China's stunning record of economic development since the 1970s has been marred by an increasingly obvious gap between the country's 'haves' and its 'have-nots'. While people living in some parts of the country have enjoyed dramatically improved conditions of life, those in other districts and regions have slipped ever further behind in terms of access to health, wealth, education, security and opportunity.

Paying for Progress in China is a collection of essays which trace the causes of this growing inequality, using new data including surveys, interviews, newly available official statistics and in-depth fieldwork. Their findings expose the malfunctioning of China's 'broken' intergovernmental fiscal system, which has exacerbated the disequalizing effects of emerging market forces. Whilst the government's deliberately 'pro-poor' development policies have in recent years sought to reduce the gap between rich and poor, both markets, and also state institutions and policies, are continuing to create perverse equity outcomes across the country, confounding hopes for better-balanced and more inclusive growth in China.

The interdisciplinary approach of this collection, incorporating work by economists, sociologists and political scientists, makes it a valuable resource for students of contemporary Chinese political economy and social development.

The Washington financier who first proposed creation of a trust fund to retire the national debt has written a book outlining a new plan that would prevent Congress from raiding the fund to supplement the cost of regular government programs. In 1982 he suggested a temporary 5% tax on manufacturers sales. The income would go into a debt trust fund similar to the highway trust fund. The $1 trillion federal debt would have been retired in five years (by 1985 or 1986) under that proposal. In the past decade, however, federal trust fund have not fared as well. For example, contributions to the social security fund essentially are borrowed for the regular budget. The trust fund contains federal I.O.U.s. A special tax that raised secure funds exclusively for debt retirement might well get public support. Without federal interest payments, the 1992 federal deficit would have been cut to $114 billion from $314 billion.

Washington banker and attorney Charles W. Steadman, who made the 1982 proposal, now has eliminated the trust fund from his method of paying off the debt. In "The National Debt Conclusion: Establishing the Debt Repayment Plan," (Praeger Publishers, November 1993), Steadman lays out his proposal to eliminate the debt in ten years. Steadman would issue new debt bonds for existing federal government debt securities in a single exchange. A sales tax at the producers' level would be dedicated solely to paying off the new debt bonds on schedule. There would be no trust fund. The rate of the sales tax would be scheduled to raise only enough money each year to call the bonds scheduled for retirement in that year. The debt bonds could be retired only by income from the special purpose tax. Steadman's plan establishes a contract between the government and the bondholders, who would have no claim on general funds of the United States. The Congress would have no way to borrow from the debt retirement receipts. Steadman argues that America must adopt a fundamentally different fiscal structure before the debt burden ultimately causes collapse of the nation's financial structure.

The economic demands of an ageing population, coupled with the crisis of public spending pose one of the greatest challenges to social policy in both the East and West. This book focuses on the political economy of pensions, particularly on the interaction between private and state provision. Enterprise and the Welfare State argues that there is more to welfare than simply provision by the state and so the focus of this book is on the welfare society rather than the welfare state. This requires a new system of statistical accounting and a different focus for case studies. A multidisciplinary approach is used to examine the design of the pensions system in nine countries with different institutional welfare mixes. Using a common conceptual framework, it compares and contrasts the goals and realities of the welfare systems in France, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden, where strong occupational pensions are in operation, with the more modest welfare states in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each country case study provides a grounded analysis of the evolution of pension design and traces the impact of the policies on the economic well-being of the aged and the performance of the economy. It offers new data on the level of spending of enterprise based occupational pensions and examines the implications for redistribution resulting from changes in the design of state and occupational pensions. This book will be essential reading for academics, students and public policymakers interested in the economics of welfare, social policy and the future of pension provision.

The subnational dimension of infrastructure has emerged as one of the greatest challenges in contemporary public finance policy and management. Ensuring the efficient provision of infrastructure represents a challenge for all countries irrespective of their level of centralization or decentralization. This book proposes an innovative approach for the strengthening of decentralized public investment and infrastructure management. Decentralization and Infrastructure in the Global Economy: From Gaps to Solutions covers the most important aspects of infrastructure investment in a decentralized setting. It discusses infrastructure gaps and the quality of subnational spending; how functional responsibilities, financing and equalization can be designed; sector-specific arrangements in high expenditure areas, such as health, education and roads; key steps of the public investment cycle and management; and analyses the political economy and corruption challenges that typically accompany decentralized infrastructure projects. This book challenges some of the well-accepted principles of intergovernmental fiscal relations and will be useful to researchers and practitioners of public finance policy and management.

Budgeting for Local Governments and Communities is designed as the primary textbook for a quarter or semester-long course in public budgeting and finance in an MPA programme. Many currently available texts for this course suffer from a combination of defects that include a focus on federal and state budgeting, a lack of a theoretical governance framework, an omission of important topics, and typically a lack of exercises and datasets for student use. Budgeting for Local Governments and Communities solves all of these problems. The book is exceptionally comprehensive and well written, and represents the efforts of veteran authors with both teaching and real-world experience. Key Features: Special Focus on Local Government Budgeting: focuses exclusively on budgeting at the local levels of American government, which are responsible for spending 40 percent of the taxes collected from citizens. Integration of Theory and Practice: teaching cases and chapters capture the "lessons learned" by professional practitioners who have extensive experience in making local public budgeting work on the ground.< /li> Polity Approach to Local Budgeting: presents an introduction to local budgeting as the central political activity that integrates the resources of the community into a unified whole. Budgeting is presented as governance work, rather than as a unique set of skills possessed by analysts and financial specialists. Legal, Historical, Economic and Moral Foundations of Local Government Budgeting: provides readers with an understanding of how the structures and processes of local budgeting systems are firmly tethered to the underlying core values, legal principles and historical development of the larger American federal, state and local political systems. Electronic Datasets and Budgeting Exercises: the text includes access to extensive electronic datasets and practice exercises that provide abundant opportunities for students to "learn through doing." Extensive Glossary and Bibliography: covers terms on the history and practice of local public budgeting.

This book explores the issue of private sector over-indebtedness following the recent financial crisis. It addresses the various challenges for policymakers, investors and economic agents affected by applied remedial policies as the private non-financial sector in Europe continues to face increased challenges in servicing its debt, with the problem mainly concentrated in several countries in the EU periphery and Eastern Europe. Chapters from expert contributors address reduced investment as firms concentrate on deleveraging and repairing their balance sheets, curtailed consumer spending, depressed collateral values and weak credit creation. They examine effective policies to facilitate private sector debt restructuring which may involve significant upfront costs in terms of time to implement and committed budgetary resources, as well as necessary reforms required to improve the broader institutional framework and judicial capacity. The book also explores the issue of over indebtedness in the household sector, contributing to the literature in establishing best practice principles for household debt.

The book brings together internationally respected specialists from economics, history and political science such as Harold James, Louis Pauly and Kenneth Moure. 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 book examines interesting new topics in applied economics from the perspectives of the economics of information and risk, two fields of economics that address the consequences of asymmetric information, environmental risk and uncertainty for the nature and efficiency of interactions between individuals and organizations. In the economics of information, the essential task is to examine the condition of asymmetric information under which the information gap is exploited. For the economics of risk, it is important to investigate types of behavior including risk aversion, risk sharing, and risk prevention, and to reexamine the classical expected utility approach and the relationships among several types of the changes in risk. Few books have ever analyzed topics in applied economics with regard to information and risk. This book provides a comprehensive collection of applied analyses, while also revisiting certain basic concepts in the economics of information and risk. The book consists of two parts. In Part I, several aspects of applied economics are investigated, including public policy, labor economics, and political economics, from the standpoint of the economics of (asymmetric) information. First, several basic frameworks of the incentive mechanism with regard to transaction-specific investment are assessed, then various tools for market design and organization design are explored. In Part II, mathematical measures of risk and risk aversion are examined in more detail, and readers are introduced to stochastic selection rules governing choice behavior under uncertainty. Several types of change in the random variable for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability distribution function (PDF) are discussed. In closing, the part investigates the comparative static results of these changes in CDF or PDF on the general decision model, incorporating uncertain situations in applied economics.

Based on the philosophy of Systems Science and the law of evolution theory, the book, by applying the methods of structural functionalism, divides the modern social system into human-culture, economy, polity, science, law, education and other sub-systems through the systematic synthesis of disciplines such as economics, sociology, management, politics, culture theories, history and philosophy, and explores the connection between these sub-systems and their intricate relation with social progress, thus depicting the historical trajectory of the long-term evolution of human social system. Starting from the actual production and operation of the firms, the author systematically analyses the organic connections and sophisticated operating process of social reproduction in modern society from micro, meso and macro, revealing the dynamic structure and evolutionary laws of the social economic system. This book reveals the fractal features such as self-similarity, hierarchy, and recursiveness in the general structure of the firm system, the sector system and the national economic system, thereby integrating micro-, meso- and macro-economics into a unified theoretical framework. This integration is interdisciplinary, and has gone beyond the economics. It can be regarded as the fourth grand synthesis in the history of economics after John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) and Samuelson (1915-2009).

By taking the long view on the evolution of this country's tax policies through the past few decades, Henrekson and Stenkula explain how Sweden developed the highest tax-to-GDP ratio in the world, until the beginning of the 2000s.

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.

This volume provides a splendid and wide-ranging collection of studies analyzing the political-economy of decentralization in Latin-America. It's a fascinating story with numerous and profound insights into how fiscal decentralization actually works in the context of a variety of fiscal institutions and in a setting with a high degree of inequality in the distribution of income and territorial disparities.' - Wallace E. Oates, University of Maryland, College Park US'The volume on Decentralization and Reform in Latin America is an important addition to the growing literature on decentralization. Some of the issues in the implementation and effectiveness of decentralization are similar all over the world, but there are issues of particular salience to Latin America, a region where decentralization reforms have come sometimes in the wake of major political reforms. This volume pays special attention to the complexity of issues (both relating to equity and efficiency) arising in the context of vertical fiscal imbalance and inter-governmental transfers, in the delivery of social services or investment spending, in the sharing of rent from natural resources among social and regional groups and in macro-fiscal stabilization. I expect the volume to receive widespread attention.' - Pranab Bhardan, University of California, Berkeley, US 'Giorgio Brosio and Juan Pablo Jimenez have made a remarkable job in preparing the best comprehensive treatment of comparative decentralization experiences in Latin America. It will be essential reading for analysts of fiscal and local government issues in the region and a very useful tool for Latin Americanists in general.' - Jose Antonio Ocampo, Professor, Columbia University. Former Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and Finance Minister of Colombia Decentralisation and Reform in Latin America analyzes the process of intergovernmental reform in Latin America in the last two decades and presents a number of emerging issues. These include the impacts of decentralization and the response of countries in the region to challenge such as social cohesion, interregional and interpersonal disparities, the assignment of social and infrastructure expenditure, macrofinancial shocks, fiscal rules and the sharing of natural resources revenue. The main aim of the book is to assess the effective working of decentralized arrangements and institutions, with a view of suggesting corrections and reforms where the system is not working according to expectations. Policymakers, researchers and academics with an interest in subjects related to public policy, fiscal rules, intergovernmental relations, governance and decentralization will find this book invaluable. Contributors include: J.R. Afonso, E. Ahmad, V. Almeida, G. Arballo, G. Brosio, K. Castro, O. Cetrangolo, S. Dain, L. de Mello, A. Faveret, R. Gargarella, A. Goldschmit, J.C. Gomez Sabaini, V. Grembi, J.P. Jimenez, A. Manoel, J. Martinez-Vasquez, F. Rezende, C. Sepulveda, T. Ter-Minassian, J. Veloso

The global economy has experienced four waves of rapid debt accumulation over the past fifty years. The first three debt waves ended with financial crises in many emerging and developing economies.

Entitlements represent one of the largest and fastest-growing portions of the federal budget. They are regarded as sacrosanct by lawmakers, yet many people see them as one of the greatest threats to the American Dream. T his volume argues that by sacrificing the future in order to pay ever-larger federal benefits through programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and federal pensions, entitlement spending has become a crushing burden to American workers. Peterson and Howe destroy myths surrounding entitlement spending. They show that the bulk of it does not go to the poor. The majority of the elderly are not needy and dependent. Entitlement programs, not defense spending, consume the largest share of the federal budget. In short, we cannot balance the budget without reducing entitlement spending. In a country that demands critical investments--improving public education, alleviating poverty, increasing professional opportunity--growth in entitlement spending is unaffordable. "On Borrowed Time" is an important and timely book that will be mandatory reading for policymakers, politicians, economists, and a general public concerned with its financial future.

An illustrious group of economists contribute to this volume honoring Dick Netzer, the public finance economist well-known for his research on state and local taxation, the provision of urban public services, and non-profit organizations. Following in his tradition, the contributors apply microeconomics to real world problems facing urban areas and use statistical analysis to gain insight into practical solutions. The first four chapters of the book provide in-depth explorations of alternative methods of financing urban government such as: the relative merits of income and property taxation at the local level, the impact of sales and income taxation on property taxation, and the feasibility of adopting a land value tax. The next two chapters focus on government expenditures: the impact of subsidized housing investment on property values, and the theoretical and historical explanations for public ownership and direct provision of public services. The final two chapters of the book turn their attention to the non-profit sector, exploring subsidies to non-profit arts organizations and the role of the non-profit sector in providing K-12 education, specifically addressing the implications for segregation and equity. Comprehensive and engaging, professionals and scholars in the fields of public finance, urban economics and public administration will find this collection of great interest.

This book reflects the futuristic scientific view of the consequences of transition to Industry 4.0 for climate change. The authors present a systemic overview of the current negative consequences of digitization for the environment, new outlines of the energy sphere in Industry 4.0 and the change of the environment pollution level in Industry 4.0. The book also analyses the ecological consequences of growth and development of Industry 4.0, and considers Industry 4.0 as an alternative to fighting climate change. The book presents a view on fighting climate change in Industry 4.0 from the positions of shifting the global community's attention from environment protection to formation of the digital economy. A logical continuation of this book is a view from the opposite side, which would allow reflecting the contribution of Industry 4.0 into fighting climate change and the perspectives of harmonization of these top-priority directions of the global economy's development. This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners interested in climate change and development of Industry 4.0, as well contributing to a national economic policy for fighting climate change and corporate strategies of sustainable development in Industry 4.0.

The period between 1767 and 1873 shaped public finance in Britain (and, by extension, many other countries) as we know it today, with the major economists of the time providing influential contributions. Until now, no book has examined and compared the thought of these 'classical economists' from the perspective of public finance rather than that of pure theory.

This groundbreaking volume critically analyzes and compares the writings on government expenditure, taxation and public debt of thinkers such as Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. These key figures are united by their struggles with fiscal theory - an important feature in the formation and development of political economy.

An original and intriguing read, this book breathes fresh life into the history of economic thought. Dome's clear and exciting arguments will make for essential reading for historians of economic thought, economic historians and those with an interest in public finance.

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.

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.

Developments in the NHS, Railtrack and London Underground have led to speculation about whether a new organisational form is now needed for public service delivery. There are several perceived problems with the conventional models, which have led to the increased involvement of the private and voluntary sectors in recent years. However, company and charity models were not designed with public services primarily in mind, so does Britain need a new type of orgainsation to protect the public interest while providing a stimulus to creativity, risk-taking and entrepreneurship? Does the current debate about new organisational forms, including the Public Interest Company model, contain the answer? The Public Management Foundation explores where the problems with public services lie, and the extent to which new forms might be the solution.

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.

For four decades Professional Investor and its predecessor, Investment Analyst, the journal of The Institute of Investment Management and Research, has been publishing sound investment advice on topical issues from leading experts in the field.
The articles in this collection cover financial subjects ranging from the first introduction computers to mathematical techniques into finance, through the oil crisis years, to the valuation of brands, intellectual property and goodwill. Each article provides a fascinating insight both into the subject concerned and into contemporary thinking at the time of writing. All the articles have been selected for their significance to the financial world today. These fascinating articles are as relevant today as when first written.
The Institute of Investment management and Research (IIMR) is the professional Examining body for investment analysts and fund managers in the UK. It provides the 'Threshold Competence' examination for fund managers and analysts, in addition to a six paper Associate examination.
The Institute was founded in 1955 as the Society of Investment Analysts and changed its name in 1992. It was a founding member of EFFAS and has close links with AIMR in the US.
Professional Investor is the journal of the IIMR and is published ten times a year.

Floating-Rate Securities is the only complete resource on "floaters" that fills the information void surrounding these complex securities. It explains the basics of floating rate securities, how to value them, techniques to compute spread measures for relative value analysis, and much more.

Series Information:
Harwood Fundamentals of Pure & Applied Economics

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.