Fiscal policy is an incredibly important tool for governments across the world, with many countries facing dilemmas in crafting fiscal policies to meet changing demographic needs, greater demands for social welfare and sudden spending due to shocks such as terrorism. This important book looks at fiscal policy in the Asian Pacific economies and with a broad array of contributors will be a useful tool to students, researchers and professionals working in international economics and finance.

This book provides an overview of the evolution and theories of the Austrian School of Economics and develops answers to current economic questions and the pressing problems of the 21st century from the Austrian perspective. Readers will learn about the fundamental ideas of the Austrian School, the current state of Austrian economics, and the intellectual figures and institutions that sustain it as a vibrant intellectual movement. International experts on Austrian economics cover topics such as the economic impact of pandemics, trade blocs, federalism and European integration, and the economic development of China. The book also discusses the influence of the Austrian School on modern economic thought and mainstream economics, as well as on policymakers. It will appeal to students and scholars of economics and to anyone interested in social and economic liberalism.

The book brings together internationally respected specialists from economics, history and political science such as Harold James, Louis Pauly and Kenneth Mouré. First providing a short history of money doctors, the book then goes on to cover such themes as:
*the IMF and policy advice
*the Russian experience
*contemporary money doctors.
The book shows that there is still a long way to go before international financial advice develops into something that is truly helpful in the long term.

This textbook includes material on the general survey on the theory of taxation, other forms of public revenue, public expenditure and public debts. There are chapters on modern theories of budgetary policy and the controversial cheap money policy, pursued by the author when he was in charge of the British Treasury from 1945-1947.

Series Information:
Harwood Fundamentals of Pure & Applied Economics

In recent years, the European Commission has attached increasing importance to the use of financial engineering instruments rather than traditional grant-based financing for the microcredit sector, considering these to be the most efficient option available. This book presents a study of capacity building and structural funds in public managing authorities for the microcredit sector. It presents two surveys to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the managing authorities' capacity building. The first survey investigates the authorities' need for and interests in capacity building activities, assessing the areas in which capacity building support is needed, and explores the different types of support offered. The second survey analyses the results of the microcredit and microfinance programming activity, investigating its target groups and other operational features. It examines the key monitoring and reporting issues involved in this activity, before analysing the regulatory framework of the microcredit and microfinance sector. This book presents an in-depth analysis of structural funds and their management by policy-makers in the European convergence regions. It explores the interests of managing authorities, microcredit institutions, operators and other financial intermediaries involved in microcredit programming activities, and offers some core strategic and operational recommendations for the use of structural funds in the microcredit sector.

"Fiscal Crisis of the State" refers to the tendency of government expenditures to outpace revenues in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its relevance to other countries of the period and also in today's global economy is evident. When government expenditure constitutes a larger and larger share of total economy theorists who ignore the impact of the state budget do so at their own (and capitalism's) peril. This volume examines how changes in tax rates and tax structure used to regulate private economic activity. O'Connor theorizes that particular expenditures and programs and the budget as a whole can be understood only in terms of power relationships within the private economy. O'Connor's analysis includes an anatomy of American state capitalism, political power and budgetary control in the United States, social capital expenditures, social expenses of production, financing the budget, and the scope and limits of reform. He shows that the simultaneous growth of monopoly power and the state itself generate an increasingly severe social crisis. State monopolies indirectly determine the state budget by generating needs that the state must satisfy. The state administration organizes production as a result of a series of political decisions. Over time, there is a tendency for what O'Connor calls the social expenses of production to rise, and the state is increasingly compelled to socialize these expenses. The state has three ways to finance increased budgetary outlays: create state enterprises that produce social expenditures; issue debt and borrowing against further tax revenues; raise tax rates and introduce new taxes. None of these mechanisms are satisfactory. Neither the development of state enterprise nor the growth of state debt liberates the state from fiscal concerns. Similarly, tax finance is a form of economic exploitation and thus a problem for class analysis. O'Connor contends that the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state is the inevitable consequence of the structural gap between state expenditures and revenues. The state's only way to ameliorate the fiscal crisis is to accelerate the growth of the social-industrial complex. In his new introduction, O'Connor describes "The Fiscal Crisis of the State" as "the product of a unique combination of personal, intellectual, and political experiencesa." He goes on to explain the origins of his theory and the consequences of "The Fiscal Crisis of the State." He answers the question "is there a fiscal crisis today?" and discusses changes in fiscal policy since the '60s and '70s. James O'Connor is emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The Discretionary Economy argues that we do in fact control our own political and economic destinies. As a community, we have discretion over policies that determine whether an economic process adequately provides for the necessities of life. We also determine who participates in normative public judgments and whether decisions distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Tool argues that we must continuously organize the institutional structures through which economic and political functions in the social process are carried on. We must exercise discretion by creating and modifying institutions that coordinate our behavior.

To exercise discretion effectively requires that we employ distinctively American economic, political, and philosophical theory. In this volume, the pivotal twentieth-century contributors to this encompassing theory of political economy are Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Clarence Ayres, and R. Fagg Foster. This volume presents, in detail, their analytical and philosophical perspective on social change. A major purpose of this volume is to compare and contrast the American tradition with the traditions of capitalism, Marxism, and fascism, demonstrating that the former can resolve compelling economic and political problems and the latter two cannot.

This book explains how to identify and analyze social, economic, and political problems confronted in all communities, and how to go about framing and implementing structural adjustments in the political economy. It will be of interest to students in non-traditional courses in political economy including institutional economics, contemporary social problems, economics and social policy, methodology, and contemporary economic thought.

How do Australian governments budget? How well do they spend and manage our money? Governments seem to be locked in a constant struggle with the problems of budgeting. Cabinet never has enough resources to go around, and while some agencies 'guard' public expenditure, others find endless ways to make new claims on budgets.Managing Public Expenditure in Australia provides the first systematic analysis of government budgeting and the politics of the budgetary process. Drawing on extensive original sources, the authors examine debates and reforms in public finance from Whitlam and Fraser to Hawke, Keating and Howard, and assess their impacts on policy development. In tracking the way governments actually spend money, Managing Public Expenditure in Australia provides an alternate and complementary political history of federal government over the past forty years.This book also includes accessible discussions on topics such as budget theory, financial management in government, and debt and deficit reduction. An explanation of new resource management techniques and initiatives help to illuminate the ongoing changes to budget and expenditure management practices. This is an essential purchase for students, teachers and practitioners of public finance, and for anyone involved in the continuing debate over the nature and role of the public sector.

Public budgets follow rules of presentation and use terms that make sense to few outside the world of public finance. Moreover, practices vary widely among the thousands of governments across the globe, between federal, state, and local levels of government in the United States, and among nonprofit organizations, many of which provide services similar to governments. Understanding Government Budgets, Second Edition offers a detailed examination of each of the different types of information found in budgets, featuring annotated examples from a variety of organizations. It expands on explanations in the previous edition by including a wealth of examples from governments abroad and from the nonprofit sector. The book stresses that the choices made about content, format, and organization influence the story a budget tells. Designed to help citizens, students, and policy makers become more informed users of public budgets, this book makes the format of budgets and the information they contain accessible and understandable, providing users with the tools they need to make better sense of public organizations and their performance. Complete with online instructor support material including sample problems, in-class exercises, and discussion questions for each chapter, Understanding Government Budgets, Second Edition is perfect for undergraduate or graduate-level courses in budgeting and public administration, and offers a useful guide to budgets for citizens with an interest in how government operates.

The Global Debt Bomb describes the rapid increase in public and private debt in the G7 nations since the 1960s, why this debt has grown so quickly, and what the economic, political, and social consequences of this rise in debt have been. International in focus, this book broadens the debate on public debt to include household and corporate debt, avoids alarmist rhetoric, and puts our current problems in historical perspective.

The central message of The Global Debt Bomb is that the debt-induced financial crisis that affected the Pacific Rim and much of the developing world in 1998 will likely spread to the industrialized countries in Europe and North America when current market and asset "bubbles" burst. How to prevent or mitigate another possible crisis is the primary contribution of this book.

Within a historical perspective, Clayton clearly explains the "culture of debt" - its definition, how it got to be such a major burden, why we can't live without it, and ways to manage it more efficiently. He addresses the development of debt over the course of the 20th century in both the US and world economies. This comprehensive multidisciplinary analysis covers all aspects of debt - benefits and necessity; the impact (both good and bad) on individuals, corporations and governments; and lessons to be learned from the past. Clayton, drawing on current research and extensive primary data in economics, political science, and history, concludes that with our rapacious accumulation of debt and common-place use of "debt-finance", our society has set itself up for a significant financial decline.

Eighteen years of Conservative stewardship ensured that the Labour government's education policy did not begin with a tabula rasa, for its starting point has been defined by the previous government to a greater extent than any other incoming government has found. In this book the practitioners discuss the micro effect of the policies in their schools. This book will make an important contribution to continuing debate about the best way forward for state education in England and Wales.

This comprehensive new text breaks the mould of traditional Public Sector Economics texts. It provides the student with a solid grounding in theory and focuses on how this theory can be applied to a broad range of contemporary issues such as health and education, the monopoly regulation and privatisation, as well as taxes and incentives. This approach teaches the student to understand how the public sector interacts with the rest of the economy, why governments act in the way they do, enabling them to evaluate policies and their alternatives.

Economists and political scientists deal with three major areas of concern: the effect of moving large numbers of welfare recipients into labor markets, the planned federal reforms in the health-care field that will shift costs to the state and local sectors, and trends in federal aid. Focusing on the impact of US devolution of responsibility and costs to the states, they find that the state economies can accommodate the challenges generally, but that the effect of welfare reform is too long-range to be adequately assessed in the near-term.

This volume is a follow-up to the earlier "Urban Economics, Volume 2" of "Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics," edited by Edwin Mills. The earlier volume, published in 1987, focussed on urban economic theory. This new handbook, in contrast, focuses on applied urban research. The difference is of course in emphasis. The earlier volume was by no means entirely concerned with theoretical research and this one is by no means entirely concerned with applied research.

There have certainly been important theoretical developments during the last decade, and they are surveyed at appropriate places in this volume. However, there has been an outpouring of high quality applied research in urban economics, as in other specialties. The reasons for the rapid growth of applied research are not difficult to identify; improved theoretical frameworks within which to do applied research; improved econometric techniques and software; more and better data; and, probably most important, ever cheaper computing power, which is being ever more widely distributed within the research community, providing increasingly easy access to and analysis of, data.

Selection and classification of topics to include in this handbook has inevitably depended on the editors' perceptions of subjects on which important research has been undertaken. It has also depended on the availability of authors who were able and willing to write critical surveys of large amounts of international research. An attempt was made to include authors and have them survey research from a variety of countries. However, there is still a US bias in applied urban research, partly related to the availability of data and computers but also to the sheer size of the US research community.

For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http: //www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes

The authors of this work examine the dominant view that voluntary activity promotes social capital and hence good government, but also explore alternative models for the creation of social capital. Theoretical discussion is combined with detailed case studies to provide a new explanation of :
* the origins and nature of social capital
* its effects on political participation and policy-making
* the role of the voluntary sector
Contributors go on to examine the possibility that current changes in the voluntary sector may in fact undermine social capital and consider the consequences.
This book is an important step forward in this rapidly growing field of research and adds a unique European perspective to a debate which has been largely US-focussed.

The recent devolution to the states of responsibilities previously held by the federal government -- a key goal of the deficit-reduction, smaller-government agenda of the 1990s -- has far-reaching implications for state budgets. At the moment, a strong economy has put most states into a strong enough fiscal condition to shoulder such burdens as welfare reform and public investment. But beneath the current surpluses are structural problems that are unlikely to withstand the next economic downturn; as a result, any essential public needs will be left unmet. This book deal with three major areas of concern: first, the effect of moving large numbers of welfare recipients into labor markets; second, the planned federal reforms in the health care field that will shift costs to the state and local sector; and third, trends in federal aid. A basic finding of these essays is that state economies can accommodate these challenges generally speaking, but the effect of recent welfare reform presents a problem too long-range to be adequately assessed in the near-term.

Confronted with rising citizen discontent, the Reinventing Government movement, and new technological challenges, public organizations everywhere are seeking means of improving their performance. Their quest is not new, rather, the concern with improving the performance of government organizations has existed since the Scientific Management Movement. "Public Sector Performance" brings together in a single volume the classic, enduring principles and processes that have defined the field of public sector performance, as written in the words of leading practitioners and scholars. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a performance compass for today's public managers, helping them to reconstruct the public's confidence in, and support of, government.Defined here as managing public organizations for outcomes, performance is examined in all its varied dimensions: organizing work, managing workers, measuring performance, and overcoming resistance to performance-enhancing innovations. The selected articles are interesting, thought provoking, and instructive. They are classics in that they have been widely cited in the scholarly literature and have enduring value to public managers who seek to understand the many dimensions of performance. The book is organized into three sections: Performance Foundations, Performance Strategies, and Performance Measurement. Excerpts from additional selected articles feature special topics and wisdom from performance experts.

In "Honest Numbers and Democracy," Walter Williams offers a revealing history of policy analysis in the federal government and a scorching critique of what's wrong with social policy analysis today. Williams, a policy insider who witnessed the birth of domestic policy analysis during the Johnson administration, contends that the increasingly partisan U.S. political environment is vitiating both "honest numbers" -- the data used to direct public policy -- and, more importantly, honest analysts, particularly in the White House.

Drawing heavily on candid off-the-record interviews with political executives, career civil servants, elected officials and Washington-based journalists, Williams documents the steady deformation of social policy analysis under the pressure of ideological politics waged by both the executive and legislative branches. Beginning with the Reagan era and continuing into Clinton's tenure, Williams focuses on the presidents' growing penchant to misuse and hide numbers provided by their own analysts to assist in major policy decisions.

"Honest Numbers and Democracy" is the first book to examine in-depth the impact of the electronic revolution, its information overload, and rampant public distrust of the federal government's data on the practice of policy analysis.

A hard-hitting account of the factors threatening the credibility of the policymaking process, this book will be required reading for policy professionals, presidential watchers, and anyone interested in the future of U.S. democracy.

In the public sector at the moment resources are scarce - or at the very least finite and limited - how they are allocated is therefore of crucial importance.
This book analyses this process and examines the competing values that underlie the public service ethic, including the role of markets and quasi-markets, in the delivery of public services.
Topics discussed include:
* whether people should be denied the public services they need because public bodies are short of money
* what balance we should strike between markets and public organisations to provide public services
* whether the use of markets has gone too far and whether we need to return to a public service ethic

The widespread restructuring and privatization of UK public services has fundamentally changed the nature of society. This text is an examination of all aspects of public sector management. It includes: recent developments in the public sector and policy making; analysis of the role of markets and quasi markets in the allocation and delivery of public services; the heuristics and dialectics of resource allocation; news stories from the press, such as the story of "child B" to illustrate arguments; and two diagnostic inventories "Monksbane and Feverfew" and "RAPS" which readers can use to assess their own values about public services.

The main focus of downsizing has shifted from the private to the public sector. The cutbacks began in the Department of Defense. Now the goal is a federal civilian workforce reduction of 12 percent by the year 2000.

This pioneering study looks at the management of workforce reductions in the public sector both in theory and in practice. Three case studies -- of the Defense Logistics Agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Food and Drug Administration -- illustrate the organizational, managerial, and human dimensions of attempting to improve performance with reduced resources. The author draws on extensive interviews with senior executives and middle managers in the three agencies; at the General Accounting Office, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Performance Review; the Senior Executives Association and the Federal Managers Association; and scholars and researchers.

In a larger sense, this work pushes the boundaries of knowledge concerning organizational change and makes a significant contribution to organization theory. It offers important new insights not only for public sector managers but for organization theorists and management specialists whose work on downsizing has been presumed but not shown to be applicable to the public sector.

The main focus of downsizing has shifted from the private to the public sector. The cutbacks began in the Department of Defense. Now the goal is a federal civilian workforce reduction of 12 percent by the year 2000. This pioneering study looks at the management of workforce reductions in the public sector both in theory and in practice. Three case studies -- of the Defense Logistics Agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Food and Drug Administration -- illustrate the organizational, managerial, and human dimensions of attempting to improve performance with reduced resources. The author draws on extensive interviews with senior executives and middle managers in the three agencies; at the General Accounting Office, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Performance Review; the Senior Executives Association and the Federal Managers Association; and scholars and researchers. In a larger sense, this work pushes the boundaries of knowledge concerning organizational change and makes a significant contribution to organization theory. It offers important new insights not only for public sector managers but for organization theorists and management specialists whose work on downsizing has been presumed but not shown to be applicable to the public sector.