This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) war on offshore tax evasion. The authors explain the new emerging regulatory regimes on the global exchange of information to combat offshore tax evasion and analyse why Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) is not a "magic bullet" solution. Chapters include coverage of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), AEOI and the Common Reporting Standards (CRS), and the unprecedented extra-territorial enforcement by the United States of its tax and reporting laws, including the FBAR provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act. These new legal regimes directly impact nearly all financial institutions and financial service providers in the U.S., U.K., EU, Canada, and each of the 132 member jurisdictions of the OECD's Global Forum, as well as 8 million U.S. expats. In light of The Panama Papers, this book offers a timely and valuable contribution on the prevalence and costs of international tax evasion for the global financial community, policy-makers, and practitioners alike.

This book presents a set of original and innovative contributions on state, institutions and democracy in the field of political economy. Modern political economy has implied the interaction between politics and economics to understand political, electoral and public issues in different nations, and in this volume a group of leading political economists and political scientists from Europe, America and Asia provides theoretical advances, modelling and case studies on main topics in political economy. The analysis of the role and performance of politics and democracy in diverse nations implies the study of the organization of the state, lobbying, political participation, public policies, electoral politics, public administration and the provision of public services. This book provides advances in the research frontier of these topics and combines historical evidence, institutional analysis, mathematical models and empirical analysis in an interdisciplinary approach. Political and social scientists, economists and those interested in the performance of states, democracy and elections can find new research results in this volume.

This open access book offers a critical perspective on intra-European mobility and migration by using new empirical data and theoretical discussions. It develops a theoretical and empirical analysis of the consequences of intra-European movement for sending and receiving urban regions in The Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Turkey, Poland and Czech Republic. The book conceptualizes Central and Eastern European (CEE) migration by distinguishing between different types of CEE migrants and consequences. This involves a mapping of migration corridors within Europe, a unique empirical analysis of consequences for urban regions, and an analysis of governance responses. Next to the European and country perspectives on this phenomenon, the book focuses on the local perspective of urban regions where most mobile citizens settle (either permanently or temporarily). This way the book puts the analysis of intra-European movement in the perspective of broader theoretical debates in migration studies and beyond.

The World Bank has partnered with the Commitment to Equity Institute at Tulane University to implement their diagnostic tool - the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Assessment - designed to assess how taxation and public expenditures affect income inequality, poverty, and different economic groups. The approach relies on comprehensive fiscal incidence analysis, which measures the contribution of each individual intervention to poverty and inequality reduction as well as the combined impact of taxes and social spending. The CEQ Assessment provide an evidence base upon which alternative reform options can be analyzed. The use of a common methodology makes the results comparable across countries. This volume presents eight country studies that examine the distributional effects of individual programs and policy measures - and the net effect of each country's mix of policies and programs. These case studies were produced in the context of Bank policy dialogue and have since been used to propose alternative reform options.

In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around the performativity of economics over a variety of disciplinary contexts and provide new case studies illuminating this phenomenon. In featuring the latest contributions to the performativity debate the book revives discussion of the fundamental questions: What precise meaning can we attribute to the notion of performativity? What empirical evidence can help us recognize economics as performative? And what consequences does performativity have for contemporary societies? The contributions demonstrate how performativity can serve as a powerful conceptual resource in dealing with economic knowledge, as an inspiring framework for investigating performative practices, and as an engine of discovery for thinking of the economic proper.

This volume discusses post-socialist urban transport functioning and development in Russia, within the context of the country's recent transition towards a market economy. Over the past twenty-five years, urban transport in Russia has undergone serious transformations, prompted by the transitioning economy. Yet, the lack of readily available statistical data has led to a gap in the inclusion of Russia in the body of international transport economics research. By including ten chapters of original, cutting-edge research by Russian transport scholars, this book will close that gap. Discussing topics such as the relationship between urban spatial structure and travel behavior in post-soviet cities, road safety, trends and reforms in urban public transport development, transport planning and modelling, and the role of institutions in post-soviet transportation management, this book provides a comprehensive survey of the current state of transportation in Russia. The book concludes with a forecast for future travel development in Russia and makes recommendations for future policy. This book will be of interest to researchers in transportation economics and policy as well as policy makers and those working in the field of urban and transport planning.

Central American countries spend approximately one percent of their aggregate gross domestic product subsidizing residential electricity consumption. This amount is comparable with what these countries spend on education and social assistance. The pressure that electricity subsidies exert on government budgets is particularly high when international energy prices rise. Electricity subsidies also provide perverse incentives for the overconsumption of electricity as households do not pay the true cost of their consumption, which in turn reduces incentives to increase energy efficiency. This book answers key questions regarding residential electricity subsidies in Central America. In particular: How do the subsidy mechanisms function in each country? What are their fiscal costs? Are these subsidies good value for the money? How efficient are subsidies in reaching households in need, and what drives this efficiency? What are the reform options? The main message of this book is that there is considerable scope for improving the efficiency of electricity subsidies in Central America by better targeting them to low-income households. The book shows that electricity subsidies help reduce the burden of electricity costs on the lowest-income groups. However, the existing electricity subsidy schemes are very inefficient at targeting resources to low-income households, with the majority of government spending going to higher-income households. Indeed, most countries in the region have the opportunity to significantly reduce the fiscal costs of electricity subsidies without imposing significant costs on households, particularly poor households. Given the limited fiscal space in the region and the major needs of the countries in terms of social services and physical infrastructure, this study seeks to provide Central American policymakers with the analytical foundations necessary to assess the costs and benefits of their electricity subsidy mechanisms, and design effective reform strategies that reflect their unique circumstances and policy priorities.

The rising role of intra- and intergenerational transfers (e.g. basic income, child benefit and public pensions) characterises modern economies, yet most models depicting these transfers are too sophisticated for a wider but mathematically trained audience. This book presents simple models to fill the gap. The author considers a benevolent government maximizing social welfare by anticipating citizens' shortsighted reaction to the transfer rules. The resulting income redistribution is analyzed for low tax morale, strong labor disutility and heterogeneous life expectancy. Key issues that the book addresses include the socially optimal pension contribution rate, retirement age, and redistribution programs. The author concludes by removing some strong restrictions and introducing median voter, incomplete information and dynamic complications. The book will be of value for graduate students and researchers interested in public economics, especially in public and private pensions.

In recent years, debate on the state's economic role has too often devolved into diatribes against intervention. Peter Evans questions such simplistic views, offering a new vision of why state involvement works in some cases and produces disasters in others. To illustrate, he looks at how state agencies, local entrepreneurs, and transnational corporations shaped the emergence of computer industries in Brazil, India, and Korea during the seventies and eighties.

Evans starts with the idea that states vary in the way they are organized and tied to society. In some nations, like Zaire, the state is predatory, ruthlessly extracting and providing nothing of value in return. In others, like Korea, it is developmental, promoting industrial transformation. In still others, like Brazil and India, it is in between, sometimes helping, sometimes hindering. Evans's years of comparative research on the successes and failures of state involvement in the process of industrialization have here been crafted into a persuasive and entertaining work, which demonstrates that successful state action requires an understanding of its own limits, a realistic relationship to the global economy, and the combination of coherent internal organization and close links to society that Evans called "embedded autonomy."

This book explores the economic and social development of the Western Balkan region, a group of six countries that are potential candidates for EU membership. It focuses on the key economic issues facing these countries, including the challenge of promoting economic growth, limiting public deficits and debt, and fostering international trade relations. Given the severe impact of the recent economic crisis on social welfare in the region, it also investigates the nature and extent of social exclusion, a factor likely to produce future political instabilities if not effectively addressed by a return to sustainable economic growth. The contributions explore these issues in light of the major influence of EU policy instruments and advice, which are currently guiding the economies along an accession trajectory to future EU membership.

This book covers the latest advances in the theory and practice of public investment management. It includes the most up-to-date developments in the implementation of public asset management - including multiple contributions on portfolio allocation in varying interest-rate and credit-risk environments. Other highlights include implementation, performance attribution and governance issues surrounding reserves management, portfolio construction techniques appropriate for public investors and an in-depth discussion of the challenges to achieving international diversification.

This book provides a historical understanding of current debates over tax reform and offers a comparative framework for discussing the relationship between fiscal policy and the distribution of income and wealth. Topics covered include the evolution of income taxation since World War II; the turn toward value added taxation; the relationship between tax reform and the construction of welfare states; the impact of globalization on tax and fiscal policy; the social forces shaping tax consent; and the political economy of tax and fiscal reform. These topics are covered in case studies that focus on significant episodes in the fiscal history of Denmark, Sweden, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and Japan.

This book discusses the evolution of the third tier of the Indian federal system, with a focus on rural local governance (commonly known as Panchayati Raj) against the backdrop of important theoretical and empirical literature on the relevance and effectiveness of service delivery in the decentralized system. It evaluates the quintessence of the functioning of the Panchayati Raj in the past two decades of its existence. This pioneering book also discusses the treatment of the third-tier government in the inter-governmental fiscal transfer framework and the delineation of the unique institution of local self-government in the Northeastern Indian States. In the light of the loosely evolved fiscal relations between three levels of government, it has been observed that local self-governments in the bottom tier have not been truly empowered yet. The book argues in favor of integrating the third-tier government into the Indian federal system and suggests how this could be achieved.

This book describes the ontology structure, types of actors, their potential actions, and ways that actions can affect the things that are part of the conflict. An ontology of unconventional conflict supports the understanding of unconventional conflict in general. It also provides a tool for understanding and investigating a particular unconventional conflict. The ontology specifies the relations among the elements and supports creating a description of a particular situation. Unconventional conflict spans the range from natural disasters through human disagreements to irregular warfare (up to conventional war). Unconventional conflict involves damage to things and injuries to people; however, the critical factors are the actions, reactions, and opinions of people, including political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information components. This ontology supports and will appeal to military strategists, political scientists, economists, and politicians in understanding their planning for, and managing of these conflicts.

This book analyzes the foundations and means of overcoming the current crisis in the broader area of Southeast Europe. The contributions make proposals from both theoretical and empirical points of view and discuss the concept, determinants and policies of competitiveness in these countries. The financial crisis became a prolonged fiscal crisis, a bank confidence crisis, and economic recession, and the book discusses the European and national policies implemented to resolve it. It also investigates the internal conflicts generated by institutional arrangements and policy measures, both within the nation states and the eurozone. Economic competitiveness is a key topic for policymakers, as they have to secure economic growth and improve their populations' standards of living. This volume sheds light on what constitutes economic competitiveness, as well as on the policies and economic and institutional structures that improve competitiveness.

This book explores the wave of liberalization reforms experienced by OECD network industries. Focusing on the telecommunications sector, the authors analyze the latest data available on liberalization and privatization, and following a political economics approach, they integrate standard economic analysis with the most recent studies of the political determinants of market-oriented policies. The book presents new econometric evidence on several policy issues, including institutional complementarities dynamics, the problem of policy sequencing and the role of government political ideology. The detailed and comprehensive discussion offers insights into how so many countries adopting similar reforms actually differ in their policy "bundling", intensity and implementation of liberalization and privatization.

Is there a limit to technological advancements? Are technological advancements creating a more equal and fair world? Starting from influential thinkers driving a never-ending evaluation of development discourse - incorporating theories of modernisation, endogenous growth, globalisation, neoliberalism and several others - Seung-Jin Baek answers these questions and sets out practical steps to create societies that are more equal in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This book explores why Western-centred development strategies are unlikely to bring about similar developmental paths and outcomes in developing economies. By theoretically and empirically assessing the Technology-Development-Inequality nexus, Baek explores why a distorted developmental path has been observed in recent years, with high income countries being associated with rising inequality. This is important reading for all those seeking to understand international development in a twenty-first century context.

This book proposes a method for calculating China's debt based on a quantitative econometric analysis. This is conducted by measuring the relationship between China's debt size and economic growth. The conclusion that is reached is as follows: China's current debt has already exceeded the inflection point, and that means that it is now having an adverse effect on its economic performance. The book also focuses on China's debt problems as a whole, highlighting debt issues faced by different entities and industries, as well as the ratio and structure of the virtual and real economies. The contents are presented in three major principles: theory, oriented,data, and oriented policy.

Behavioral Insights for Development: Cases from Central America brings together a set of experiences that applied behavioral insights to different areas of public policy - in some cases through randomised control trials, and in others using surveys or behavioral games. These experiences collectively show the promise of public policies that are informed by a better understanding of what drives individual behavior. In Costa Rica, for example, informing households of how much water they consume relative to their neighbours reduced water consumption (chapter 1). In Guatemala, altering the way government communicates with taxpayers increased revenue collection (chapter 2). In Nicaragua, an analysis of a cash transfer program found that children in households receiving benefits exhibited significantly higher cognitive development - a result influenced by parental behaviour changes during the programme (chapter 3). In El Salvador, we explore how different biases explain the apparent puzzle of a gas subsidy reform that benefited most of the population yet proved to be widely unpopular (chapter 4). Chapter 5 also uses behavioural insights to analyse subsidy reforms in El Salvador, this time using a different methodology: a set of economic behavioural games designed to evaluate the willingness of individuals to accept subsidy reforms that would affect them directly. Finally, chapter 6 reflects on the progress made in applying behavioural insights in a development context. These cases illustrate, in practice, some of the findings of the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. In particular, they demonstrate the possibility of using nontraditional tools, complementary to regulation, in contexts where time and resources are limited. The World Bank has since established a Mind, Behavior, and Development (eMBeD) Unit within the Poverty and Equity Global Practice to mainstream and scale up behavioural science in public policies and programs. We hope these experiences will help to inform other practitioners about the potential of applying behavioral insights in a development context and will encourage them to consider such approaches as a complement to traditional policy measures.

This book upturns many established ideas regarding the economic and social history of Quebec, the Canadian province that is home to the majority of its French population. It places the case of Quebec into the wider question of convergence in economic history and whether proactive governments delay or halt convergence. The period from 1945 to 1960, infamously labelled the Great Gloom (Grande Noirceur), was in fact a breaking point where the previous decades of relative decline were overturned - Geloso argues that this era should be considered the Great Convergence (Grand Rattrapage). In opposition, the Quiet Revolution that followed after 1960 did not accelerate these trends. In fact, there are signs of slowing down and relative decline that appear after the 1970s. The author posits that the Quiet Revolution sowed the seeds for a growth slowdown by crowding-out social capital and inciting rent-seeking behaviour on the part of interest groups.

This book assesses the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its ramifications for the global economy from a multidisciplinary perspective. Current market conditions and systemic issues pose a risk to financial stability and sustained market access for emerging market borrowers. The volatile environment in the financial system became the source of major threats and some opportunities such as takeovers, mergers and acquisitions for international business operations. This volume is divided into six sections. The first evaluates the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis and its impacts on Global Economic Activity, examining the financial crisis in historical context, the economic slowdown, transmission of the crisis from advanced economies to emerging markets, and spillovers. The second section evaluates global imbalances, especially financial instability and the economic outlook for selected regional economies, while the third focuses on international financial institutions and fiscal policy applications. The fourth section analyzes the capital market mechanism, price fluctuations and global trade activity, while the fifth builds on new trends and business cycles to derive effective strategies and solutions for international entrepreneurship and business. In closing, the final section explores the road to economic recovery and stability by assessing the current outlook and fiscal strategies.

This book argues that economic activity in the public sphere now underwrites private corporations, and rejects rigid adherence to traditional economic theories that no longer apply. Adam Smith's widely used "merchant's model" assumes that most investment is private, when in fact research demonstrates that public investment in the workforce through education and training far outweighs the private sector, and does not account for the growing presence of consensual pricing, the diversification of modern businesses, or the increasing internal authoritarianism of globalizing companies. With de facto public support for these adaptations undermining the universally presumed economic model, private corporations are able to increase their profits while misrepresenting the investment of their own global labor forces. This book suggests an "economy of laws" solution that balances the needed degree of central investment planning with the continuation of our pluralist economy of largely autonomous firms, principally by extending the full rights of citizens into the workplace itself.

This book explores the various economic and institutional factors that explain why huge investments are made in unworthy transportation mega-projects in the US and other countries. It is based on research, the general literature, economic analyses, and results from a specifically collected database showing that a significant proportion of implemented mega-projects have been found to be inferior ex-ante or incapable of delivering the returns they promised ex-post. Transportation infrastructure and other public investments of a similar scope ("mega-projects") reflect public sector priorities and objectives, non-pecuniary as well as financial constraints, and a range of decision-making processes. This book describes how decisions made in the public sector with respect to transportation infrastructure investments are affected by the large populations and territories they serve, the estimation of the substantial opportunity costs they entail, the formal procedures instituted for quantitatively appraising projected outcomes and monetary returns, and the political environment in which these decisions are made.

This volume covers the proceedings of the ZAFIN Finance and Sustainability conference, organized by the Wroclaw University of Economics in cooperation with the Corvinus University of Budapest and the University of Economics in Prague. The authors analyze a variety of issues related to recent finance problems, including corporate finance, public finance, monetary and fiscal policy issues, and risk management. The book also discusses topics related to sustainable finance, the transition to green economies, corporate sustainability and sustainable development. The target audience for this book includes researchers at universities and research and policy institutions, graduate students, and practitioners in economics, finance and international economics working for private or government institutions.

This book is a quarterly forecast and analysis report on the Chinese economy. It is published twice a year and presents ongoing results from the "China Quarterly Macroeconomic Model (CQMM)," a research project at the Center for Macroeconomic Research (CMR) at Xiamen University. Based on the CQMM model, the research team forecast major macroeconomic indicators for the next 8 quarters, including the rate of GDP growth, the CPI, fixed-asset investment, resident consumption and foreign trade. At the same time it focuses on simulation of current macroeconomic policies in China. In addition to helping readers understand China's economic trend and policy guide, this book has three main goals: to help readers understand China's economic performance; to forecast the main macroeconomic indicators for the next 8 quarters; and to simulate the effectiveness of macroeconomic policies.