This book provides compelling arguments for the exclusive concern with efficiency ('a dollar is a dollar') in all specific areas of public economic policy, leaving the objective of equality to be achieved through the general tax/transfer system. Public policies should ultimately maximize the sum of individual welfares which should be individual happiness rather than preferences. Relative-income and environmental disruption effects cause a bias in favour of private spending which is no longer conducive to happiness socially. Welfare can be increased more by higher public spending on research and environmental protection, including the perfection of the techniques of brain stimulation to increase happiness.

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.

This volume presents selected papers from the 18th Eurasia Business and Economics Society (EBES) Conference, with major emphasis placed on highlighting the latest research developments in the economics of innovation, public economics, and management. The articles in the volume also address more specialized topics such as luxury fashion, weather derivatives, health management, islamic bonds, and life satisfaction, among others. The majority of the articles focus on phenomena observed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and South Asia, representing a unique contribution to understanding contemporary research challenges from a different perspective.

With the current global crisis, high levels of volatility in trade, capital flows, commodity prices, aid, and the looming threat of climate change, this book brings together high-quality research and presents conceptual issues and empirical results to analyze the determinants of the vulnerability to poverty in developing countries.

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.

This volume sheds new light on economic developments in several countries of Southeast Europe. The European Union and especially the eurozone continue to experience rhythms of fiscal crisis, as can most clearly be seen in the debt crisis in the South Periphery. Despite the fact that several measures and decisions have been taken to deal with the crisis (banking union, liquidity support from the European Central Bank), proposals to reform Europe's strategic policy in order to find a way out of the crisis have been put forward. This book explores the respective roles that specific sectors, e.g. the agricultural sector, social capital, tax policies and labour immigration, can play in this regard. The importance of international economic relations (exports, imports, FDI, exchange rates) is analysed, in order to illustrate the nature of the economic developments and the major economic difficulties these countries face.

This data-rich work examines today's most compelling and controversial public health issues, including alcohol and drug abuse, AIDS, abortion, black and infant mortality, drug-affected babies, child abuse, teenage pregnancy, and cigarette smoking. Hammerle's theme is that individual behavioral choices often have far-reaching and costly effects. When practiced by large numbers of people, the human and fiscal costs can be monumental, taxing virtually all of our social systems as well as our financial resources. Hammerle enumerates these costs and, employing economic analytical tools, recommends public policies that will reduce the incidence of such behavior or otherwise reduce its social cost. Some recommendations are outside the mainstream, but all are well substantiated and soundly argued.

This volume will be of great interest to academics, practitioners, and policy-makers in the fields of public health, health care administration, public policy, child protection, and family planning. The work will also interest economists and sociologists in the field of social welfare, as well as lay persons who are concerned about these timely public health issues.

The changing economic conditions of the 1990s now demand a review of the framework and adaptation to conditions currently prevailing in the government's role in social welfare. Recognizing that the national political leadership no longer was willing to support all of the public programs and benefits that it had initiated in the past 50 years, the authors assume that a downsizing of the national government's role in social welfare will occur. This volume explores how downsizing will affect the private sector, nonprofit organizations, families, and individuals, while including specific recommendations and suggestions on how social welfare programs can be reformed or modified.

Analyzes the contemporary operations and goals of the Federal Reserve, with particular attention to the present continuing state of recession and the role that monetary policy may or may not have played in its development.

Economic globalization is a complex phenomenon where the links between social security expenditures and globalization are not well understood so far. This study summarizes new key findings and highlights new theoretical insights in the field of social security systems, labor standards, taxation and economic globalization. Moreover, new thoughts on the links between social security systems and migration as well as between free trade areas and social market economy development are presented. The book analyzes the role of a changing age dependency using a Branson model and it derives implications for the stock market price index, the exchange rate and the interest rate. Economic globalization needs to be politically managed and through the Transatlantic Banking Crisis and the Euro Crisis the need to more carefully draw the rules of the game for financial globalization has been highlighted. Unstable financial markets have a large potential to undermine social market economies and social security systems. The rising income inequalities within countries raise more policy challenges for Europe than for the US.

Privatization and capital markets support and reinforce each other to promote economic growth around the world. This work is intended to fill a gap in the literature by discussing the links between privatization and capital markets, and to provide useful insights for policy makers in developing countries and in the international donor agencies, for academics and practitioners dealing with economic development, and for the internationally minded private sector around the world. Privatization, in its various forms, and the development of capital markets will be a primary catalyst for economic growth and development well into the next century.

Law and regulation are becoming increasingly important in any discourse involving the Islamic financial services industry. This important aspect comprises both the legal and Shari'ah aspects from the pre-contract stage up to the post-execution phase, and even post-contract termination phase. Emerging Issues in Islamic Finance Law and Practice in Malaysia focuses on emerging legal, Shari'ah and regulatory issues in the Islamic finance industry in Malaysia. Through the lens of the Malaysian legal framework, financial experts Umar A. Oseni, M. Kabir Hassan, and Rusni Hassan and their expert contributors raise and discuss issues that cut across borders and, as such, can be transposed to other Islamic finance jurisdictions. With the different perspectives and approaches adopted by various chapters, Emerging Issues is specifically designed to meet the needs of academics and practitioners of Islamic finance law to provide general legal and Shari'ah guidance on the emerging issues identified. In Emerging Issues, Oseni, Hassan and Hassan provide rigorous research for curious minds who seek to ascertain the position of Islamic law on certain new issues, such as the application of Fintech in Islamic finance and the regulation of digital currencies. Readers will also benefit from the case studies included, which are based on the Malaysian legal and Shari'ah framework since Malaysia is generally considered a model for other Islamic finance jurisdictions.

"This book analyses privatisation in Ireland, a European economy that has experienced rapidly changing fortunes over the last 30 years. It examines the effects of privatisation in terms of corporate performance, public finances and the distributional aspects of privatisation including the impact on employment and share ownership"--

The first book of its kind, this is a collection of essays on the financing of transportation in non-metropolitan areas in the United States. It reviews basic demographic trends and conditions of infrastructures at the present time while exploring a wide range of alternatives for improving them. Including contributions from local finance personnel, engineers and other government officials, Financing Local Infrastructure in Nonmetropolitan Areas is an exhaustive study of the problems facing local infrastructure, providing an invaluable resource for scholars, administrators, and laypersons whose jobs are affected by infrastructure issues, such as agricultural and business personnel.

This book examines history of Russian finances in the period of Russia's transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and in the current decade. It focuses on obstacles to market reforms and macroeconomic policy choices that resulted in the state debt expansion and the financial crisis of 1998.

This book develops a number of analytical models and presents empirical analyses of the equity and efficiency effects of existing indirect taxes from New Zealand. Potential tax reforms including environmental taxes are also examined and the methods presented can easily be adapted to deal with other countries. Policy debates are inevitably influenced by value judgements, which are seldom made explicit either by governments or those engaging in public discussion. By concentrating on the empirical orders of magnitude, and by examining the implications of adopting alternative value judgements, the findings of this book contribute towards rational policy debate, rather than relying on guesswork and rhetoric. The equity and efficiency effects of indirect taxes are examined in detail, using the central concepts of welfare changes, the excess burden of taxation, and money metric utility measures. The indirect taxes examined include a carbon tax designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Distributional Effects of Indirect Taxes develops widely applicable models and will therefore appeal to economists interested in public economics, tax policy, inequality measurement, welfare economics and tax modelling. Economists in government departments and international agencies interested in public finance and inequality and poverty measurement will also find much to engage them in this book, as will policymakers concerned with indirect and environmental tax policy, inequality, and welfare economics.

As a result of the financial crisis, the weaknesses of the Eurozone, including the public debt crisis, materialized in severe depressions in certain of its country members. In this monograph, the author analyzes structural weaknesses of the Eurozone and argues that they can be traced to (i) institutional differences, (ii) differences in the economic structures, (iii) the fundamental inability of European Bureaucracy to deal with crises, and (iv) the extreme rigidity of markets which prevents a general equilibrium in product and credit markets. He concludes that whether the Eurozone is sustainable, depends on future monetary and credit policies, and discusses the implications of reforming it in the best interest of the international banking and financial system. The recent policies of the ECB of "cheap" credit expansion are examined in detail. The approach of the work is along the lines of von Mises' and Hayek's Austrian tradition; additionally, substantive international empirical evidence supporting this Austrian approach is presented.

This book provides a complete analysis of educational production and costs using the nonparametric technique known as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The book focuses on estimation of technical, allocative and scale efficiency in the public sector characterized by the influence of exogenous socio-economic variables. State of the art DEA models will be presented and fully discussed. Specific education topics important to policy makers including adequacy, efficiency, productivity, environmental costs and equity will be analyzed. To illustrate how these techniques can be applied to school systems worldwide, the authors use data on Australian elementary and high schools to develop nonparametric measures that will help inform current policy debate in Australia. They also discuss the applicability of these analysis techniques and methodologies to certain related scenarios.

The purpose of the book is to provide a comprehensive analysis of educational production using numerous DEA models that have been developed. Chapters 3 7 and 9 were developed in the literature as extensions to the basic DEA models. Each chapter explains why new advances in DEA were needed in order to carry out accurate analysis of educational production, and then presents the use of these new techniques within the context of educational performance, productivity, and cost. These extensions were based on public sector production in general, and educational production in particular. The models showed that traditional DEA improperly controlled for exogenous factors of production like the socioeconomic conditions prevalent in the education setting. In addition, models of educational funding typically use ad hoc and simple approaches that often assume that schools operate efficiently. This book uses economic and mathematical models to further our understanding of educational production while providing various measures of economic performance. The authors use current data on Australian schools to highlight important policy questions related to efficiency, economies of size and how scarce resources can best be spent to improve performance.

This research focus comes at an important watershed moment in the Australian Federal Governments current involvement in designing new nationally consistent funding models for both government and non-government schooling sectors with effect from 2014. A new National School Resourcing Standard is proposed to be implemented signaling a move to resource adequacy, school efficiency and value for money dimensions. These proposed innovative schooling resourcing developments will enable the Australian school efficiency and productivity studies to serve as the basis to evaluate the funding changes, in order to determine whether there have been significantly different student performance outcomes in the transition from a centralized to a new decentralized set of school funding arrangements."

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

Budget deficits, gas prices, health care costs, social security, job security.... Anxiety over the economy pervades our daily lives-from reports on the early morning newscasts to gossip around the water cooler to dinner table debate. Yet most citizens are woefully ignorant when it comes to understanding how the economy works and how to interpret the impact of policies and business decisions. It's easy to slip into generalities: government spending is wasteful, taxes are too high, good-paying jobs are being shipped overseas, Americans don't save enough. Other issues become hijacked by political partisans to advance their agendas: trade must be fair!, tax cuts will pay for themselves!, there will be no money left in the social security till after the baby boomers loot it! In Smart Economics, Michael Walden provides an antidote: take 50 of today's top economic issues and explain their meaning, implications, and potential solutions in a logical, straightforward, commonsense, and non-partisan way. Has Government Spending Been Out of Control? Is Profit Bad? Walden applies basic economic concepts and logical argumentation to help readers get their bearings-to separate fact from fiction and ultimately make better economic decisions themselves. The result is an entertaining and highly informative introduction to economic principles and their influence on our behavior. In Smart Economics, Michael Walden provides an antidote: take 50 of today's top economic issues and explain their meaning, implications, and potential solutions in a logical, straightforward, commonsense, and non-partisan way. From Has Government Spending Been out of Control? to Is Profit Bad? to Why Are Pro Sports Stars Paid So Much? Walden demystifies the dismal science, using basic concepts and logical argumentation to help readers get their bearings-to separate fact from fiction and ultimately make better decisions, when it comes to spending, investing, saving, and voting. The result is an entertaining and informative introduction to economic principles and their influence on our behavior.

John Levy's text presents microeconomic theory for use in analyzing and formulating public policy. It couples a direct and non-intimidating approach to essential theory with a presentation that is sophisticated at the policy level. It does not attempt to cover the entire body of economic theory, but rather presents those elements of theory most relevant to courses in public economics and public policy in such programs as public administration, policy analysis, health planning, environmental management, urban affairs, and urban planning. The text is divided into two parts. The first introduces basic concepts with an emphasis on their philosophical underpinnings and policy uses; the second consists of six essays on policy-related subjects, selected to make use of concepts presented in the first part. Among the unusual features of the book are the discussion of the tax expenditure concept, benefit cost analysis with numerical example, substantial discussions of the origins and philosophical implications of economic man as a behavioral model, and an entire chapter devoted to public choice.

A complete guide to sovereign wealth funds written by and for industry practitioners

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) aren't new, but they are often misunderstood. As they've attracted more attention over the last decade and grown greatly in size, the need for a new and thorough resource on SWFs has never been greater. These funds will only grow more important over the coming years. In this book, expert authors who work in the industry present a comprehensive look at SWFs from the perspective of western investors.

Economic growth continues to transform the economic and political landscape of Asia. Equally the policies now being adopted to promote private sector participation, re-structure state entities, and reduce the presence of the state in the provision of public goods and services, are tied to fundamental transformations in Asia's state-society relations. The global cast of contributors present a timely analysis of the impact of neo-liberalism on Asia's developmental policies and the organisation of Asian states and markets. Ironically, the "developmental state" that has historically driven Asia's rapid economic transformation is now threatened by an increasingly dominant neoliberal agenda that aims to roll back the state in the name of market fundamentalism.

From its origins in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the diffusion of participatory budgeting to other parts of the world has been met with varying degrees of success despite its label as a product of democratic innovation. Drawing on in-depth empirical and theoretical analysis, this book sheds light on the diffusion dynamics of participatory budgeting and the processes of its framing and adaptation in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It explores the question of participatory budgeting's national characteristics and potential for realising a more democratic society. Thus, the volume engages in a theoretically innovative and empirically grounded overview and critical assessment of participatory budgeting initiatives in three European countries. The double focus on frames in the diffusion and implementation of single cases and the systematic evaluation of their results offers a deeper understanding of "success factors" and results of participatory budgeting and other institutional processes of citizen participation.