapter delves into this integration, examines its impact on the gaming industry, and provides a high-level overview of key related legal and ethical issues that warrant further exploration.

In this concluding discussion, key aspects of Hellenistic economic development are discussed and related to the presence of military wage labourers. In particular, the presence of paid soldiers and a market for labour are connected to the increased production of goods and services for the market, to the period’s rapid and significant monetization, and to the apparent rise in private wealth generation and profit-seeking behaviour. As a key part of this argument, military wage labourers are discussed as the driving force behind the Hellenistic world’s budding market economy.

The idea that the Song experienced an economic (or monetary, financial, commercial) “revolution” has gained broad currency in the historiography. One key development was the monetization of the economy, including the introduction of paper currency, used along with various kinds of metal currencies for all kinds of commercial transactions and even tax payments. The role of the state was crucial, both in providing infrastructure for transportation and distribution networks and in implementing policies that supported merchant entrepreneurs and promoted the development of agriculture through the introduction of new technologies and new crops. Farmers specialized in the production of certain commodities, and ceramics, textiles, and other goods were also produced for the marketplace. Both urban and rural markets proliferated, and new kinds of merchant enterprises accompanied this commercial growth. The expansion of shipbuilding and advances in both shipbuilding and navigational technology supported the growth of maritime trade. Commercial relations with Japan and Korea in particular also fostered cultural connections: the transmission of religion, books, and other cultural commodities went along with silks, foodstuffs, metals, and aromatics. Despite ongoing political and military conflicts between them, overland border trade continued between Song and its northern nomadic neighbors to supply essential and luxury goods.

The Conclusions explore the consequences of our arguments for the study of late antiquity more generally and the patterns of Roman military organization. The Roman military was among the most important institutions in the ancient world, and revising its history has ramifications for such perennial questions as imperial decision-making and Roman identity. Moreover, our reconstruction creates new questions, in particular about the economy of the fifth-century east Roman empire and its ability to mobilize and sustain the armies described by the Notitia. This chapter concludes by situating our revised narrative within the longe durée of Roman military history from Augustus to Byzantium and identifying the major considerations, including many non-military considerations, that motivated the empire’s various military configurations.

Business impacts the world we live in by affecting our environment, living creatures, and our heritage. Often these costs are externalized onto remote populations or future generations. This chapter begins with an emblematic case about rare earth minerals that are vital to modern technology but which, despite “green” initiatives, are also difficult to refine or recycle, and therefore create pollution. The term “sustainability” is closely analyzed, as it conflates the senses of “maintaining our current production and consumption levels” with “maintaining resources in the face of rising prosperity and consequent depletion,” each with widely divergent implications. Arguments promoting intrinsic value of the biosphere are assessed, as are conservation claims about the broad “web of being” and potential climate change. Monetization, the technique that asks hypothetical questions to assess environmental preferences, is presented and critiqued. Triple bottom line accounting is outlined, and the amount of waste we produce is also discussed. The final case looks at the potential effects of large-scale industrial farming and its implications for the environment and the global food chain.

The conquest of Egypt and Asia, leading to new urban and fiscal infrastructures and new forms and levels of elite consumption, increased the scale of trade and exchange in the Hellenistic economy. Complex institutional changes that were spurred by both fiscal-military demand and local responses to this demand changed agrarian and commercial patterns, with likely positive effects on local markets. This chapter argues that the Hellenistic period was one of moderate economic growth both in the Greek poleis of the Aegean and in the core regions of Hellenistic Asia and Egypt. The greater presence of Roman traders in the Hellenistic East from the second century onwards is also likely to have had positive effects on market exchange and monetary circulation. Yet there is reason to assume that in the final decades of the Hellenistic period, all Hellenistic regions to some extent, but particularly the Aegean and Asia Minor, suffered from the destructive forces of the Roman military presence and subsequent tributary exploitation. Only after the Roman civil wars came to an end and fiscal practices were better regulated did the economies of the East begin to recover and to expand along the pathways that had developed in the Hellenistic period.

Babylonia held a crucial position in a network of overland and naval routes, connecting Arabia, India, and the Graeco-Bactrian empire with the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia via the Fertile Crescent in the west. This network enabled the royal administration to combine the functions of trade and communication with settlement politics, the melioration of agriculture, and the supply of war zones. In this latter role, the Babylonian economy might have played an important part in Seleucid warfare, despite Babylonians never being actively involved in military campaigns. A new Graeco-Babylonian elite with particular demands, the dynamic development of settlements, the network of trade routes, communication, mobility connecting the western parts of the empire in the Aegean with the east, and increased monetization may have provided the conditions for some economic growth in Hellenistic Babylonia. Nevertheless, Babylonia had already been a very productive and economically dynamic region in the Achaemenid period. There were certainly great continuities from the Persian and Seleucid empires, and one may wonder whether the efforts of the early Seleucid kings to improve lines of communication, temple economies, and monetary exchange aimed at regaining the levels of prosperity that had already been achieved before Alexander’s conquests.

Although significant progress has been made in dealing with ancient economies through the establishing of new methodological approaches (like the New Institutional Economics), old-school Political Economy still plays an important role. It endeavours among other things to describe and evaluate the causes which lead to economic growth, thereby including factors which cannot be subsumed under the category of ‘institutions’ (exclusively focused on by the NIE) like demography or climate. Recently, this traditional approach has been intensively adopted to explain and measure the growth of ancient Greek economies between the ninth and fourth centuries, today viewed as an established fact in contrast to the older consensus, which was characterised by scepticism regarding the capability of ancient societies to generate sustainable growth. This chapter presents the most important factors that were (supposedly) conducive to growth and describes and their mutual interplay and interferences. In a further section, some methodological and empirical problems of the way 'ancient growth' is quantified in contemporary research are discussed. In a final section, some thoughts are offered on geo-economic factors, assumed by the author to have had a decisive impact in bringing about 'growth' or concentrations of wealth in some areas and milieus.

This chapter discusses the economic developments occurring within the Ptolemaic empire (323–30 BCE), of which Egypt was the core province. It explores how state formation affected economic development and how Ptolemaic imperialism, demography, and the interaction between Egyptian and Greek social networks were factors of economic change and economic exploitation. After an overview of past and current approaches to the economy of the Ptolemaic empire and of the geography of the empire, it assesses the cost and benefits of military conquests and the management of migrations patterns and new settlements by the Ptolemies, who increased their revenues and reduced the cost of their army through land allotments to cleruchs. The political economy of the Ptolemies relied on a complex tax system, with some documents pointing to a centralized taxation of the provinces, and innovative but also unusual monetary policies, such as closed-currency system based on a lower weight standard than the Attic standard in Egypt, Cyprus, and Syria-Phoenicia. The chapter concludes with examples of the synergistic relationship between empire, warfare, and trade and between the public and private spheres of the economy, and sketches the purchasing power of different economic groups in Egypt.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the IP licensing industry and covers the business assumptions and goals of IP transactions, including market and geographic expansion, modularization, monetization, rights aggregation and platform leadership.

Early modern South East Asia can be characterized as a region of low population density, abundant natural resources, and high labour productivity in agriculture, where coastal areas were deeply involved in international trade, in particular with China and India. Available information on urban real wages indicates that in most parts of the region, living standards were well above Chinese and Indian levels until at least the mid-nineteenth century. The population growth observed throughout the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests also a strong resilience to climate shocks and wars. The main independent indigenous polities in the mainland and a few smaller ones in the archipelago reinforced their authority, legitimacy, and capacity. An increase or stability in the long run of per capita terms comprehensive wealth, which is the total value of natural, human, and physical (i.e. produced) capital stocks divided by total population, would imply a sustainable economic transformation. The general trends that can be observed suggest that this was the case in early modern South East Asia.

Inland waters and their biodiversity are a valuable resource.They are a source of fresh water, helping to purify it, and provide habitat for organisms (e.g. fishes) that may be eaten or used by humans. To improve the condition of fresh waters globally, it is imperative to link biodiversity conservation to human well-being. The concept of ecosystem services - the benefits humans derive from ecosystems - offers a means to make this link explicit, resolving the conflict between human water use and biodiversity protection. Ecosystem services thus serve as a proxy for biodiversity, assuming that maintaining the former will serve to protect the latter, representing a win-win conservation solution. While relevant for fisheries (a provisioning service), the substitution may be less applicable to supporting services that depend upon maintaining ecological functioning, not maximizing final services for humans. While valuation of biodiversity (and its subsequent monetization) is problematic, payment for ecosystem (or watershed) services can incentivize land-owners to protect sources of clean water for downstream users.