This book is about how much people earn and why the distribution of earnings has been changing over time. The gap between the top and bottom in the United States has widened significantly since 1980. Why has this happened? Is it due to new technologies? What is the role of globalisation? Are there historical precedents?
The book begins with the "race" between technology and education, and shows that continuing technical progress does not necessarily imply a continuing rise in dispersion. It then examines the experience of 20 OECD countries over the twentieth century, material presented in the form of 20 country case studies. The book breaks new ground in assembling data on the distribution of individual earnings covering much of the twentieth century and drawing on a variety of under-exploited sources.
The findings overturn a number of widely-held beliefs. It is not the earnings of the low paid that have been most affected by the recent changes; widening is largely due to what is happening at the top. The recent rise in earnings dispersion is not unprecedented, but should be seen as part of a longer-run history of successive compression and expansion of earnings differences.

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

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

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

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

State and local government fiscal systems have increasingly become vulnerable to economic changes. Over the past three decades, state and local deficits during economic recession have been larger and deeper each time. The impact of the Great Recession and its aftermath of feeble growth and lingering high unemployment has been dramatic both in scope and intensity. Before the crisis, long-term structural deficits were persistent for both individual governments and the entire sector as spending plans and patterns outpaced governments' revenue-generating capacity. The revenue systems of these governments eroded while the workloads and scope on the expenditure side of the state and local system budget continued to grow. This handbook evaluates the persistent problems in the fiscal systems of state and local governments and what can be done to solve them. It contains 35 chapters authored by 60 practitioners and academics who are renowned scholars in state and local finance. Each chapter provides a description of the discipline area, examines major developments in policy, practices and research, and opines on future prospects. The chapters are divided into four sections. Section I is a systematic discussion of the institutional, economic, and political framework that provides a background for understanding the structure and financial performance of the state and local sector. The chapters in Section II provide an overview of the various components of state and local revenue systems and how they reacted to the Great Recession. They analyze the diverse forms of taxes and charges in detail, prescribe remedies and alternatives, and examine the implications for future revenue performance. Chapters in Section III turn to spending, borrowing and financial management in the state and local sector. The focus is on the big six service delivery sectors: education, health care, human services, transportation, pensions, and housing. Section IV is a set of chapters that look ahead and speculate about how the state and local government sector's money-raising, spending, and service delivery structures will adjust to the new circumstances.

The book brings together internationally respected specialists from economics, history and political science such as Harold James, Louis Pauly and Kenneth Moure. First providing a short history of money doctors, the book then goes on to cover such themes as:
*the IMF and policy advice
*the Russian experience
*contemporary money doctors.
The book shows that there is still a long way to go before international financial advice develops into something that is truly helpful in the long term.

The "Theory of Macrojustice", introduced by S.-C. Kolm, is a stimulating contribution to the debate on the macroeconomic income distribution. The solution called "Equal Labour Income Equalisation" (ELIE) is the result of a three stages construction: collective agreement on the scheme of labour income redistribution, collective agreement on the degree of equalisation to be chosen in that framework, individual freedom to exploit his--her personal productive capicities (the source of labour income and the sole basis for taxation). This book is organised as a discussion around four complementary themes: philosophical aspects of macrojustice, economic analysis of macrojustice, combination of ELIE with other targeted tranfers, econometric evaluations of ELIE.

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

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

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

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

Essential services are being privatised the world over. Whether it's water, gas, electricity or the phone network, everywher from Sao Paulo in Brazil to Leeds in the UK is following the US economic model and handing public services over to private companies whose principal interest is raising prices. Yet it's one of the world's best kept secrets that Americans pay astonishingly little for high quality public services. Uniquely in the world, every aspect of US regulation is wide open to the public. How is this done and why has this process not taken root elsewhere? How is regulation threatened even in the United States? And what power does the public have to ensure that services are regulated along these US lines?;This volume, based on work for the United Nations International Labour Organisation, is a step-by-step guide to the way that public services are regulated in the United States. It explains how decisions are made by public debate in a public forum. Profits and investments of private companies are capped, and companies are forced to reduce prices for the poor, fund environmental investments and open themselves to financial inspection.

Fiscal policy is an incredibly important tool for governments across the world, with many countries facing dilemmas in crafting fiscal policies to meet changing demographic needs, greater demands for social welfare and sudden spending due to shocks such as terrorism. This important book looks at fiscal policy in the Asian Pacific economies and with a broad array of contributors will be a useful tool to students, researchers and professionals working in international economics and finance.

Public budgets follow rules of presentation and use terms that make sense to few outside the world of public finance. Moreover, practices vary widely among the thousands of governments across the globe, between federal, state, and local levels of government in the United States, and among nonprofit organizations, many of which provide services similar to governments. Understanding Government Budgets, Second Edition offers a detailed examination of each of the different types of information found in budgets, featuring annotated examples from a variety of organizations. It expands on explanations in the previous edition by including a wealth of examples from governments abroad and from the nonprofit sector. The book stresses that the choices made about content, format, and organization influence the story a budget tells. Designed to help citizens, students, and policy makers become more informed users of public budgets, this book makes the format of budgets and the information they contain accessible and understandable, providing users with the tools they need to make better sense of public organizations and their performance. Complete with online instructor support material including sample problems, in-class exercises, and discussion questions for each chapter, Understanding Government Budgets, Second Edition is perfect for undergraduate or graduate-level courses in budgeting and public administration, and offers a useful guide to budgets for citizens with an interest in how government operates.

The book brings together internationally respected specialists from economics, history and political science such as Harold James, Louis Pauly and Kenneth Mouré. First providing a short history of money doctors, the book then goes on to cover such themes as:
*the IMF and policy advice
*the Russian experience
*contemporary money doctors.
The book shows that there is still a long way to go before international financial advice develops into something that is truly helpful in the long term.

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

Series Information:
Harwood Fundamentals of Pure & Applied Economics

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.

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

"Fiscal Crisis of the State" refers to the tendency of government expenditures to outpace revenues in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its relevance to other countries of the period and also in today's global economy is evident. When government expenditure constitutes a larger and larger share of total economy theorists who ignore the impact of the state budget do so at their own (and capitalism's) peril. This volume examines how changes in tax rates and tax structure used to regulate private economic activity. O'Connor theorizes that particular expenditures and programs and the budget as a whole can be understood only in terms of power relationships within the private economy. O'Connor's analysis includes an anatomy of American state capitalism, political power and budgetary control in the United States, social capital expenditures, social expenses of production, financing the budget, and the scope and limits of reform. He shows that the simultaneous growth of monopoly power and the state itself generate an increasingly severe social crisis. State monopolies indirectly determine the state budget by generating needs that the state must satisfy. The state administration organizes production as a result of a series of political decisions. Over time, there is a tendency for what O'Connor calls the social expenses of production to rise, and the state is increasingly compelled to socialize these expenses. The state has three ways to finance increased budgetary outlays: create state enterprises that produce social expenditures; issue debt and borrowing against further tax revenues; raise tax rates and introduce new taxes. None of these mechanisms are satisfactory. Neither the development of state enterprise nor the growth of state debt liberates the state from fiscal concerns. Similarly, tax finance is a form of economic exploitation and thus a problem for class analysis. O'Connor contends that the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state is the inevitable consequence of the structural gap between state expenditures and revenues. The state's only way to ameliorate the fiscal crisis is to accelerate the growth of the social-industrial complex. In his new introduction, O'Connor describes "The Fiscal Crisis of the State" as "the product of a unique combination of personal, intellectual, and political experiencesa." He goes on to explain the origins of his theory and the consequences of "The Fiscal Crisis of the State." He answers the question "is there a fiscal crisis today?" and discusses changes in fiscal policy since the '60s and '70s. James O'Connor is emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The German state banks - or Landesbanks - are not only some of the largest banks in Germany but are also a dominant force in the international banking sector. These state-owned banks enjoy special privileges and government support which have made them major players in the global arena of banking and finance.Protected by the German taxpayer's seemingly bottomless pockets in the form of state warranties, Landesbanks are able to take part in financing some of the largest projects in the world. They occupy nearly fifty per cent of the top places in both Moody's and Standard and Poor's international rankings. Professor Sinn critically scrutinizes the privileges of the German Landesbanks and questions the justification of government intervention in the banking sector. He predicts that European integration and the introduction of the euro will lead to a fierce take-over battle between Europe's banks. He argues that, given the state warranties, it seems likely that the German Landesbanks will be among the winners in this battle and concludes that the German public banking system has grown far larger than is appropriate for a market economy. This timely book addresses issues of concern for European bankers and policymakers alike. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of financial economics, European integration and money and banking.

How do Australian governments budget? How well do they spend and manage our money? Governments seem to be locked in a constant struggle with the problems of budgeting. Cabinet never has enough resources to go around, and while some agencies 'guard' public expenditure, others find endless ways to make new claims on budgets.Managing Public Expenditure in Australia provides the first systematic analysis of government budgeting and the politics of the budgetary process. Drawing on extensive original sources, the authors examine debates and reforms in public finance from Whitlam and Fraser to Hawke, Keating and Howard, and assess their impacts on policy development. In tracking the way governments actually spend money, Managing Public Expenditure in Australia provides an alternate and complementary political history of federal government over the past forty years.This book also includes accessible discussions on topics such as budget theory, financial management in government, and debt and deficit reduction. An explanation of new resource management techniques and initiatives help to illuminate the ongoing changes to budget and expenditure management practices. This is an essential purchase for students, teachers and practitioners of public finance, and for anyone involved in the continuing debate over the nature and role of the public sector.

The Discretionary Economy argues that we do in fact control our own political and economic destinies. As a community, we have discretion over policies that determine whether an economic process adequately provides for the necessities of life. We also determine who participates in normative public judgments and whether decisions distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Tool argues that we must continuously organize the institutional structures through which economic and political functions in the social process are carried on. We must exercise discretion by creating and modifying institutions that coordinate our behavior.

To exercise discretion effectively requires that we employ distinctively American economic, political, and philosophical theory. In this volume, the pivotal twentieth-century contributors to this encompassing theory of political economy are Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Clarence Ayres, and R. Fagg Foster. This volume presents, in detail, their analytical and philosophical perspective on social change. A major purpose of this volume is to compare and contrast the American tradition with the traditions of capitalism, Marxism, and fascism, demonstrating that the former can resolve compelling economic and political problems and the latter two cannot.

This book explains how to identify and analyze social, economic, and political problems confronted in all communities, and how to go about framing and implementing structural adjustments in the political economy. It will be of interest to students in non-traditional courses in political economy including institutional economics, contemporary social problems, economics and social policy, methodology, and contemporary economic thought.

Financial institutions are facing unprecedented challenges brought on by the coronavirus Pandemic, less than a decade after recovering from the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis. The causes of these challenges differ greatly from the previous crises that financial institutions, to a large extent, had contributed to. The current challenges were exogenous and unpredictable, and their consequences will reshape the financial system architecture around the world. Fintech, once dismissed as no more than a novel approach to servicing the segment of the population often overlooked by established financial intermediaries, is now challenging the traditional models of commercial and investment banking. The inevitable future introduction of digital currencies that could replace national currencies in many business transactions has the potential to fundamentally change the business models of financial institutions and how the financial system functions. Volume 22, Fintech, Pandemic, and the Financial System, examines systemic challenges faced by a wide range of financial market participants and the continued disruptions introduced by financial innovations (Fintech). International Finance Review publishes theme-oriented volumes on various issues in international finance, such as international business finance, international investment and capital markets, global risk management, international corporate governance and institution, currency markets, emerging market finance, international economic integration, and related issues.

The book presents the economic policy model known as "Social Market Economy" in Germany, the country where it originated. Although the model has since been adopted as core objective in the EU Treaty of Lisbon, experts still disagree on its exact nature. The author contributes to this debate by presenting the German economic system from an external perspective and looking at the extent to which it enabled the country increase its weight in international relations. The systems history, identity, political and economic concepts, including ordoliberalism, are analyzed. Its potential and shortcomings are assessed by comparing it to other forms of capitalism. A brief enquiry is made into whether the "Social Market Economy", or aspects of it, are applicable to other countries, including in Eastern Europe. Providing both theoretical and practical aspects, the book offers a valuable resource for researchers, public administration professionals, and policymakers.

The Russian budget process has received little detailed attention in academic literature. Here various key aspects of the formation of the federal budget, largely since Vladimir Putin began his third presidential term in 2012, are examined. It is primarily the writing of the expenditure side of the budget which is described, that is, how it is decided how much money is spent on what. While ample information is provided on budgetary outcomes, the focus is on the process: the issues faced by budget makers, the actors and institutions involved, and the formal and informal procedures that lead to outcomes. It is not the task of the volume to provide an analysis of the wisdom or effectiveness of particular budget allocations; its goal is to provide some judgement on the effectiveness of the process. Chapters are offered on the budgetary process as it relates to the two main claimants on federal budget funding, the social and defence sectors. Three chapters then examine the major locations of budgetary policy-making: the executive (at presidential and cabinet of ministers levels), the Duma, and the expert community. This book was originally published as a special issue of Post-Communist Economies.

A survey of governmental industrial policy in Britain from 1900 to 1990, revealing both the macroeconomic context of such policy and the microeconomic effects. Dr Tomlinson is a reputable scholar of government policy over this period, and this book illuminates both the formation of policy, and the capacity of each government to fulfil its aims.

Eighteen years of Conservative stewardship ensured that the Labour government's education policy did not begin with a tabula rasa, for its starting point has been defined by the previous government to a greater extent than any other incoming government has found. In this book the practitioners discuss the micro effect of the policies in their schools. This book will make an important contribution to continuing debate about the best way forward for state education in England and Wales.