This book offers fresh insights into the economic development and financial markets of Southeastern and Central European countries. The first part analyses macroeconomic trends and monetary policy issues, while the second part explores the development of financial and insurance markets. With contributions covering topics such as regional and income inequalities, economic embeddedness, industrial competitiveness, entrepreneurship, financial integration, insurance markets, and other socio-economic aspects, it appeals to scholars in the field of economics and finance interested in the further economic development of the Balkans and Eastern European countries as well as to professionals in the financial and insurance sectors.

Conventional wisdom dictates that those goods which are said to cause harm or impose costs on society deserve a special tax. For centuries, governments have levied these "sin taxes" on alcohol and tobacco, but the list of taxable sins has now grown to include soda and marijuana, with calls to impose further taxes on plastic bags, meat, and even robots and carbon. Contrary to what experts and policymakers tell us, many of these alleged sins impose very little, if any, cost on society, and the harms that do exist can be minimized without resorting to tax. What follows in this book is a discussion of four case studies-on tobacco, marijuana, alcohol and soda-which make the case against the conventional wisdom in taxing these "sins", before concluding that when it comes to taxing sin, it is time for governments to forgive-and forget.

The European Union (EU) has reached crisis point. Populist and Nativist forces are militating against years of austerity economics, distant elites, and a rising tide of migration. Despite the EU's shortcomings, this book seeks to determine the future of the EU, outlining how the institution can learn lessons from the elements that have plunged much of Europe into social, economic and political turmoil. This book argues for reform not revolution. By interviewing politicians, economists, representatives of national bodies and EU citizens, this book provides unique insights never before disclosed and makes a major contribution to current debates on the future of the EU and the Eurozone.

This edited collection explores the historical determinants of the rise of mass schooling and human capital accumulation based on a global, long-run perspective, focusing on a variety of countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The authors analyze the increasing importance attached to globalization as a factor in how social, institutional and economic change shapes national and regional educational trends. Although recent research in economic history has increasingly devoted more attention to global forces in shaping the institutions and fortunes of different world regions, the link and contrast between national education policies and the forces of globalization remains largely under-researched within the field. The globalization of the world economy, starting in the nineteenth century, brought about important changes that affected school policy itself, as well as the process of long-term human capital accumulation. Large migrations prompted brain drain and gain across countries, alongside rapid transformations in the sectoral composition of the economy and demand for skills. Ideas on education and schooling circulated more easily, bringing about relevant changes in public policy, while the changing political voice of winners and losers from globalization determined the path followed by public choice. Similarly, religion and the spread of missions came to play a crucial role for the rise of schooling globally.

The United States has one of the most unique budgeting processes of any modern government. The "powers of the purse" are enumerated under the Constitution, but they were hotly debated by the nation's founding fathers. However, the lack of a legal guide for exactly how to delegate the powers, and under what conditions, has led to a process marked by power struggles-primarily between Congress and the presidency-over the last 230 years. Still, the budget and appropriations process is central to the functioning of the federal government. This book covers the transformation of American government through the lens of shifting budgeting power, while documenting the evolution of economic policy through the federal budget. As the nation and the federal government have expanded, the budget process has entirely broken down. This book also recommends changes that would help the budget process function more effectively. The chapters are organized both chronologically and topically to help the reader think through the evolution of the budget process. With its comprehensive approach to the history of the budget process-covering the entirety of US federal existence-this book will be a go-to resource for academics and public policy professionals interested in Congressional and executive history.

This book discusses Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) and their potential to protect and maintain critical infrastructure in a variety of global governmental settings. Critical infrastructure is defined as essential services that underpin and support the backbone of a nation's economy, security, and health. These services include the power used by homes and businesses, drinking water, transportation, stores and shops, and communications. As governmental budgets dwindle, the maintenance of critical infrastructure and the delivery of its related services are often strained. PPPs have the potential to fill the void between government accounting and capital budgeting. This volume provides a survey of PPPs in critical infrastructure, combining theory and case studies to provide a comprehensive view of possible applications. Written by a diverse group of international experts, the chapters detail PPPs across industries such as transportation, social infrastructure, healthcare, emergency services, and water across municipalities from the US to New Zealand to Hong Kong. Chapters discuss objectives and legal requirements associated with PPPs, the potential advantages and limitations of PPPs, and provide guidance as to how to structure a successful PPP for infrastructure investment. This book is of interest to researchers studying public administration, public finance, and infrastructure as well as practitioners and decision makers interested in instituting PPPs in their communities.

This Handbook is a comprehensive anthology of up-to-date chapters contributed by current researchers in budget forecasting. Editors Daniel Williams and Thad Calabrese had previously found substantial deficiencies in public budgeting forecast literature with current research failing to address such matters as practices related to forecasting expenditure factors, the consequences of forecast bias, or empirical examination of the effectiveness of many deterministic methods actually used by many governments. This volume comprehensively addresses the state of knowledge about budget forecasting for practitioners, academics, and students and serves as a comprehensive resource for instruction alongside serving as a reference book for those engaged in budget forecasting practice.

Benefiting from the authors' many years of teaching undergraduate and graduate students and practitioners, here is a clear, comprehensive, practice-oriented text for public budgeting courses. Rather than presenting each budgeting concern in mind-numbing detail, the book offers a commonsensical view of public budgeting and its importance to current and future public managers. The text is designed to show readers how managers relate to budgeting and how their actions make a difference in the operation and performance of public organizations. The book covers the historical development of public budgeting, sources of public revenues, revenue management, budgeting processes and formats, operating techniques, politics within public budgeting, and more. "Budgeting for Public Managers" is concise, clearly written, well illustrated, and grounded in the real-world concerns of public managers. Each chapter concludes with a helpful list of additional reading and resources for readers who want to dig deeper into budgeting practice and application.

This book offers a multidisciplinary account of the 'rule of law' as a central pillar of the classical liberal tradition. The authors analyze the original meaning of this expression as first introduced by British jurist A. V. Dicey, before examining its subsequent elaboration by Leoni, Fuller, Hayek and Oakeshott. Addressing the main philosophical and legal aspects of the rule of law, this volume will appeal to all those engaged in law, political theory, philosophy, economics, business ethics, and public policy.

In recent decades, the dissemination and the adoption of new public management (NPM) have been significant within the new public sector. One key innovation is the adoption of accrual accounting from business enterprise. The unresolved question is, what does accrual accounting mean in practice for government? This book analyzes the initial stage of development of an accrual accounting system in the context of regional government in Italy. It presents the accrual accounting system as a new technology and contributes to understanding of neutral tools involved in a public sector reform.

Because of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, the challenges of securing necessary external capital have become more significant for young ventures. In this realm, equity crowdfunding has evolved into the most promising financing alternative for entrepreneurs and received worldwide attention. By focusing on three subsequent research questions, this book aims to contribute to the ongoing scientific discussion of equity crowdfunding. First, it reveals fruitful future research avenues by providing a systematic overview of the development of equity crowdfunding research. Second, it sheds light on the so far less explored investor perspective and analyzes the decision-making process of equity crowdfunding investors. Third, based on a multi-method approach, the questions of how equity crowdfunding investors evaluate radically innovative ventures and how radically innovative ventures can establish venture legitimacy are explored.

Globalization and the information revolution have highlighted the catalytic role of local governments for improving economic and social outcomes at the local level as well as growing the national economy by enhancing international competitiveness. This comprehensive account of local public finance and economics brings together principles and better practices for improving quality and access of local public services provision. The volume covers assignment of responsibilities; jurisdictional design; local service delivery; local regulation; local self-financing options such as income, sales, property and environmental taxation, user charges and fees; infrastructure finance options; and higher order government financing of local governments. The treatment is non-technical and suitable for a wide variety of audiences including scholars, instructors, students, media, policy advisers and practitioners.

"This book is able to explain and analyze what has eluded both scholars and thought leaders in business and the media - how and why populism has grabbed center stage. Highly recommendable." -David B. Audretsch, Indiana University Bloomington, USA "Welfens provides valuable insight into US politics and describes the strategic options for Europe going forward." -Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, USA "With great skill Welfens traces the implications of US populism for the global economic system." - Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University, USA "This critique of Trumps fiscal and international trade policies and their weak intellectual basis deserves the attention of US and European readers alike" -Richard H. Tilly, University of Munster, Germany What lies behind the Trump victory of 2016 and the US' new raft of economic policies? Is a populist presidency in the United States likely to be a temporary phenomenon or a structural long-term challenge? In an era of declining multilateralism, what can the US still stand to learn from Europe, where several countries have effective lifetime economic welfare equal to that of the US - and what can the EU learn from the US in return? Furthermore, what international economic dynamics can be expected from the Sino-US trade conflict and can globalization be maintained? In this timely volume, Paul Welfens provides a rare, clear-sighted and scholarly analysis of the global problems created by Trump's protectionism and economic policy. He leverages his understanding of these problems to make concrete policy suggestions that could help prevent the world economy from falling back into a variant of the Great Powers regime of the late nineteenth century.

This book provides a framework to understand the disregarded aspect of emerging market growth which is informal employment. Informal employment in unregistered enterprises or of workers without employment contracts or social protection contributions constitutes 88 per cent of employment in India and is a ubiquitous feature of the economy. A large proportion of informal employment (86 per cent) is self-employment and this category of employment has been neglected in the literature on work and development which has focused instead on wage employment that is a contract for work with another person or enterprise. Another striking feature of such economies which the book engages with is that, as they have liberalized, informal employment in the registered enterprises or formal part of the economy has grown. The informal sector has been analyzed by recourse to two major approaches. One is a public economics framework that underlines how informal enterprises evolve as they trade-off reduced access to public services such as contract enforcement with the payment of taxes and regulatory compliances. This book extends this literature by focusing on the access to formal sector credit and its potential for financing productive enterprises as a factor that is considered when an enterprise contemplates whether to incorporate or not. The second leg of the literature takes a labour perspective and emphasizes mandated labour costs such as hiring and firing costs, benefits, and minimum wages as considerations when deciding on whether to engage labour on a formal or informal basis. The book broadens this literature by taking into account how the human capital of workers and the monitoring costs of ensuring that workers are adhering to the terms of negotiated contracts inform the decision with regard to informality. The book will resonate with those academics and policy makers who are engaged with the conundrums of development.

This Handbook responds to the needs and aspirations of current and future generations of development economists by providing critical reference material alongside or in relation to mainstream propositions. Despite the potential of globalisation in accelerating growth and development in low and middle-income countries through the spread of technology, knowledge and information, its current practice in many parts of the world has led to processes that are socially, economically and politically and ecologically unsustainable. It is critical for development economists to engage with the pivotal question of how to change the nature and course of globalisation to make it work for inclusive and sustainable development. Applying a critical and pluralistic approach, the chapters in this Handbook examine economics of development paths under globalisation, focusing on sustainable development in social, environmental, institutional and political economy dimensions. It aims at advancing the frontier of development economics in these key aspects and generating more refined policy perspectives. It is critically reflective in examining effects of globalisation on development paths to date, and in terms of methodological and analytical approaches, as well as forward-thinking in policy perspectives with a view to laying a foundation for sustainable development.

This book focuses on income inequality, output-inflation trade-off and economic policy uncertainty in South Africa. Tight monetary and macroprudential policies raise income inequality. Income inequality transmits monetary policy and macroprudential policy shocks to real economic activity. Economic policy uncertainty influences the dynamics in the lending rate margins, inflation expectations, credit, pass-through of the repo rate to bank lending rates and companies' cash holdings. The trade-off between output and inflation and output growth persistence vary with inflation regimes. Stimulatory demand policy shocks are less effective in high inflation regime. High income inequality raises consumption inequality, which raises demand for credit, but price stability matters in this link. Increased bank concentration raises income inequality, lowers economic growth and employment rate. Elevated economic policy uncertainty lowers output growth, lowers capital formation, reduces credit and raises companies' cash holdings. Increased companies' cash holdings reduce capital formation and impact the transmission of expansionary monetary policy shocks to real economic activity. This book shows there is an inflation level within the target band below it which lowers income inequality, while raising GDP growth and employment. Thus price stability, economic policy uncertainty and income inequality matter for the efficient transmission of policy shocks.

The notion of quality features prominently in contemporary discourse. Numerous ratings, rankings, metrics, auditing, accreditation, benchmarking, smileys, reviews, and international comparisons are all used regularly to capture quality. This book paves the way in exploring the socio-political implications of evaluative statements, with a specific focus on the contribution of the concept of quality to these processes. Drawing on perspectives from the history of ideas, sociology, political science and public management, Dahler-Larsen asks what is the role of quality, and more specifically quality inscriptions, such as measurement? What do they accomplish? And finally, as a consequence of all this, does the term quality make it possible to deal with public issues in a way that lives up to democratic standards? This cross-disciplinary book will be of interest to scholars and students across various fields, including sociology, social epistemology, political science, public policy, and evaluation.

This book brings together scholars from the fields of politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and economics, to explore pathways towards implementing a Basic Income in Australia. It is the first book of its kind to outline avenues for implementation of a basic income specifically for Australia and responds to a gap in the existing basic income literature and published titles to provide a distinct standpoint in the exploration of basic income within the Australian contemporary policy landscape. The first section of the book outlines some of the continuing substantive and philosophical issues regarding BI implementation. In the second section of the book, authors offer practical strategies and models for progressing BI in Australia.

This book makes an original and significant contribution to Keynesian macroeconomics. The IS-LM model is a basic workhorse of Keynesian macroeconomics. However, its financial aspects are extremely rudimentary and the link between the real and the financial sector is extremely tenuous. Hence, neither the IS-LM model nor IS-LM-based models can be applied to the major economic issues facing today's world. This book develops alternative models in the Keynesian tradition that incorporate financial institutions and make explicit the intimate link between the processes of generation of income, saving, credit and expenditure. It subsequently uses these models to address the major current macroeconomic issues that India and the rest of the world are confronted with. In the Indian context, it focuses on the issues of unemployment, growth, recession, bank performance, banking sector reforms and corruption. It also seeks to identify the causes of economic crises in Greece and the US. The analysis reveals a common trend in the economies considered here: the policy framework within which they function is recessionary, exploitative and fosters unemployment, inequality and poverty. Further, this framework is leading these economies farther away from the goal that every civilized society should strive to achieve, namely, providing all citizens with suitably gainful jobs and adequate access to quality food, clothing, shelter, education and health care. The book seeks to identify the cause of this malady, and puts forward policies to remedy it. It thus contains takeaways for academia, think tanks as well as policy makers.

This book presents a synthesis of recent developments in axiomatic analyses of social welfare evaluation in social choice theory. It covers three different contexts of social welfare evaluation, namely, social welfare evaluation within a generation, intergenerational social welfare evaluation involving infinitely many generations, and intergenerational social welfare evaluation with variable population sizes of generations. Analyzing these three different but related contexts of social welfare evaluation in a unified manner, the book places the emphasis on the close linkage between them and provides readers with new insight regarding the relationship between them. Evaluation criteria discussed in the book are firmly rooted in moral philosophy. Besides the axiomatic analyses of utilitarian and egalitarian evaluation criteria, newly developed results on compromised criteria between the utilitarian and egalitarian evaluation criteria are covered as well. The book is recommended to readers who seek an up-to-date integrated overview of a large and broad body of the literature on the axiomatic analysis of social welfare evaluation.

The days of buoyant capital investment, jobs, and wealth are passing Alberta by as the boom-and-bust cycle runs its course and the global climate crisis becomes more acute. As the province scrambles to boost the dying oil economy and curb spending, one solution is all but ignored - a sales tax. In this collection, Alberta scholars and policy experts map out why and how a provincial sales tax should and can be implemented.

Thanks to a series of recent US Supreme Court decisions, corporations can now spend unlimited sums to influence elections, Super PACs and dark money groups are flourishing, and wealthy individuals and special interests increasingly dominate American politics. Despite the overwhelming support of Americans to fix this broken system, serious efforts at reform have languished. Campaign finance is a highly intricate and complex area of the law, and the current system favors the incumbent politicians who oversee it. This illuminating book takes these hard realities as a starting point and offers realistic solutions to reform campaign finance. With contributions from more than a dozen leading scholars of election law, it should be read by anyone interested in reclaiming the promise of American democracy.

Hans van Zon analyzes the financialization of developed capitalism, and argues that the emergence of finance as a dominant force has contributed to the relative decline of the West. He demonstrates that the neo-liberal model is inherently unstable and undermines capitalist economies, which can only function if they are embedded in institutions that are non- or even pre-capitalist. He shows how a toxic combination of financialization, corporate globalization, and a deregulated and parasitic financial industry have led to structural economic stagnation in both the USA and the greater part of the EU.

When the Act of Union was passed in 1707, Scottish parliament was dissolved and the nation’s capital became London. While the general public balked at the perceived unfairness of the treaty, the majority of Scottish ministers seemed satisfied with its terms. This book offers an explanation of how that outcome came about. By examining the influence of a particular strain of mercantilist thought, Ramos demonstrates how the negotiations preceding the passage of the Act of Union were shaped by ideas of value, wealth, trade and power, and, accordingly, how the model of positive balance was used to justify the necessity of the Act. Utilizing contemporary evidence from the English and Scottish ministers involved, this book explores alternative arguments regarding the Union, from before 1707 and in early Scottish political economy, thus highlighting the differing economic and political views that have persisted between England and Scotland for centuries. With twenty-first century discontent leading to the Scottish independence referendum and arguments that persist in the wake of the Brexit decision, Ramos produces timely research that investigates ideas of protectionism that feed into mercantilist economic thought. 

Throughout much of the twentieth century, economists paid little heed to the role of financial intermediaries in procuring a beneficial allocation of capital. By the end of the century, however, some financial historians had begun to turn the tide, and the phrase 'finance-growth nexus' became part of the lexicon of modern economics. Recent experience has added another dimension in that countries with broader, deeper and more active financial systems might be prone to financial crises, particularly if regulatory structures are inadequate. In this book, Peter L. Rousseau and Paul Wachtel have gathered together some of today's most distinguished financial historians to examine this finance-growth nexus from both historical and modern perspectives. Some essays examine the nexus in a particular historical or cross-country context. Others, in the light of recent experience, explore the expanded nexus of finance, growth, crises, and regulation.