Some years ago, when Principal and Professor of Economics at the infant Univer sity of Buckingham, Britain's only independent university, I was intrigued to receive an application, supported by strong recommendations from a Signora Ilde Rizzo, who wished to take some courses in public finance. As she was already an of Catania, noted for its expertise in the economics of Assistant at the University public finance, my colleagues and I brushed aside her modest request to attend undergraduate courses and enrolled her in our new graduate course. We also hoped that she might, in time, be able to gain experience in teaching and writing in English. Dr. Rizzo exceeded our highest expectations. She presented the first D. Phil thesis ever at Buckingham and defended it with consummate success. This work is a revised and extended version of her thesis, and it is a pleasure to congratu late Dr. Rizzo on its appearance, and also her publisher for recognizing its qUality. It will come as no surprise to the reader that Dr. Rizzo has already published extensively in Italian and also in English, but this is her first book in the latter language. I am glad to think that Dr. Rizzo's thesis arose out of our mutual interest in the question as to whether debt financing offered governments a major opportunity for maintaining the growth of public spending."

IF, WHEN YOU SAY "CONSUMPTION TAX, " YOU MEAN . . . by Ernest S. Christian, Jr. and Cliff Massa III Much has been said and written about consumption taxes in the United States, but mostly in a theoretical context. Dozens of schol arly treatises have been published, along with innumerable papers and speeches most of which were more argumentative than illumi nating in nature. Audiences have sat through uncounted confer ences on the merits or evils of consumption taxes, depending on the speakers' perspectives. There have been only three comprehensive legislative proposals to which these theories and arguments could be 1 applied, no one of which was acted upon in the Congress. Purveyors of conventional wisdom have suggested that this theo retical context might be replaced within a year or two by actual con sideration of a federal-level consumption tax. Some see enactment of such a tax as a desirable -- or at least a necessary -- means for reducing the federal deficit. The National Economic Commission, which was created by legislation in 1987 to recommend deficit reduction measures, was perceived by many skeptics and proponents alike to be the Trojan Horse which would carry a consumption tax Lrhe proposals were H. R. 7015, ''The Tax Restructuring Act of 1980," introduced by Rep. Al Ullman; S. 1102, ''The Business Transfer Tax Act of 1985," introduced by Senator William Roth; and H. R. 4598, introduced by Rep."

It has taken a long time to make this book. Many initial drafts of the chapters published in this book were presented in November 2000 during a two-day conference on Interactive governance: towards a post-parliamentary democracy held in Enschede (The Netherlands). The Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG) sponsored the . conference. After this conference the organisers discussed the possibility of making a book on the basis of papers presented at this event. In the end it was agreed that such a publication would indeed be worthwhile provided the initial papers were fundamentally revised. Moreover it was agreed that also supplementary chapters should be included, in order to strengthen the international comparative perspective. On this basis authors of the conference papers chapters and envisioned new chapters were invited to (re)submit drafts. The completion of the book, however, was unexpectedly halted by the tragic sudden death of our co-editor and dear friend Oscar van Heffen. In his lifetime he was the driving force behind this project. Without his efforts, insightful comments and helpful suggestions this book, in its present form, would never have been published. As such we dedicate this volume to his memory, the completion of the book being an honorary debt to our friend and his wife Mirjan.

Any Chainnan of the British Post Office dwells in the shadow of Rowland Hill, and, if he were an honest man, he probably from time to time, while singing the praises of Rowland Hill, as is his due, thinks a silent thought of sympathy for his predecessor Colonel Maberly, the head of the Post Office, the Champion of established orthodoxy, the leader of the Professionals, who had to endure the irresistible force of Hill's arguments combined with his skills as a pamphleteer, agitator, and political propagandist. My favorite passage of the book Royal Mail by Martin Daunton (1985) shows how much the Post Office of the day needed a Rowland Hill to challenge Colonel Maberly and all that he stood for. I quote from a passage describing how the Colonel, when he arrived at about 11:00 a.m. and while enjoying his breakfast, listened to his private secretary reading the morning's correspondence. Daunton records: The Colonel, still half engaged with his private correspondence, would hear enough to make him keep up a rumring commentary of disparaging grunts, "Pooh! stuff! upon my soul!" etc.

Inter and Intra Governmental Arrangements for Productivity - An Agency Approach focuses on public productivity. It addresses long standing and current questions on government productivity. Its scope and coverage range from theory to very specific applications. First of all it demonstrates the applicability of a theoretical framework to concrete issues in the public sector: the Principal Agent (PA) theory or the Agency theory. Secondly, it demonstrates the different perspectives of this theoretical framework as seen by researchers and practitioners from various countries. The volume is based upon the revised seminar papers from a conference that was held at the University of Twente. Two trends obvious in this world are its increasing global character and the need for increasingly efficient and effective organizations. Inter and intra governmental organizations need to learn to effectively and efficiently work together in complex web like relationships. This study forms a major step in that direction. It consolidates several current economic concepts that are highly visible and specifically applies them to various levels and functions of government. It emphasizes that PA theory is a powerful conceptual framework because of the economic focus on transactions between principals and agents. The issues of information asymmetry, across government constituents, political/diplomatic considerations, and the narrow focus of PA problems will be described. Attention is also given to the issues of citizen demands, internal markets, franchising, competitive procurement and contracting in'. The study concentrates on academic thinking about the applicability of PA concepts to administrative theory building. As such it makes a current, valid contribution to the knowledge and practice of public administration world-wide.

Due to the developments in the role of governments, the importance of government accounting and financial reporting is increasing. This led to changes in Government Accounting all over the world. For institutional, public finance and other reasons this has not always been done for central governments and regional and local governments in the same way. Some countries maintain the cash basis, some changed over to the accrual basis. Many of them started at first with lower government levels, only few changed over completely. Comparative Issues in Government and Accounting aims to give insight in the array of different patterns the world shows with respect to government accounting and financial reporting. Of course a complete overview would have been too ambitious a goal. This book brings together an interesting number of academics coming from a representative number of countries to get an impression of the situation and especially of the existence and the backgrounds of similarities and differences. Thirty-five authors and co-authors produced 21 chapters reflecting on the situations in 16 countries on 4 continents. Countries dealt with are Albania, Australia, Belgium, China, Egypt, Finland, France, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

It is now twenty years since the concept of rent-seeking was first devised by Gordon Tullock, though he was not responsible for coining the phrase itself. His initial insight has burgeoned over two decades into a major research program which has had an impact not only on public choice, but also on the related disciplines of economics, political science, and law and economics. The reach of the insight has proved to be universal, with relevance not just for the democracies, but also, and arguably more important, for all forms of autocracy, irrespective of ideological com plexion. It is not surprising, therefore, that this volume is the third edited publication dedicated specifically to scholarship into rent-seeking behavior. The theory of rent-seeking bridges normative and positive analyses of state action. In its normative dimension, rent-seeking scholarship has expanded, enlivened, in some respects turned on its head, the traditional welfare analyses of such features of modern economics as monopoly, externalities, public goods, and trade protection devices. In its positive dimension, rent-seeking contributions have provided an important analy tical perspective from which to understand and to predict the behavior of politicians, interest groups and bureaucrats, the media and the academy within the political market place. This bridge between normative and positive elements of analysis is invaluable in facilitating an understanding of and evaluating the costs of state activity within a consistent paradigm."

Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics presents a collection of papers analyzing the political systems of ten nations. It intends to provoke a conscious effort to compare, and investigate, the public choice of comparative politics. There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political science literature. This work, however, presents an empirically oriented study of the politics, bureaucratic organization, and regulated economies of particular nations in the canon of the comparativist. It therefore provides a public choice view at the level of nations, not of systems. This compendium of work on comparative politics meets two criteria: In every case, a model of human behavior or institutional impact is specified; Also in every case, this model is confronted with data appropriate for evaluating whether this model is useful for understanding politics in one or more nations.

This book was initiated while the three major authors were at the Development Centre of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, working on its program on economic growth, trade, and sustainability. We wish to thank the OECD Development Centre for its support. The book was completed during summer 2001 at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University. We appreciate the resources and financial support CARD provided for publication of this work. Sandra Clarke provided technical editing of the manuscripts and oversaw the indexing of the book; Becky Olson prepared the camera-ready copy of the final manuscript. We thank them for their instrumental help in these last steps. Part of the work presented in this volume previously appeared in some form in journals. The analysis of Chile presented in Chapter 6 appeared as "Growth, Trade, Pollution and Natural-Resource Use in Chile. Evidence from an Economywide Model," Agricultural Economics 19(1998): 87-97; and as "Trade Integration, Environmental Degradation, and Public Health in Chile: Assessing the Linkages," Environment and Development Economics, in press. The work on Costa Rica and Indonesia summarised in Chapter 10 appeared as "Is There a Trade-off Between Trade Liberalisation and Pollution Abatement in Costa Rica? A Computable General Equilibrium Assessment," Journal of Policy Modeling 20(1): 11-31; and as "The Environment and Welfare Implications of Trade and Tax Policy," Journal of Development Economics 52(1997): 65-82.

G. Galeotti* and M. Marrelli** *Universita di Perugia **Universita di Napoli 1. The economic analysis of optimal taxation has permitted considerable steps to be taken towards the understanding of a number of problems: the appropriate degree of progression, the balance between different taxes, the equity-efficiency trade-off etc .. Though at times considered as abstract and of little use in policy design, the issues it addresses are real ones and very much on the agenda of many countries. As usual in scientific debate, criticisms have contributed to the correct understanding of the theoretical problems involved and made clear that, at the present state of the art, definitive conclusions may be premature. A first well-taken criticism addresses the assumption, underlying optimal taxation models, of a competitive economy with perfect information on the part of individual agents and full market clearing. Once we leave the Arrow-Debreu world, it is no longer necessarily the case that taxes and transfers introduce distortions on otherwise efficient allocations.

hen my husband died in 1973 I had to go through his W papers. Some of them were still in manuscript form and had never before been published. I selected several of these, plus a number of other articles that had appeared in periodicals but were no longer in print. This book is the result. At my request Richard Ebeling wrote an introduction which he has done in great detail. The depth of Ebeling's understanding of my husband's work is certainly apparent in his writing. I am pleased to have the Ludwig von Mises Institute present this volume to the public. Margit von Mises New York City September 1989 vii Introduction I I n the 1920s and the 1930s, Ludwig von Mises was recognized as one of the leading economic theorists on the European Conti nent. I F. A. Hayek has said that Mises's critique of the possibilities for economic calculation under socialism had "the most profound impression on my generation . . . . To none of us '" who read his] book Socialism] when it appeared was the world ever the same again., 2 Lord Lionel Robbins, in introducing the Austrian School literature on money and the trade cycle to English-speaking readers in 1931, emphasized the "marvelous renaissance" the "School of Vienna" had experienced "under the leadership of . . . Professor Mises."

This book brings together the work of scholars who have written for it independent essays in their areas of particular expertise in the general field of income distribution. The first eight chapters provide a review of the major theories of income distribution, while the final two are con cerned with problems of empirical estimates and inferences. One of these chapters presents estimates of factor shares in national income in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, while the other ex amines how relationships between the size distribution of income and economic development are being investigated. A convenient way of conveying an understanding of how economic theorists have dealt with the distribution of income is to examine separ ately each major approach to this subject. Each contributor was thus assigned a particular approach, or a major theorist. No attempt was made to avoid the apparent duplication that occurs when the same references are examined by different contributors. The reader gains by seeing how the same material can be treated by those looking at it from different perspectives. A chapter each has been devoted to Marx and Marshall."

Sponsored by the American Real Estate Society (ARES), Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation addresses a wide variety of timely issues relating to property ownership, rights, and use, including: ancestral burial, historical record of occupancy, treaty implementation problems, eminent domain, the effects of large governmental change, financing projects under formal and informal title or deed document systems, exclusive ownership vs. non-exclusive use rights, public land ownership, tribal or family land claims, insurgency and war, legal systems of ownership, prior government expropriation of lands, moral obligation to indigenous peoples, colonial occupation, and common land leases. These issues can also be broadly grouped into topics, such as conflict between indigenous and western property rights, communal land ownership, land transfer by force, legacy issues related to past colonization and apartheid, and metaphysical/indigenous land value.

I. The concept of competition played a central role in the very first attempts to apply the tools of economics to the analysis of politics. Adopting Hotelling's (1929) industrial organization model of imperfect competition in markets in which space has a predominant role, Downs (1957), following on some perceptive insights of Schumpeter (1942), was able to formulate a model of electoral competition in which political parties, seeking the support of citizens, compete against each other in offering policies designed to elicit their vote. Downs' model and the numerous variants to which it gave birth soon became the major component of what was to become Public Choice Theory. The enormous efforts of the last 30 years devoted to modelling electoral competition have helped improve our understanding of politics and have contributed a basic element that undoubtedly will remain essential to any reasonably complete theory of politics. But whatever may have been early expectations, it is now clear that electoral competition will only be one such element. More recently, the idea of competition has been used to model interest-group behavior. Becker (1983), building on earlier work by Bentley (1908), Truman (1958), Olson (1965), Stigler (1971) and Peltzman (1976), applied the Public Finance analysis of the excess-burden of taxes and subsidies - to which, incidentally, Hotelling (1938) had made pioneering contribution- to produce a model in which competition between interest groups determines an equilibrium distribution of income.

The six papers in this vohune represent state-of-the-art empirical and conceptual research on various aspects of the taxation of multinational corporations. They were commissioned for and presented at a conference organized by Price Waterhouse LLP on behalf of the International Tax Policy Forum, held in Washington, DC in March, 1994. The ftrst four papers were originally published in the May, 1995 issue of International Tax and Public Finance. The Slemrod paper appeared in the Policy Watch Section of the November, 1995 issue of that journal. The foregoing papers were subject to the normal refereeing procedures of the journal, and the summaries that follow are drawn from there. The Leamer paper has not been previously published. Altshuler and Mintz examine one aspect of the 1986 u. s. Tax Reform Act --the change in the rules for the allocation of interest expense between domestic-(U. S. ) and foreign-source income. In the absence of rules, a parent with excess credits could reduce U. S. tax liability by allocating interest expense toward itself; thus reducing its taxable domestic income without any compensating increase in either the U. S. tax due on foreign-source income or the foreign tax due (which is independent of U. S. rules).

Ein zentrales Lehrgebiet der Finanzwissenschaft ist Gegenstand dieses Lehrwerkes. Es darf als dafur massgeblich genannt werden."

Hans-Michael Heitmuller The financing of public funds has become a strongly competitive business. Within the EU, national boundaries for this sphere have been formally removed as well as important hindrances to the trade of goods and services. Deregulation and technological innovations have decreased the economic distance between the regions of the EU. With the transition to the Euro, a weighty step has been made in the direction towards a home market. It has become simpler and worthwhile for public borrowers to obtain comparative offers from over and beyond country borders. For the supplier, this field of business is marked by relatively low risks, a correspondingly modest personal capital requirement, but narrow margins as well. On the other hand, as well as language and social differences, there exist in actuality still many-sided market access thresholds on the basis of different institutional and instrumental framework data within the individual countries, especially inthe area of public funds. This will only change slightly in the foreseeable future. Reliable information about these special framework conditions is still in demand. It is an important factor of success in business politics.

At present we observe a decreasing role for the state in many areas where it used to be prominent. Amidst severe budgetary cuts, the state and its organs are confronted with ever louder calls for efficiency in public office (value for money') and public performance. Simultaneously we see in many democratic welfare states the rise of new institutional forms and social organizations responding to new public priorities. Phenomena like privatization and de-regulation, new forms of regulation and self-regulation, and the rise of special issue groups are an expression of this. This book seeks to provide order in some of today's issues and to offer analysis and explanation for selected topics. The book opens with contributions on the importance of concepts of present-day institutional economics interpreting modern governmental behavior and organization. Subsequent chapters deal with new developments in various fields such as environmental management and conservation, political legitimacy, or the new roles for covenants. Audience: This volume will be of interest for scholars in the fields of public service, government studies and adjacent branches of economics, political science and law.

GERAD celebrates this year its 25th anniversary. The Center was created in 1980 by a small group of professors and researchers of HEC Montreal, McGill University and of the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. GERAD's activities achieved sufficient scope to justify its conversion in June 1988 into a Joint Research Centre of HEC Montreal, the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and McGill University. In 1996, the U- versite du Quebec a Montreal joined these three institutions. GERAD has fifty members (professors), more than twenty research associates and post doctoral students and more than two hundreds master and Ph.D. students. GERAD is a multi-university center and a vital forum for the devel- ment of operations research. Its mission is defined around the following four complementarily objectives: * The original and expert contribution to all research fields in GERAD's area of expertise; * The dissemination of research results in the best scientific outlets as well as in the society in general; * The training of graduate students and post doctoral researchers; * The contribution to the economic community by solving important problems and providing transferable tools.

Markov chains have increasingly become useful way of capturing stochastic nature of many economic and financial variables. Although the hidden Markov processes have been widely employed for some time in many engineering applications e.g. speech recognition, its effectiveness has now been recognized in areas of social science research as well. The main aim of Hidden Markov Models: Applications to Financial Economics is to make such techniques available to more researchers in financial economics. As such we only cover the necessary theoretical aspects in each chapter while focusing on real life applications using contemporary data mainly from OECD group of countries. The underlying assumption here is that the researchers in financial economics would be familiar with such application although empirical techniques would be more traditional econometrics. Keeping the application level in a more familiar level, we focus on the methodology based on hidden Markov processes. This will, we believe, help the reader to develop more in-depth understanding of the modeling issues thereby benefiting their future research.

In a relatively short period of time, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has grown into a powerful analytical tool for measuring and evaluating performance. DEA is computational at its core and this book is one of several Springer aim to publish on the subject. This work deals with the micro aspects of handling and modeling data issues in DEA problems. It is a handbook treatment dealing with specific data problems, including imprecise data and undesirable outputs.

Topics in this comprehensive survey include bureaucracy, corruption and tax compliance; public finance in developing economies; taxation in several former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe and China; taxation in the enlarged European Union; tax harmonization vs. tax competition; and the philosophy of taxation and public finance. The editor has assembled a stellar group of authorities to write about their areas of expertise.

Nicolas Buclet Waste management issues can be approached in several ways. The question of which treatment technique to adopt is essentially a downstream problem. In our view the issue needed to be tackled further upstream. Waste management is not only a technical problem, it is also an area which involves various actors throughout society. In this book, as in the previous volume (Buclet, Godard, 2000), the organisation of waste management is seen in terms of regimes. A regime is an entire form ofinstitutional, technical, economic and social organisation relating to a specific field, no matter how complex that field is. Regime formation is generally a long-drawn-out process, rooted in the multiple interactions of the actors involved. Legislation plays a crucial role but would not, of itself, lead to the formation of a regime. There is always the old question of causality and which element occurs first: the behaviour of actors who constitute the reality, or the legislation that models their behaviour? Besides legislation, other formal or informal conventions influence the behaviour of actors approaching a common path, making co ordination easier between them. In this book we have insisted on conventional principles. They are the real guides for actors within each national regime."

This book is about bounded rationality and public policy. It is written from the p- spective of someone trained in public economics who has encountered the enormous literature on experiments in decision-making and wonders what implications it has for the normative aspects of public policy. Though there are a few new results or models, to a large degree the book is synthetic in tone, bringing together disparate literatures and seeking some accommodation between them. It has had a long genesis. It began with a draft of a few chapters in 2000, but has expanded in scope and size as the literature on behavioural economics has grown. At some point I realised that the geometric growth of behavioural - search and the arithmetic growth of my writing were inconsistent with an am- tion to be exhaustive. As such therefore I have concentrated on particular areas of behavioural economics and bounded rationality. The resulting book is laid out as follows: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the rest of the book, goes through some basic de?nitions and identi?es themes.