How can governments control spending pressure from influential groups, often representing powerful regional interests? This book is concerned with institutional solutions that allow modern nation states to balance historically grown cultural, political and economic diversity.Laura von Daniels combines different literatures in economics and political science, and draws on interviews with former government leaders, and country experts from international organizations. She applies this research to topics such as fiscal institutions and budget balances, presenting a critical review of different institutional approaches to resolving fiscal imbalances and public indebtedness. Students and scholars of various disciplines, including politics, public and social policy, economics and business will find the discussions and detailed description of institutional reforms in emerging market nations to be of use to their research. It will also be of interest to practitioners working on fiscal decentralization and budget control.

This reprinted edition of a classic and truly seminal book, written by one of the leading thinkers in the field, represents the first comprehensive treatment of the economic theory of multi-level government. It explores the specific economic roles of the various levels of government, the assignment of different forms of taxation to central, state (provincial), and local governments, and the fiscal links between tiers of government provided by intergovernmental grants. This reprinted edition includes a new preface that briefly describes the origins of the book and comments on the evolution of the theory and practice of fiscal federalism since its original publication. The primary interest in the book will come from scholars and graduate students interested in multi-level public finance and public economics.

Applied Macroeconomics for Public Policy applies system and control theory approaches to macroeconomic problems. The book shows how to build simple and efficient macroeconomic models for policy analysis. By using these models, instead of complex multi-criteria models with uncertain parameters, readers will gain new certainty in macroeconomic decision-making. As high debt to GDP ratios cause problems in societies, this book provides insights on improving economies during and after economic downturns.

Master the most important areas of today's tax law with Whittenburg/Altus-Buller/Gill's best-selling INCOME TAX FUNDAMENTALS 2022. This concise, practical introduction to tax preparation uses a unique, step-by-step workbook format that integrates actual tax forms. You learn the complexities of the U.S. income tax code as this edition's clear, up-to-date presentation walks you through real, current examples using the most recent tax forms. A variety of end-of-chapter problems and online exercises offers hands-on practice with tax return problems that use source documents identical to those of real clients. Professional Intuit (R) ProConnect (TM) tax preparation software also accompanies each new book. In addition, numerous study tools and powerful online resources, including the CNOWv2 online homework tool, help you further refine your knowledge and practical skills to become a successful tax preparer today.

The maintenance of financial stability is a key objective of monetary policy, but the record of regulators in achieving this has been lamentable in recent years. This failure has been matched by an equivalent inability to establish an appropriate theoretical basis for financial regulation. In this book, the authors demonstrate how to enhance the theory, modeling and practice of such regulation. The main determinant of financial instability is the default of financial institutions. The authors highlight the importance of the appropriate incorporation of default into macro-financial models and its interaction with liquidity. Besides covering the historical development and current stance of financial regulation, the book includes a number of policy-oriented chapters revealing how the authors' modeling approach can improve the process. This authoritative book will serve as a basis for future work on financial stability management for both academics and policy makers and provide guidance on how to undertake crisis prevention and resolution.

Gordon Brown was a past-master at sneaking in new taxes by stealth, but his efforts as Chancellor and then Prime Minister were merely the latest in a long line of party leaders desperate to extract more money from reluctant taxpayers. This book challenges the need for government to resort to such underhand practices which undermine the economy, killing the goose which lays the golden eggs, and the integrity of the political process. The author argues that not only does taxation flout the principle of private property, but it 'is a primal cause of both inflation and unemployment. Regardless of this, the freely elected governments of contemporary trading economies - with the acquiescence of their electorates - persist in raising the major part, if not all, of their revenues by means of taxation. The immediate cause of such action by governments...is ignorance of any acceptable alternative method of raising sufficient public revenue.' Burgess shows how the development of Keynes' general theory of employment 'leads to the conclusion that an open trading economy is likely to be most competitive, and therefore most prosperous, only when taxation is abolished' - but government must be funded. How can this be done without taxation? To provide an answer he refines Alfred Marshall's distinction between the public and private value of property to reveal an alternative, peculiarly public source of revenue. Unlike a tax, defined by a former Labour Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, as 'a compulsory contribution imposed by a public authority, irrespective of the exact amount of service rendered to the taxpayer in return', the 'public value' identified by Marshall would deliver an exact equivalence between the benefits enjoyed and the amount paid. On the basis of this widely accepted definition, therefore, it is not a tax but the price for services rendered like any other transaction - the price fixed by the market. The author shows how reform may be introduced with a minimum of disruption, so that politicians with an eye to re-election can achieve measurable results during the lifetime of a parliament.

In Progress and Poverty, economist Henry George scrutinizes the connection between population growth and distribution of wealth in the economy of the late nineteenth century. The initial portions of the book are occupied with refuting the demographic theories of Thomas Malthus, who asserted that the vast abundance of goods generated by an economy's growth was spent on food. Consequently the population rises, keeping living standards low, poverty widespread, and starvation and disease common. Henry George had a different attitude: that poverty could be solved and economic progress preserved. To prove this, he draws upon decades of data which show that the increase in land prices restrains the amount of production on said land; business owners thus have less to pay their workers, with the result being mass poverty especially within cities.

Virtually all fiscal measures influence people's health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes. The purpose of this book is to discuss the subject of these measures, which we define as 'health taxes'. The book aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, we build an argument throughout the book for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.

In 1918, the Soviet revolutionary government repudiated the Tsarist regime's sovereign debt, triggering one of the biggest sovereign defaults ever. Yet the price of Russian bonds remained high for years. Combing French archival records, Kim Oosterlinck shows that, far from irrational, investors had legitimate reasons to hope for repayment. Soviet debt recognition, a change in government, a bailout by the French government, or French banks, or a seceding country would have guaranteed at least a partial reimbursement. As Greece and other European countries raise the possibility of sovereign default, Oosterlinck's superbly researched study is more urgent than ever.

This book explores the system of financing local governments in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using evidence from the last two decades, the authors, experts on their particular countries, describe the development of the current local government finance system in each nation, and the major challenges and policy options they face. The contributions in this book provide comprehensive coverage of a transitional Europe that encompasses both modern local public finance theory and specific applications in the target countries. The book is a recommended read not only for students of local government and local public finance, but also practitioners and all those who have to deal with the accountability and financial issues at local government level in Central and Eastern Europe.