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Books > Money & Finance > Public finance > General
"This book is able to explain and analyze what has eluded both scholars and thought leaders in business and the media - how and why populism has grabbed center stage. Highly recommendable." -David B. Audretsch, Indiana University Bloomington, USA "Welfens provides valuable insight into US politics and describes the strategic options for Europe going forward." -Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley, USA "With great skill Welfens traces the implications of US populism for the global economic system." - Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University, USA "This critique of Trumps fiscal and international trade policies and their weak intellectual basis deserves the attention of US and European readers alike" -Richard H. Tilly, University of Munster, Germany What lies behind the Trump victory of 2016 and the US' new raft of economic policies? Is a populist presidency in the United States likely to be a temporary phenomenon or a structural long-term challenge? In an era of declining multilateralism, what can the US still stand to learn from Europe, where several countries have effective lifetime economic welfare equal to that of the US - and what can the EU learn from the US in return? Furthermore, what international economic dynamics can be expected from the Sino-US trade conflict and can globalization be maintained? In this timely volume, Paul Welfens provides a rare, clear-sighted and scholarly analysis of the global problems created by Trump's protectionism and economic policy. He leverages his understanding of these problems to make concrete policy suggestions that could help prevent the world economy from falling back into a variant of the Great Powers regime of the late nineteenth century.
This book focuses on development of blockchain-based new-generation financial infrastructures, in which a systematic, complete theoretical framework is proposed to explore blockchain-based securities trading platform, central securities depository (CSD), securities settlement system (SSS), central counterparty (CCP), payment system (PS) and trade repository (TR). The blockchain-based new FMI has attracted much attention in the securities industry. At present, the cross-border depository receipt (DR) business faces a dilemma between efficiency and security. In this book, the author proposes a blockchain-based new DR solution, manifesting the potential for using blockchain technology in the FMI field. In addition, using Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) as the underlying technology in the DR scenario, specific process and operations are proposed for delivery versus payment (DvP), delivery versus delivery (DvD) or payment versus payment (PvP) and other exchange-of-value methods. This book further studies how to carry out opening positions, end-of-day settlement of margin, forced liquidation and settlement at maturity, for exchange-traded derivatives, such as futures and options, under the blockchain-based technological framework. Blockchain technology not only naturally fits into the decentralized or non-centralized characteristic of the OTC market but also can effectively address the pain points and difficulties of the OTC market. This book provides an in-depth analysis of existing specific issues in China's bond market, regional equity markets and asset management market, among other OTC markets, and proposes relevant blockchain-based solutions. Blockchain technology does not change the public policy objectives for FMI. The blockchain-based new FMIs are still subject to compliance, safety and efficiency requirements. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the applicability of the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMI) to them, in particular, analyzes their legal basis, off-chain governance and system security.
This collection of essays presents new insights into the analyses of public debt theory, recent historical episodes, econometric analyses of public debt and policy dilemmas and options. The subjects covered include optimal debt policy, the role of deficits as a temporary stimulus in the course of disinflation, the intergenerational equity aspects of public debt, public debt problems in developing countries, indexing public debt for inflation and various conceptual, accounting and measurement issues in obtaining accurate information on deficits and public debt as well as their impact on aggregate economic activity. The studies document the explosion of public debt, the potential benefits and costs associated with this explosion and the perceptions of the debt problems from the viewpoints of various national economies as well as the world economy. Professor Arrow was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1972.
This book contains selected papers of the International Conference on Industrial Economics Systems and Industrial Security Engineering (IEIS 2020), which is co-organized by Beijing Jiaotong University, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, in July 25-28 2020. This book aims to provide new research methods, theories and applications from various areas of industrial economics and engineering. In detail the included scientific papers analyze and describe communication processes in the fields of industrial economics, industrial system, industrial security and engineering and other related areas. The variety of papers delivers added value for both scholars and practitioners.
People covered by public pensions are often the subject of "pension
envy": that is, their benefits might seem more generous and their
contributions lower than those offered by the private sector. Yet
this book points out that such judgments are often inaccurate,
since civil servants hold jobs with few counterparts in private
industry, such as firefighters, police, judges, and teachers. Often
these are riskier, dirtier, and demand more loyalty and discretion
than would be required of a more mobile labor force in the private
sector. The debate challenges traditional ideas about how the
public employee labor contract is structured and raises questions
about how such employees are attracted to the public sector,
retained and motivated on the job, and retired, via an entire
compensation package of wages and benefits. Authors explore aspects
of these schemes, addressing the cost and valuation debate, along
with the political economy of how public pension asset pools are
perceived and managed, an increasingly important topic in times of
global financial turmoil. The discussion also explores ways that
public pensions can be strengthened in the US, Japan, Canada, and
Germany.
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.
This book sheds new light on if and why, between 2009 and 2015, European governments succeeded or failed in initiating and actually realizing some of the farthest-reaching austerity plans in modern history. The author analyzes the economic and political context and the underlying causes of austerity and economic adjustment packages during the Euro crisis. In doing so, he shows that austerity has its roots in an institutional mismatch between capitalist diversity in the Eurozone on the one hand, and an ill-conceived common economic regime on the other. In this context, austerity trumped politics, and even democracy itself. The book will appeal to scholars of political science and comparative political economy, as well as governmental policymakers and practitioners in the finance sector.
This vital resource is devoted to providing nonpartisan, objective analysis of the national debt, including leading drivers of the debt, the budgetary process, and claims and counter-claims about national debt benefits and drawbacks. This indispensable resource provides readers with a clear and unbiased understanding of the national debt and its relationship to the U.S. economic system. The book addresses the foundations and major elements of America's budgetary process, details how government taxing and spending priorities impact the nation's debt, explains the difference between deficits and debt, and summarizes dominant conservative and liberal economic perspectives on the national debt and related fiscal issues. Utilizing authoritative resources and accessible, lay-friendly terminology, this book punctures popular myths and misconceptions about the national debt. But it also shines a light on the numerous economic, social, and political drivers of our national conversation about the debt-and the ways in which the national debt is likely to influence the lives of future generations of Americans. At a time when American political discourse often descends into fact-free zones of wishful thinking and deceptive claims, this book provides information for readers to truly understand the national debt. Addresses beliefs and claims regarding the national debt in an easy-to-navigate question-and-answer format Draws from empirical research in a variety of scholarly fields and presents those findings in a single, lay-friendly location to aid understanding of complex issues related to fiscal policy and federal budgets. Provides readers with leads to conduct further research in extensive Further Reading sections for each entry Examines claims made by individuals and groups of all political backgrounds and ideologies
This volume presents new developments in the research on ancillary benefits. Twenty years after the influential OECD report on ancillary benefits, the authors discuss theoretical innovations and offer new empirical findings on various ancillary effects in different world regions. Covering topics such as ancillary health effects associated with reduced air pollution, the influence of ancillary benefits on international cooperation on climate protection, co-effects of carbon capture and storage, ancillary effects of adaptation to climate change, multi-criteria decision analysis covering multiple effects of climate protection actions, and the analysis of primary and ancillary effects within an impure public goods framework, it provides starting points for further research on integrated climate policies seeking to address a range of policy objectives simultaneously.
Evaluation in recent decades has evolved from a tool for project appraisals to a more widely used framework for public decision-making and operational management. Most evaluation books are focused on traditional tools of analysis such as cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis to the neglect of modern tools such as multi-criteria evaluation, social marginal cost of funds analysis, data envelopment analysis, results-oriented management and evaluation and theory based evaluations. This edited volume provides an easily accessible and comprehensive survey of both traditional and modern tools of analysis that are used in the evaluation literature to evaluate public projects, programs, policies and policy analysis and advice. The book will be of interest to students, scholars, researchers, practitioners and policy makers.
Reflecting the diverse and profound changes triggered by the latest wave of economic globalization, this book highlights various governance responses at national, regional and global levels. The topics covered are wide-ranging and include economic history and development, European integration, exchange rate arrangements, industrial and labor economics, international cooperation and multilateralism, and public choice. The book is divided into three parts: The first part, which contains contributions by Barry Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau, is devoted to economic history. The second part examines open economy macroeconomics with a focus on Europe, including contributions by Jurgen von Hagen and Paul Krugman. The third part presents contributions to international political economy, and related interdisciplinary topics. This Festschrift is written in honor of Jorge Braga de Macedo, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics and a distinguished Portuguese academic whose work has an impressive global reach. The contributions, written by a selection of international authors, deal with his oeuvre covering the wide range of topics broached in this book, as his publication record amply attests.
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.
Conventional wisdom warns that unaccountable political and business agents can enrich a few at the expense of many. But logically extending this wisdom implies that associated principals - voters, consumers, shareholders - will favor themselves over the greater good when 'rules of the game' instead create too much accountability. Democratic Governance and Economic Performance rigorously develops this hypothesis, and finds statistical evidence and case study illustrations that democratic institutions at various governance levels (e.g., federal, state, corporation) have facilitated opportunistic gains for electoral, consumer, and shareholder principals. To be sure, this conclusion does not dismiss the potential for democratic governance to productively reduce agency costs. Rather, it suggests that policy makers, lawyers, and managers can improve governance by weighing the agency benefits of increased accountability against the distributional costs of favoring principal stakeholders over more general economic opportunities. Carefully considering the fundamentals that give rise to this tradeoff should interest students and scholars working at the intersection of social science and the law, and can help professionals improve their own performance in policy, legal, and business settings.
Today, the most pressing challenges for public economics are of macroeconomic nature: pensions, debt, income distribution, and fiscal sustainability. All these problems are compounded by the phenomenon of demographic transition and aging. This graduate textbook addresses these issues with the help of state-of-the-art macroeconomic tools that are based on a sound microfoundation and rooted in empirical evidence. Different from the standard partial-equilibrium analysis in traditional textbooks on public economics, the concept of general equilibrium helps to account for compensating or amplifying side-effects of economic policy. GAUSS and MATLAB computer code as well as teaching material (slides) are available as downloads from the author's homepage.
This open access handbook, Ten Crises systematically traces the economic historyof China from 1949 to 2020, unravelling the complex domestic and global factorsleading to the cyclical crises identified by WEN and his research team, andexamining the corresponding counteracting policies and measures by thegovernment to resolve or defer the crises. The book offers profound insights intoChina's endeavours and predicaments on the path of modernization, andcontemplates opportunities and lessons for the forging of alternative trajectoriesnot only for China but also for the global south: to reconstruct rural communitiesfor integrated cooperation and governance, and to revitalize ecological civilization.
Public Sector Leadership in Assessing and Addressing Risk explores risk management in practice, taking a specific focus on the identification of risks in the European public sector while contextualising its Eurocentric analysis within a global setting. The volume lays important groundwork for understanding the main philosophical premises of risk management. Navigating the text's philosophical underpinnings such as 'Risk Management is a misnomer', the editors provide deep insight into global, strategic, and operational risk management that will prove invaluable for any practitioner. Providing high quality academic research, ESFIRM provides a platform for authors to explore, analyse and discuss current and new financial models and theories, and engage with innovative research on an international scale.
This book brings together scholars from the fields of politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and economics, to explore pathways towards implementing a Basic Income in Australia. It is the first book of its kind to outline avenues for implementation of a basic income specifically for Australia and responds to a gap in the existing basic income literature and published titles to provide a distinct standpoint in the exploration of basic income within the Australian contemporary policy landscape. The first section of the book outlines some of the continuing substantive and philosophical issues regarding BI implementation. In the second section of the book, authors offer practical strategies and models for progressing BI in Australia.
As digitalization and social media are increasingly blurring the boundaries between traditional societal, political, and economic institutions, this book provides a cross-disciplinary examination of value co-creation. From various standpoints, it examines how institutions contribute to service ecosystems and how digitalization is transforming value co-creation in these ecosystems. Further, the book shares new perspectives on relational dynamics among government, companies, and citizens. These insights fill the gaps between service science and political science by integrating institutional logics into the concept of value co-creation. The book subsequently examines society as an interaction space. Topics discussed include the new logic and transformation mechanisms of economic activities, citizen participation, governance, and policy-making in the face of technological innovations, market-based reforms, and the risk of disconnect between citizens and policy-making. Here the focus is on value co-creation in complex adaptive systems where institutions, individuals, and businesses negotiate value and interests in networked relations. In closing, the book presents a range of empirical case studies on value co-creation, which provide examples of active networked citizenship, innovative governance and policy-making, democratic leadership, and trust-building dialogue among institutions. The studies address the context of Nordic countries, recognized as world-leading democracies. Pursuing a systems approach, the book articulates a social reality composed of interacting and interconnected elements that cannot be captured with only micro or macro levels of analysis. Service ecosystems are considered as configurations of people and technologies embedded in institutionalized rules, cultural meanings, and practices, offering valuable insights into the service-centered view of markets and society. Given the breadth and depth of its coverage, the book offers a valuable resource for all students and scholars interested in understanding and envisioning the future democratic landscape.
Studies in Indian Public Finance is a comprehensive analytical study of Indian public finance evaluated in the background of theories and best practice approaches. It is a comprehensive analysis of the nature and composition of public spending and its financing. Beginning with normative questions on the role of the State, the book argues that public expenditure policies in India are dominated by political economy considerations. Low revenue productivity of the tax system has constrained the ability of the government to adequately finance physical and social infrastructure at required levels causing elevated levels of large deficits and debt threatening stability, and sustainability. The book also analyses the trends and issues in Indian fiscal federalism and evaluates the effectiveness of intergovernmental transfers in a country marked with wide inter-regional disparities. The analysis also extends to the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indian public finances. The book will be useful to students of economics, scholars working on the subject, and policy makers.
The sustainability of public pension systems has become an important aspect for governments and institutions worldwide. This book addresses the multiple elements that influence the sustainability of pension systems with a special focus on central and eastern European countries. Supported by the results of econometric empirical studies, the authors discuss and analyse areas like social economy versus capitalist economy, globalization versus glocalization, population aging versus birth and fertility, emigration versus immigration, early retirement versus prolongation versus professional activity, the sustainability of public pension systems versus the adequacy of benefits provided, public pension systems compared to private pension funds and taxation of salary incomes versus subsidization of state social insurance.
DEA is computational at its core and this book will be one of several books that we will look to publish on the computational aspects of DEA. This book by Zhu and Cook will deal with the micro aspects of handling and modeling data issues in modeling DEA problems. DEA's use has grown with its capability of dealing with complex service industry and the public service domain types of problems that require modeling both qualitative and quantitative data. This will be a handbook treatment dealing with specific data problems including the following: (1) imprecise data, (2) inaccurate data, (3) missing data, (4) qualitative data, (5) outliers, (6) undesirable outputs, (7) quality data, (8) statistical analysis, (9) software and other data aspects of modeling complex DEA problems. In addition, the book will demonstrate how to visualize DEA results when the data is more than 3-dimensional, and how to identify efficiency units quickly and accurately.
In 1996, the Japanese government introduced a policy package initiating massive deregulation and liberalization in the nation's financial sector, referred to as Japan's financial 'Big Bang.' This book argues that the emergence of the Big Bang Initiative poses numerous challenges to conventional interpretations of Japanese politics and represents a clear case of institutional change in Japanese finance. Whereas many observers stress continuity in Japanese politics, this book argues that the emergence in the 1990s of performance failures and scandals attributed to the bureaucracy, as well as the increase in the likelihood of a change in government in this period, led policymaking patterns surrounding the Big Bang to differ radically from those dominating public policymaking in the past. These developments led to change in the nature of the alliance between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF), to a shift in priorities within the MOF, and to a heightened role for the public in policymaking. The result was that the MOF, long perceived as 'entrenched' and seeking to maximize tangible tokens of organizational power, became more than willing to launch the Big Bang, despite the fact that these reforms would strip the ministry of many of its regulatory tools and sever the ministry's close ties with the financial sector. The book also argues that these new developments prevented financial industry actors from forestalling these reforms, as they had done in the past with other reforms similarly threatening the viability of weaker firms. The findings reveal that not only politicians, but also bureaucrats and interest groups, have reasons to pursue public support to enhance their respective political influence. Consequently, well-organized groups do not always prevail over the unorganized public.
Basic information is provided on how contribution programs can be used in community-based development with satisfying results for all. Senior corporate managers are encouraged to go beyond traditional giving and to consider other areas. Concrete suggestions and a review of the experience of some of the pioneers are presented. For companies and foundations which have limited resources, but have a desire to participate, several techniques of indirect investments in social development are shown.
This book explores the origins of Arthur Laffer's economic theories and how they became a part of mainstream economic policy. Utilizing interviews and archival material, Laffer's life is traced from his early education through to his time working for the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Laffer's influence on Reaganomics is discussed alongside the development of supply-side economics, the shift towards neoliberal policies, and the Laffer curve. This book aims to contextualise the work of Laffer within archival research and wider economic trends. It will be relevant researchers and policy makers interested in the history of economic thought and the political economy.
This book provides a comparative analysis of performance budgeting and financing implementation, and examines failures and successes across both developed and developing countries. Beginning with a review of theoretical research on performance budgeting and financing, the book synthesises the numerous studies on the subject. The book describes the situation in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Netherlands and Italy, as well as in seven developing countries - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia and South Africa, at the national, and at the local level. Each chapter provides historical and descriptive details of successful or failed experiments in performance budgeting and performance financing. |
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