Broad in scope and carefully balanced in emphasis, this book is a major treatise on the theory and practice of public finance. It is unique in its presentation of a worldwide perspective and in its treatment of both the instruments of public finance and the goals, effects, and criteria of public finance measures. The book is divided into three parts. Book One defines the field, specifies the possible meaning of the "effects" of a public finance measure, and describes the criteria by which these measures are commonly appraised. Book Two is concerned with micro public finance and opens with a discussion of the theory of public goods in general. Each of the major free government services and types of transfer payments as well as the taxes that government employs are then examined. This section concludes with a chapter on the relevant aspects of government borrowing and inflationary finance. Book Three considers the major goals of public finance policy and describes how the various instruments described in Book Two can be used in achieving these goals. Among the topics treated are the use of appropriate instruments to resolve conflict in goals, conceptual problems of measuring the public finance sector and its maximum and minimum economic limits, consensus goals of equity full employment and Pareto-optimism use of resources, and goals that evoke conflicts of interest within any community. "A very scholarly book of genuine value to its field by Shoup, one of the outstanding authorities in public finance in the world."--"Choice" "Carl S. Shoup" was McVikar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. At General MacArthur's request he led the team creating modern Japan's tax system. He was described as "the dean of contemporary public finance experts." "Steven Medema" is professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is the author of "Economics and the Law" and "Historians of Economics and Economic Thought" and serves as editor of the Transaction "Classics in Economics" series.

Underfunded pension liabilities threaten the fiscal stability of many cities. While Detroit's bankruptcy has dominated the headlines, the problem is widespread. With ongoing battles in many localities, policymakers are increasingly turning their attention to the legacy issues surrounding the funding of pensions. Public Pensions and City Solvency addresses this complex fiscal challenge and presents strategies to achieve financial sustainability. Writing in a direct, readable style for a professional as well as an academic audience, expert contributors provide incisive analyses and practical approaches to navigating the fiscal morass in which many cities find themselves. Richard Ravitch, former lieutenant governor of New York, writes the Foreword and Robert P. Inman and Susan M. Wachter provide the Conclusion. The book's three chapters examine the issue from different key perspectives: Joshua D. Rauh, a leading scholar in the study of unfunded pension liabilities, provides an economist's perspective; Amy B. Monahan, a renowned authority in public employee benefits law, illuminates the legal framework; and D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins, visionary political scientists, put the crisis and its economic and legal implications into context and lay out the necessary framework for reform. The problems that arise from underfunded public pensions are only going to escalate. Public Pensions and City Solvency is a unique resource for decision-makers, policy-makers, and researchers and a timely addition to the evolving debate over what constitutes sustainable solutions. Contributors: Robert P. Inman, D. Roderick Kiewiet, Mathew D. McCubbins, Amy B. Monahan, Joshua D. Rauh, Richard Ravitch, Susan M. Wachter.

This short book integrates the imperatives of public debt sustainability with those of socioeconomic sustainability in the context of budget austerity measures. It is argued that poverty, inequality and unemployment problems should be integral aspects of policy frameworks for austerity and fiscal stability. The economics of austerity in much of economic analysis remains narrowly focused and lopsided, since the implications on the role of human capital and loss of prosperity base are usually ignored. This book argues that various misapplications of policies of government austerity can be avoided if greater attention is accorded to the imperatives of maintaining the win-win approaches for socioeconomic resilience and sustainability in conjunction with debt sustainability and/or fiscal stability.

"Understanding United States Government Growth" develops and tests alternative explanations of government growth since World War II. It opens with an analysis of debate about the causes and consequences of government growth, including the excessive government view that the public sector has grown beyond the scope demanded by citizens due to its own structural defects, and the responsive interpretation that government has gown because it has reacted appropriately to external public demands. The authors review the major political and economic explanations for government growth and criticize earlier empirical attempts to test these explanations. In the second half of the book, they distinguish four components of government growth: growth in the cost of government and growth in the scope of government activities in three domains--transfer payments, domestic purchases, and defense purchases. Both responsive and excessive explanations of each of these components of growth are developed and tested to allow an evaluation of the validity of the two contrasting views about big government.

The likelihood of observing Condorcet's Paradox is known to be very low for elections with a small number of candidates if voters' preferences on candidates reflect any significant degree of a number of different measures of mutual coherence. This reinforces the intuitive notion that strange election outcomes should become less likely as voters' preferences become more mutually coherent. Similar analysis is used here to indicate that this notion is valid for most, but not all, other voting paradoxes. This study also focuses on the Condorcet Criterion, which states that the pairwise majority rule winner should be chosen as the election winner, if one exists. Representations for the Condorcet Efficiency of the most common voting rules are obtained here as a function of various measures of the degree of mutual coherence of voters' preferences. An analysis of the Condorcet Efficiency representations that are obtained yields strong support for using Borda Rule.

Over the last thirty years there has been extensive use of continuous time econometric methods in macroeconomic modelling. This monograph presents a continuous time macroeconometric model of the United Kingdom incorporating stochastic trends. Its development represents a major step forward in continuous time macroeconomic modelling. The book describes the model in detail and, like earlier models, it is designed in such a way as to permit a rigorous mathematical analysis of its steady-state and stability properties, thus providing a valuable check on the capacity of the model to generate plausible long-run behaviour. The model is estimated using newly developed exact Gaussian estimation methods for continuous time econometric models incorporating unobservable stochastic trends. The book also includes discussion of the application of the model to dynamic analysis and forecasting.

Acknowledgements The work underlying this study was performed at the Econometric and Special Studies Department of the Nederlandsche Bank, where many contributed to it. I am indebted to all the statistical assistants of the department, especially to Anja Wouters and Rob Vet for their patient assistance in building up the data sets and analysing the survey data. Also Corina den Broeder rendered devoted and persistent research assistance with respect to the multicountry analysis during her stay at the Bank and I am grateful to Mike Clements of the Bank of England for his careful reading and commenting on that part. My collegues Peter van Els and Carlo Winder made some valuable suggestions. Liesbeth Klein and Coen Collee helped me avoid a number of errors in English, and thanks to the skilful efforts of Marietta Bakker, Gita Gajapersad and Carolien Verhoeven the text looks as it does. Above all, lowe a debt of gratitude to Martin Fase, one of the pioneers in this field of research, for his efforts and contribution to the improvement of this study. INTRODUCTION We seem to be well on the way to a cashless society. Paradoxically, however, the majority of the transactions are still paid in cash even in the most advanced economies. A second paradoxical observation is that, despite the primary and common character of currency, the economic theory on the use of and demand for cash is only rarely supported by empirical evidence.

This book was written in response to the coming into force on the first of January 1981 of the Customs Valuation Code of the GATT, an agreement which has been applied unilaterally by the EEC and the US since the first of July 1980. As a result of the new agreement a uniform system for the valuation of goods for customs purposes will be used for the first time in history of international trade by the most important trading nations. This can be seen as an important step in the removal of trade barriers, as the use of a uniform system enables any one occupied with international trade to foresee with reasonable accuracy the treatment he will receive in other countries. This book provides a survey of the new system, together with the application and interpretation which to our opinion may be expected on the basis of the international discussions. Some attention is paid, moreover, to the remaining systems of valuation of goods which the exporter may encounter. In writing this book we have not only had the aim of providing a source of information for exporters, but we believe it will be of use to anyone who is, or has to be, interested in the customs valuation. March 1981, the authors. V Richard van Raan, after studying civil law at the university of Leiden, specialised himself in fiscal law. Henk de Pagter studied fiscal law in Rotterdam."

This book presents research on a kind of water use conflicts that is becoming more and more common and important: How to best manage moving water in times of increasing demand for electricity as well as environmental services. How should decisions be made between water use for electricity generation or for environmental and recreational benefits? The authors develop a simple general equilibrium model of a small open economy which is used to derive a cost-benefit rule that can be used to assess projects that divert water from electricity generation to recreational and other uses (or vice versa). The cost-benefit rule is then applied to the specific case of a proposed change at a Swedish hydropower plant. The book provides a manual for the evaluation of river regulations which can easily be replicated in other studies.

The study of poverty dynamics is important for effective poverty alleviation policies because the changes in income poverty are also accompanied by changes in socioeconomic factors such as literacy, gender parity in school, health care, infant mortality, and asset holdings. In order to examine the dynamics of poverty, information from 1,212 households in 32 rural villages in Bangladesh was collected in December 2004 and December 2009. This book reports the analytical results from quantitative and qualitative surveys from the same households at two points of time, which yielded the panel data for understanding the changes in situations of poverty. Efforts have been made to include the most recent research from diverse disciplines including economics, statistics, anthropology, education, health care, and vulnerability study. Specifically, findings from logistic regression analysis, polychoric principal component analysis, kernel density function, income mobility with the help of the Markov chain model, and child nutrition status from anthropometric measures have been presented. Asset holdings and liabilities of the chronically poor as well as those of three other economic groups (the descending non-poor, the ascending poor, and the non-poor) are analyzed statistically. The degrees of vulnerability to poverty are examined by years of schooling, landholding size, gender of household head, social capital, and occupation. The multiple logistic regression model was used to identify important risk factors for a household's vulnerability. In 2009, some of the basic characteristics of the chronically poor were: higher percentage and number of female-headed households, higher dependency ratio, lower levels of education, fewer years of schooling, and limited employment. There was a low degree of mobility of households from one poverty status to another in the period 2004-2009, implying that the process of economic development and high economic growth in the macroeconomy during this time failed to improve the poverty situation in rural Bangladesh.

The social, political, and economic environment is ripe with opportunity to engage women and their philanthropy. Professionals working in the field of philanthropy want ideas, practical information, research, and guidance about how to work with women donors, how to build women's philanthropy initiatives, and how to integrate this subset of donors into their current fund development departments. This book offers insight into the three historical waves of women's philanthropy and provides a summary of current research and inspiring stories collected from interviews with more than 70 women philanthropists and leaders. Each chapter begins with current research, followed by interviews and examples, and ends with suggestions for fundraisers on how to implement the information into a women's philanthropy initiative using a six-step process: Awareness, Assessment, Alignment, Action, Acknowledgement and Achievement. The last several chapters focus on lessons learned from successful programs in traditional organizational settings-healthcare, higher education, and environment-and what we have yet to learn from the new and emerging philanthropic models led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Priscilla Chan, Melinda Gates, Nancy Roob, and MacKenzie Scott. Throughout the book, themes of equity, diversity, and inclusion are evident and featured in stories and programs led by women of color and younger donors. Additionally, COVID has impacted how fundraisers work, requiring the philanthropy community to adapt and create new ways to reach women donors. The final chapter is a call to action to all women, to give bigger and bolder as the fourth wave of women's philanthropy rises.

As a part of the provisions governing the subject of the measurement of the income of business enterprises, the fifth paragraph, sub paragraph b), of article 53 of the Presidential Decree no. 597 of 29 September, 1973, provides, as it is well known, that "the difference between the normal value of goods and services, and the consideration for transfers made and for services rendered to companies, whose legal seat or administrative headquarters and whose main object are not in the Italian territory, and which either directly or indirectly control the enterprise, or are controlled by the same company that controls the enterprise," is tobe included in the proceeds. The second paragraph of the successive article 56 further states that the cost of acquisition of the goods transferred and of the services rendered by the same enterprises is to be curtailed of any surplus tn respect of the normal value. The same provision also applies to the goods transferred and the services rendered by companies not having in Italy their legal seat or their administrative office or the main object of their activity, for account of which the enterprise carries out an activity for the sale and placement of raw materials or goods, or for the manufacturing or processing of products."

Taxpayer compliance is a voluntary activity, and the degree to which the tax system works is affected by taxpayers' knowledge that it is their moral and legal responsibility to pay their taxes. Taxpayers also recognize that they face a lottery in which not all taxpayer noncompliance will ever be detected. In the United States most individuals comply with the tax law, yet the tax gap has grown significantly over time for individual taxpayers. The US Internal Revenue Service attempts to ensure that the minority of taxpayers who are noncompliant pay their fair share with a variety of enforcement tools and penalties. The Causes and Consequences of Income Tax Noncompliance provides a comprehensive summary of the empirical evidence concerning taxpayer noncompliance and presents innovative research with new results on the role of IRS audit and enforcements activities on compliance with federal and state income tax collection. Other issues examined include to what degree taxpayers respond to the threat of civil and criminal enforcement and the important role of the media on taxpayer compliance. This book offers researchers, students, and tax administrators insight into the allocation of taxpayer compliance enforcement and service resources, and suggests policies that will prevent further increases in the tax gap. The book's aggregate data analysis methods have practical applications not only to taxpayer compliance but also to other forms of economic behavior, such as welfare fraud.

Economic development and social welfare depend on the existence of effective and efficient infrastructure systems, particularly in health, energy, transportation and water, many of which are developed and managed through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). However, empirical evidence suggests some pitfalls in the use of these PPP arrangements. This book addresses these issues, focusing on mostly three key questions: How to improve the robustness of the decision-making process leading to the option of PPP? How to improve contract management as the longest phase of the process? How can contracts be improved to accommodate uncertainty and avoid harmful renegotiations? The authors explore the concept of flexible contracts, the uncertainty modeling for improving the robustness of the decision-making process, and develop an overall framework for effective contract management, along with a comprehensive analysis of current renegotiation patterns. The ultimate goal is to improve the contractual performance, as well as the overall infrastructure management and social welfare.

This book analyses the contribution of the new forms of reporting adopted by Public Sector Organisations in the provision of information on value creation processes to their various stakeholders. The contributors to this volume provide evidence of innovative accounting practices and reporting formats, drawing on case studies from across Europe. Together, they highlight the limitations and opportunities of these new forms of reporting that will require further study and exploration.

When States Go Broke collects insights and analysis from leading academics and practitioners that discuss the ongoing fiscal crisis among the American states. No one disagrees with the idea that the states face enormous political and fiscal challenges. There is, however, little consensus on how to fix the perennial problems associated with these challenges. This volume fills an important gap in the dialogue by offering an academic analysis of the many issues broached by these debates. Leading scholars in bankruptcy, constitutional law, labor law, history, political science and economics have individually contributed their assessments of the origins, context and potential solutions for the states in crisis. It presents readers - academics, policy makers and concerned citizens alike - with the resources to begin and continue that important, solution-oriented conversation.

Progressing towards sustainable development raises important challenges to conducting performance evaluations in governments because there are neither generally accepted methods nor specific standards to be met at present. Sustainability Performance Evaluation System in Government, makes a conceptual contribution to public sustainability performance evaluation and develops a set of framework indicators with the help of the strategic and comprehensive approach "Sustainability Balanced Scorecard". As a conceptual basis for the further research and application, this volume will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners at many levels of environmental / sustainability, public management and strategic control studies. Evaluators will find methodological approaches and applied tools for their work. Decision-makers and managers will find it valuable to manage the social, economic and environmental issues in a balanced and integrated manner. Governments will also find it helpful in assisting them in establishing an evaluation system towards sustainable development.

This book contains selected peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability (INSTR) Conference held at the University of Minnesota July 22-23, 2010. International scholars, from a variety of disciplines--engineering, economics, geography, planning and transportation-offer varying perspectives on modeling and analysis of the reliability of transportation networks in order to illustrate both vulnerability to day-to-day and unpredictability variability and risk in travel, and demonstrates strategies for addressing those issues. The scope of the chapters includes all aspects of analysis and design to improve network reliability, specifically user perception of unreliability of public transport, public policy and reliability of travel times, the valuation and economics of reliability, network reliability modeling and estimation, travel behavior and vehicle routing under uncertainty, and risk evaluation and management for transportation networks. The book combines new methodologies and state of the art practice to model and address questions of network unreliability, making it of interest to both academics in transportation and engineering as well as policy-makers and practitioners.

This book presents latest research in the field of Political Economy, dealing with the integration of economics and politics and the way institutions affect social decisions. The focus is on innovative topics such as an institutional analysis based on case studies; the influence of activists on political decisions; new techniques for analyzing elections, involving game theory and empirical methods.

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards de struction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern: the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our 1 epoch has plunged us. his is the message of Ludwig von Mises. In the historical T battle of ideologies, Mises is a pivotal figure. With great courage and decisive effect he carried the banner of truth and freedom for others through a time of rising statism. Murray Rothbard is correct when he says, " . . . if the world is ever to get out of its miasma of statism, or, indeed, if the economics profession is ever to return to a sound and correct development of economic analysis, both will have to abandon their contemporary bog and move to that high ground that Mises developed for us. " 2 This collection of essays is both a restatement and extension of the major contributions of Mises in epistemology, history, econom ics, and political philosophy. Mises began constructing the high ground on the foundation provided by Carl Menger and Eugen von B6hm-Bawerk."

Alexander von Kotzebue investigates the interdependency of charitable giving, fundraising, and governmental intervention. His study comprises a literature survey, a model of the donor-fundraiser relation, and finally, an econometric analysis of the impact of fundraising on giving behaviour. The survey introduces theoretical approaches to donor motivation, groups them according to their central assumptions, and assesses their empirical relevance. The theoretical analysis takes for granted that fundraising is an integral part of the giving process, and models the potential conflict concerning the amount of fundraising exerted. Fundraising typically displays an ambiguous effect on donor utility. The empirical analysis employs two extensive datasets to investigate this complex donor-fundraiser relation, while establishing a convincing link of donor-level data to non-profit financial data.

Harrie de Swart is a Dutch logician and mathematician with a great and open int- est in applications of logic. After being confronted with Arrow's Theorem, Harrie became very interested in social choice theory. In 1986 he took the initiative to start up a group of Dutch scientists for the study of social choice theory. This initiative grew out to a research group and a series of colloquia, which were held approximately every month at the University of Tilburg in The Netherlands. The organization of the colloquia was in the hands of Harrie and under his guidance they became more and more internationally known. Many international scholars liked visiting the social choice colloquia in Tilburg and enjoyed giving one or more presentations about their work. They liked Harrie's kindness and hospitality, and the openness of the group for anything and everything in the eld of social choice. The Social Choice Theory Group started up by Harrie consisted, and still c- sists, of scholars from several disciplines; mostly economics, mathematics, and (mathematical) psychology. It was set up for the study of and discussion about anything that had to do with social choice theory including, and not in the least, the supervision of PhD students in the theory. Members of the group were, among o- ers, Thom Bezembinder (psychologist), Hans Peters (mathematician), Pieter Ruys (economist), Stef Tijs (mathematician and game theorist) and, of course, Harrie de Swart (logician and mathematician).

Bank panics have always mattered because they create serious disruptions in economic and financial activity, depressing national economies. But they matter even more now, as information and communications technologies have stitched together a global financial system that is more vulnerable to crisis on a large scale. For example, the global bank panic of 2007-08 froze up the national economies of the U.S., England, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Germany -- all at the same time. And each of their governments had to act to bail out their own banks, without a consistent international regulatory framework.

In this volume, Fred Betz takes a unique, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding bank panics, with an emphasis on the U.S. Bank Panics of 1857, 1907, 1930-33, 2007-08 and the European Bank Panics of 2010-2013. Despite over a hundred years of modern economic theory and many excellent historical studies about bank panics, they are still poorly understood and certainly not yet preventable. Partly this has been a function of the limitations of modern economic theory, which cannot interpret bank panics as complex societal phenomena. All societal phenomena are, in reality, multi-disciplinary in scope and cross-disciplinary in connections. Bank panics can best be understood through the collective lenses of sociology, political science, psychology, management science, management of technology, among other disciplines. Through this dynamic approach, the author identifies five key underlying triggers of bank panics: (1) funding excessive leverage in speculation, (2) lack of proper banking regulation, (3) bad banking practices, (4) lack of banking integrity, (5) corrupt banking practices. In so doing, he suggests new strategies for avoiding and recovering from bank panics and other financial crises."

The Next 25 Years of Public Choice brings together the perspectives of many of the world's leading scholars of public choice on the present state of knowledge and the likely future course of scholarship on public choice and constitutional economy. This book presents material in a manner accessible to a wide educated readership and will be influential in guiding future research in this important field. It is directed at professional scholars of public choice, economics and political science, government officials, graduate students and anyone seriously interested in public policy. A distinguished group of internationally well-known scholars offer their own often far-reaching views on strengths and weaknesses in the current literature and pinpoint important avenues of research amenable to future research.

The author had already become involved with the subject of this book when President Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar on August 15, 1971. This declaration was equivalent to an official admission of the previously evident failure of the inter national monetary system established in Bretton Woods after long and difficult negotiations. Although the real reasons for this failure are much deeper and more complex, the immediate cause was the tremendous outjlow of money from the United States to Europe and Japan. Never before had economic history recorded a currency movement of such magnitude, although during the periods preceding the devaluation of the French franc and the re valuation of the Deutsche Mark (Le., by the end of 1968 and mostly in 1969), and particularly at the beginning of 1971, the in ternational flow of money grew to such huge proportions as to alm ost traumatize the economic and financial circles of developed capitalist countries. These economic and financial circles correctly foresaw that the ever growing and hardly controllable volume of currency flow could seriously endanger the already precarious balance of the international financial system and perhaps even upset it. This brief analysis, in contrast to many other predictions of cur rency developments, holds true for a longer period as well."