This book investigates the causes of inequalities that have developed in the European Union, analyzes their social and economic consequences, and assesses the political measures taken to address these issues - also on the basis of public survey results.

The detailed analyses presented focus on structures of inequality to be found in the areas education, culture, labor market, Internet access, families and children, gender, and the regions of the EU. The book also critically examines both the legal framework conditions and financial / taxation policy as instruments that can be used to either produce or combat inequality.

This book analyses several aspects of Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM), a form of hybrid public-private partnership (PPP) for development of roads sector in India. The book covers contractual, financing, taxation and accounting aspects of the HAM based PPP projects in India and provides a complete multi-dimensional view for readers. It is a comprehensive guide for multiple stakeholders involved in the development of infrastructure projects in developing economies across globe. The book is authored by professionals having hands-on advisory experience for HAM PPP projects in India. Given that these are long-term concession agreements (around 15 years), there are inherent complications and the authors have tried to provide clarity on practical issues. The book adopts a novel case-study approach. Based on detailed financial and commercial assumptions for a road project in India, the authors have used around 100 numerical illustrations to provide a quantitative and qualitative understanding for readers. Another highlight of the book is use of international case-studies to provide key learnings in areas of project preparation and structuring for such hybrid PPP models. The risk allocation framework is also contrasted with the HAM PPP model to highlight the key differences. The international case studies have been selected from transport and water sector to illustrate the applicability of hybrid PPPs across multiple sectors to support sustainable infrastructure development. The target audience for this book include private sector developers, government agencies, deal practitioners, advisors, researchers and academia . This book will also serve as a useful guide for commercial lenders, development finance institutions (DFIs) and institutional investors who are looking to finance such infrastructure projects in the long term.

This book tackles political, social, and behavioural aspects of public finance and fiscal exchange. The book combines conventional approaches toward public finance with new developments in economics such as political governance, social and individual aspects of economic behaviour. It colligates public finance and behavioural economics and gathers original contributions within the emerging field of behavioural public finance. The book addresses public finance topics by incorporating political, social, and behavioural aspects of economic decision-making, assuming the tax relationship is shaped by three dimensions of decision-making. Thus, it aims not only to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of public finance by bringing together scholars from various disciplines but also to examine public finance through the lens of political, social, and behavioural aspects. The book scrutinizes the relationship between political institutions, governance types, and public finance; it investigates the impact of social context, social capital, and societal cooperation on public finance; it explores behavioural biases of individual fiscal preferences. This book is of interest to scholars, policymakers, tax professionals, business professionals, financers, university students, and researchers in the fields of public policy and economics.

This book presents selected papers from the 26th and 27th Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES) Conferences, held in Prague, Czech Republic, and Bali, Indonesia. While the theoretical and empirical papers gathered here cover diverse areas of economics and finance in various geographic regions, the main focus is on the latest research concerning banking and finance, as well as empirical studies on emerging economies and public economics. The book also includes studies on political economy and regional studies.

Covering core topics that explore the government's role in the economy, this textbook is intended for third or fourth year undergraduate students and first year graduate students. It includes markets, externalities, public goods, imperfect competition, asymmetric information and efficiency, and asymmetric information and income redistribution. A knowledge of intermediate microeconomics and basic calculus is assumed. Each chapter contains exercises at the end, whose solutions are available to instructors. Instructors' resource page: http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/leach/

This book analyzes the consequences that would arise if Germany's means-tested unemployment benefits were replaced with an unconditional basic income. The basic income scheme introduced is based on a negative income tax and calibrated to be both financially feasible and compatible with current constitutional legislation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) the author examines the impact of the reform on the household labor supply as well as on both poverty and inequality measures. It is shown that by applying reasonable values for both the basic income and the implied marginal tax rate imposed on earned incomes, efficiency gains can be reconciled with generally accepted value statements. Furthermore, as the proposal includes a universal basic income for families, child poverty could be reduced considerably. The estimates are based on the discrete choice approach to labor supply.

In the light of multiple corporate debacles, financial crises and environmental disasters across the globe, the need for corporate goals to transition from simply maximising shareholder wealth to optimising stakeholder welfare is being echoed in various quarters. This book makes a distinct contribution by looking at Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) from a values-based perspective with a focus on providinga balance between corporate success and social well-being. The book emphasizes that corporations need to redefine their purposes to co-create long-term, sustainable and win-win solutions for multiple stakeholders through mutually-fulfilling and value-adding collaborative efforts. Through the ideal of 'A Soulful Corporation', the book proposes a new story where corporations, as associations of individuals, can identify their 'collective spirits' in terms of environmentally-aware, socially-inclusive and financially-rewarding missions.

Some of the unique features of the book include:

. A detailed study of the evolution of CSR from the ancient to contemporary times

. Insights gained through empirical research and personal interviews with over 100 industry captains, CEOs, MDs and heads of the CSR function across companies and industries

. Case studies on CSR practices and processes in leading Indian companies including the Tata Group, TVS Motor, HUL, Wipro, L&T, Bharat Petroleum, HDFC Bank, Birla Group, Reliance Industries and others.

. Cases on unique social welfare projects in the areas of education, healthcare and drinking water supply

. A 'Society and Local Community Welfare Framework'and a '12-point Agenda for Affirmative Action' that propose policy recommendations and provide corporations with a roadmap for their CSR journey in the light of the mandatory CSR spending introduced by the Government of India.

The book has relevance to multiple stakeholders: students, academics, CSR researchers, policy-makers, industry captains, business managers and entrepreneurs."

"A Guide to SME Finance" is a brief guide to designing and implementing an SME finance program within a commercial bank or other financial institution, such as an NGO. This work covers the rationale behind SME finance - why it makes sense for a bank to enter this market sector, followed by a step-by-step approach to designing and implementing the program. Munro highlights the need to automate the lending process, and offers a lengthy description of how this can be accomplished. Examples of loan application, analysis, and approval forms and templates are included along with instructions for use. Additional formats are provided for loan officer goals and periodic reviews, portfolio and relationship profitability management, as well as a model credit score card to use as a 'sift' for loan applicants.

In the US, retirement savings are low while risk exposure is high, thus dooming many retirees to a low standard of living. This book offers straightforward solutions to build real retirement security for American families.

Global cities today are facing fundamental challenges in relation to unaffordable housing and growing economic inequality. Singapore's success in making homeownership possible for 90% of its population has attracted much attention internationally. This book represents a culmination of research by the author on key housing policy innovations for affordable housing. Housing policy changes were effected in the 1960s through reforms of colonial legislation and institutions dealing with state land acquisition, public housing, and provident fund savings. The comprehensive housing framework that was established enabled the massive resettlement of households from shophouses, slums and villages to high-rise government-built flats. In the 1980s and 1990s, housing market and land use regulations were amended in response to the changing needs of a growing economy. Housing policies have also been utilised to curb housing speculation, build racially inclusive communities, and reduce wealth inequality. More recently, an ageing population of homeowners has necessitated focus on policies for housing equity extraction. This landmark title is of relevance to all developing economies exploring alternative systems of affordable housing.

This book examines the role of government fiscal and non-fiscal incentives in spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in developed and developing economies. It explores and examines the role of government programs in different stages of firm growth pre-startup, startup, and scale-up. By developing a theoretical framework and reviewing international evidence, the book identifies the best combination of government incentives to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship, and provides concrete policy recommendations for decision-makers. Some of the issues tackled in this book include national innovation policy, innovation support programs, effectiveness of the support, challenges associated with the programs, risk-sharing and partnerships for innovation. This book is of interest to academics, students, practitioners, policymakers, governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as other stakeholders who wants to be informed about the challenges, progress and current trend in stimulating innovation and entrepreneurship.

This book investigates the economic decisions behind the implementation of public-private partnerships (PPPs). The first part of the book discusses different forms of public procurement contracts, in particular in France and the UK, and provides an economic analysis of the potential advantages and pitfalls of public-private partnerships. This exploration of PPPs' efficiency also includes an examination of the financing conditions of public procurements, as well as regulatory requirements. By reviewing empirical studies on PPPs, the second part of the book compares their advantages over purely public solutions and offers practical guidance on their implementation. Practitioners will also learn best practices on how to involve stakeholders in calls for bids.

This book offers a comprehensive overview and critique of the most important political and philosophical interpretations of the basic results of social choice, assessing their plausibility and seeking to identify the links between the theory of social choice and the more traditional issues of political theory and philosophy. In this regard, the author eschews a strong methodological commitment or technical formalism; the approach is instead based on the presentation of political facts and illustrated via numerous real-life examples. This allows the reader to get acquainted with the philosophical and political dispute surrounding voting and collective decision-making and its links to social choice theory.

This volume explores the influence of professional service firms on public policy-making from a global perspective. Drawing on cases studies from around the world, researchers from different disciplines-including sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, history, and management studies-examine how professional service firms have generated power in the policy-making process. The chapters further investigate the structure and organization of these firms and their relationship with public agencies. They discuss the impact of strategies, techniques and models promoted by these firms on political decision-making. And they analyze how these firms have contributed to the formation of global policy-pipelines, facilitating the quick diffusion of policy ideas across time and space. Exposing how professional advisors can undermine democratic decision-making, the chapters in this book explore the potential for resistance and regulation of public-private relationships.

Could information and communication technology (ICT) become the transformative tool for a new style of global development? Could ICT promote knowledge-based, innovation-driven, and smart, adaptive, participatory development? As countries seek a way out of the present period of economic contraction, they are trying to weave ICT into their development strategies, in the same way organizations have learned to use ICT to transform their business models and strategies. This integration offers a new path to development that is responsive to the challenges of our times.

In e-Transformation, Nagy Hanna identifies the key ingredients for the strategic integration of ICT into national development, with examples from around the world. He draws on his rich experience of over 35 years at the World Bank and other aid agencies to outline the strategic options involved in using ICT to maximize developmental impact transforming public service institutions, networking businesses for innovation and competitiveness, and empowering communities for social inclusion and poverty reduction. He identifies the key interdependencies in e-transformation and offers a holistic framework to tap network effects and synergies across all elements of the process, including leadership, cyber policies, institutions, human resources, technological competencies, information infrastructure, and ICT uses for government, business, and society.

Integrating analytical insights and practical applications across the fields of development, political economy, public administration, entrepreneurship, and technology management, the author candidly argues that e-transformation, like all bold ideas, faces implementation challenges. In particular, the aspiration-reality gap needs to be systematically addressed if ICT-enabled innovation and transformation is to become a development practice. E-transformation is first and foremost about thinking strategically and creatively about the options made possible by the information technology revolution in the context of globalization. To this end, the author provides tools and best practices designed to nurture innovation, select entry points, prioritize among competing demands, and sequence and scale up. He outlines the roles of all participants political, managerial, entrepreneurial, social and technical whose leadership is essential for successful innovation."

This book explores the Swedish experience of banking development, regulation and financial crisis from 1900 to 2015. It puts the experiences of the past in the context of today's debate on the future of banking, and argues that the experiences of the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007 warrants new understandings of the role of bank regulation. The book also analyses how shifts in bank regulations are usually part of more general policy shifts in society, which are in turn connected to both pragmatic and ideological considerations. In the case of Sweden the shift towards more extensive bank regulations after World War II was closely related to the development of the welfare state. Such shifts in policy and regulations are generally international, and the book also explores how the Swedish national policy has interacted with international developments.

This volume is a collection of empirical and theoretical research papers regarding economics, public finance and business written by researchers from several different universities. It also includes a wide range of topics concerning issues in economics, public finance and business. This book is aimed at educators, researchers and students interested in these fields.

This book comprehensively addresses the economic and social implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. In each chapter of the book, the effects of the pandemic on different economic and financial sectors are discussed. The book tackles many topics and issues that are of relevance in the post-pandemic world. Some of these issues are the effects of the pandemic on countries' budgets, tax systems, financial and economic policies, and management, in addition, the evaluation of the pandemic in terms of migration and refugees, the historic comparison of its effects with other pandemics, the social media reflections of the pandemic and the global governance discussions. The book also considers the effects of pandemic on the use of digital currencies and the effects of digitalization of employment and robot employment.

This book presents an analysis of Caribbean fiscal problems, with particular emphasis on the relationship between high levels of public expenditure and balance of payments problems. The study examines deficit financing, public expenditure growth, and IMF stabilization policies. Other issues raised relate to income distribution and problems of taxation and tax reform. The work focuses on Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago. The economies of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States are also considered.

This work will interest scholars in economics and economic policy-making, especially those in developing countries.

The most widely-cited social welfare statistics in the United States are based on tabulations on family income. The picture that emerges is cause for concern; median family income has hardly changed over the past 25 years while inequality has increased and poverty remained persistently high. Yet, consumption-based statistics as employed in this work yield rigorous and quite different estimates of real individual and social welfare. Closely linked to economic theory, Professor Slesnick's examination of standards of living, inequality, and poverty reveal that the standard of U.S. living has grown significantly while inequality and poverty have decreased to relatively low levels. His assessment is drawn from extended period data in order to chart long-run trends.

This book provides a thorough legal analysis of sovereign indebtedness, examining four typologies of sovereign debt bilateral debt, multilateral debt, syndicated debt and bonded debt in relation to three crucial contexts: genesis, restructuring and litigation. Its treatise-style approach makes it possible to capture in a systematic manner a phenomenon characterized by high complexity and unclear boundaries. Though the analysis is mainly conducted on the basis of international law, the breadth of this topical subject has made it necessary to include other sources, such as private international law, domestic law and financial practice; moreover, references are made to international financial relations and international financial history so as to provide a more complete understanding. Although it follows the structure of a continental "tractatus, "the work strikes a balance between consideration of doctrinal and jurisprudential sources, making it a valuable reference work for scholars and practitioners alike."

In the United States many important programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, are paid from trust funds. At a time when major social insurance funds are facing insolvency, this timely book provides the first comprehensive study of this significant yet little-studied feature of the American welfare state. Trust funds are at the heart of US budgeting and public social provision, and also raise a fundamental question of democratic politics: can current officeholders bind their successors? Through detailed case studies Patashnik shows how long term government commitments are effectively designed.

Central banks have a profound impact on financial markets, and investors struggle to keep informed about their complex policy decisions. Technological and financial developments have transformed the US Federal Reserve Bank from a financial black box into a vocal, increasingly transparent institution-and the result is such a wealth of textual data that clues to future policy decisions may be lost among the details. This book presents a solution to this problem by keeping track of those details. Schnidman and MacMillan demonstrate how the latest advances in automated text analysis, combined with the precision of domain expertise, are the keys to understanding how central banks move markets with their words. The authors outline a method to not only examine every piece of every central bank communication, but to do it in a way that is completely comprehensive and unbiased while quickly yielding hard, quantitative data that can be put to work in modern financial models.

The book examines the status of public service in developing countries, in the sectors of health, infrastructure, labour and marginalized populations, rural economy and public administration. The last decade has witnessed significant government focus on service delivery in developing nations like South Africa, Philippines, India and Malaysia. At the forefront of this movement has been the public sector reforms significantly driven by two broad factors: public sector inefficiencies and liberal economic ideology. This move towards efficient public service delivery in developing nations (versus developed nations) has required a significant shift in institutional thinking and institutional capacity for the governments. It is therefore no surprise that while economic liberalization has been relatively easy to implement, governance reforms towards public service delivery has been significantly more challenging. In this background, the chapters of the book, with sector themes, examine the three basic foundations of public policy-courses of action, regulatory measures and issues, and funding structures and priorities-in public service delivery. The book is a multi country, multi sector, perspective since it includes studies from Russian Federation, India, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Fiji, South Africa, Columbia, Philippines, Macedonia and India. This perspective lends itself to the investigation for a comprehensive overall development model.

Project Finance in Theory and Practice: Designing, Structuring, and Financing Private and Public Projects, Fourth Edition provides essential, core coverage of project finance, offering new insights into Sharia-compliant instruments and a comprehensive overview of the current state of international regulation of banking post financial crisis. This updated edition includes new case studies and topics related to country risk, along with insights from project finance experts who share their specialized knowledge on legal issues and the role of advisors in project finance details. The book will be useful for readers at all levels of education and experience who want to learn how to succeed in project finance.