Second revised edition which provides an assessment of the current state of the supply-side of the economy. Includes an examination of Britain's role in the EU and the implications of the social chapter, an analysis of the structure of British industry since the end of the Cold War, and an assessment of the resources available in the year 2000.

Public spending accounts for a significant share of national GDP and is perceived as a critically important way for overcoming periods of economic and social crisis, but is often criticised as inefficient and ineffective, giving raise to calls for new processes of reform. Because most public resources are raised through taxation from citizens and businesses, accountability and assurance are key in the democratic process, and auditing attempts to fulfil this public interest role. This in turn leaves public sector auditing under increasing public scrutiny and political pressure. Through a comparative analysis of the development of auditing practices in governments across the globe, Auditing Practices in Local Governments: An International Comparison provides a contemporary overview of public sector auditing practices at both local and state level. By focusing on countries which have experienced differing implementation processes, and which are characterised by different administrative and political cultures, the authors provide a comparative analysis of countries across the globe, including major European states, China, Australia, and New Zealand. Written by scholars and practitioners in the fields of public sector auditing, this first volume of Emerald Studies in Public Service Accounting and Accountability provides readers both researchers and practitioners with a thorough overview of international public sector auditing practice.

In recent years, the European Commission has attached increasing importance to the use of financial engineering instruments rather than traditional grant-based financing for the microcredit sector, considering these to be the most efficient option available. This book presents a study of capacity building and structural funds in public managing authorities for the microcredit sector. It presents two surveys to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the managing authorities' capacity building. The first survey investigates the authorities' need for and interests in capacity building activities, assessing the areas in which capacity building support is needed, and explores the different types of support offered. The second survey analyses the results of the microcredit and microfinance programming activity, investigating its target groups and other operational features. It examines the key monitoring and reporting issues involved in this activity, before analysing the regulatory framework of the microcredit and microfinance sector. This book presents an in-depth analysis of structural funds and their management by policy-makers in the European convergence regions. It explores the interests of managing authorities, microcredit institutions, operators and other financial intermediaries involved in microcredit programming activities, and offers some core strategic and operational recommendations for the use of structural funds in the microcredit sector.

This book offers a comprehensive guide to modern day taxation issues. It presents a thorough overview of many of the crucial aspects of applied taxation and current tax systems, and presents evidence that supports taxation as an important policy issue requiring immediate address globally. Contributions seek to address the core question of how to design a tax policy mix that can serve primarily efficiency, growth and possibly equity goals at a time where fiscal spending, for many economies, is not a viable option. Chapters provide a historical perspective on taxation, then go on to cover aspects of the modern theory of optimal taxation and tax design and provide valuable international perspectives on current tax practices and much required tax reforms. Empirical analysis on taxation and related economic data help the readers to understand how data-based observations and results are linked to the theory of taxation, and more importantly economic growth, before offering appropriate policy prescriptions. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in learning more about taxation and why it matters today in the global economy.

"Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 10, Fiscal Policy, Inequality and Welfare" contains ten papers, both theoretical and applied, on tax progressivity and tax and transfer equity. Theory topics covered include consumption tax equity, alternative definitions of tax progressivity, horizontal equity and reranking. The applied work includes studies of Australia's consumption taxes, Israel's national insurance tax system, Mexican transfer system, Canadian tax equity, trends in US tax and transfer progressivity and a study of the impact of the repeal of the US marriage tax penalty.

Debt and Development in Small Island Developing States draws on the expertise of established researchers and public officials from within the SIDS community to answer the following pressing questions related to sustainability, debt accumulation, and prospects for future growth.

This book widens the current debate on security privatization by examining how and why an increasing number of private actors beyond private military and security companies (PMSCs) have come to perform various security related functions. While PMSCs provide security for profit, most other private sector stakeholders make a profit by selling goods and services that were not originally connected with security in the traditional sense. However, due to the continuous introduction of new legal and technical regulations by public authorities, many non-security-related private businesses now have to perform at least some security functions. This volume offers new insights into security practices of non-security-related private businesses and their impact on security governance. The contributions extend beyond the conceptual and theoretical arguments in the existing body of literature to offer a range of original case studies on the specific roles of non-security-related private companies of all sizes, from all areas of business and from different geographic regions.

In an era of rapid and extensive economic reform, what is the appropriate role for fiscal policy? Is there a residual role of government after socialism and dirigisme? Following Macroeconomic Dimensions of Public Finance, this is the second volume of essays in honour of Vito Tanzi. It focuses on the importance of fiscal policy on the wholesale economic reforms that are sweeping the advanced, less developed and formerly communist countries. Issues analysed include: the role of fiscal and budgetary policies in the process of reform; the impact of privatization on the exchequer and the dilemmas for social policy in times of fiscal austerity; the paradox of post-socialism and post-dirigisme that an efficient and harmonic move to a decontrolled, liberal market economy involves active state intervention; and the methodological aspects relating to the proper assessment of selected fiscal policy mechanisms. This collection of essays will contribute to understanding the channels and transmission mechanisms of fiscal policies in the context of major economic reforms.

The Financial Analyst's Guide to Monetary Policy approaches monetary policy in a straightforward manner. In each chapter, a particular monetary policy problem is addressed and analyzed. Then it considers the practical implications and strategies that are important to the business executives, financial analysts, portfolio managers, and investors in general.

Citizens' participation, especially participatory budgeting, has spread in both Asia and Europe, and has been a symbol of democratic renewal. These transformations are already very visible in Europe, where more than 200 municipalities have adopted participatory budgeting. By contrast, in some Asian democracies, such as Japan or South Korea, it has considerably enlarged the agenda of citizen participation, integrating new forms such as taxpayers' budgets. In other countries, especially in China, participatory budgeting represents some adaptations of opening and transparency. With a global cast of authors, this study provides an overview of the impact of these devices, such as improving the modernisation of public administration or improving the contact between citizens and politicians, and documents the latest developments of citizen participation in both continents.

Examining various methods of debt management used in the US., Handbook of Debt Management, provides a comprehensive analysis of securities offered for sale by municipalities, states, and the federal government. The book covers laws regarding municipal bonds, the economic choice between debt and taxes and the tax-exempt status of municipal bond owners, capital budgeting, including state and local government practices, developing governmental and intergovernmental debt policies, pay-as-you-go with debt financing for capital projects, US Internal Revenue Service regulations on arbitrage in state and local government debt proceeds investment, US treasury auctions, and more.

This book provides quantitative evidence on the issues in fiscal and monetary policies in Mongolia and presents necessary policy recommendations for policymakers and academic circles. Mongolia belongs to a natural resource-based, transition economy and thus has faced the risk of the so-called resource curse-including the "Dutch Disease" and immaturity in market-based systems, particularly in financial markets. Consequently, reformations of resource allocation and policy governance in fiscal and monetary fields have been required. So far, however, there have been only a very limited number of quantitative studies in the Mongolian economy among the vast literature of Asian studies. This book applies scientific approaches to address fiscal and monetary issues, such as data-oriented and econometric methods (a structural vector auto-regression model, a spatial econometric model, and panel estimation with fixed effects, among others). In this manner, the book enriches empirical evidence in academic literature and also contributes to evidence-based policymaking. All the authors are young leaders of government officials in the Ministry of Finance, Financial Regulatory Commission, and National Statistics Office in Mongolia, who have been trained in academic research methodologies at Saitama University, Japan, on JICA-JDS scholarships. Thus, academic researchers and policymakers will be prominent members of the target audience for this work.

No single system of development can accommodate all variations of the economic, social and political environments in developing economies. The authors of this book analyse the changing role of the public sector in promoting socioeconomic development. They concentrate their study on the three major issues of macroeconomic management in development planning: market mechanisms, financial management and enterprise management, and the transfer and development of technology. Planning practitioners and scholars and students of economic development should find this book provides important theoretical insights, as well as the experiences of various countries in managing their economic progress.

This book analyzes the effects of the recent crisis and evaluates potential solutions to the gridlock that is currently dominating the Eurozone and the European Union, concerning both the monetary policy and the budgetary and fiscal policy. The timely study highlights the main challenges that European political leaders will face in the months to come. Furthermore, its interdisciplinary approach embraces economic, financial and legal perspectives, so as to ensure the global coherence and comprehensiveness of its content. The contributors to this volume are prominent experts from the areas of Economics, Finance, Law, and Political Science, offering readers a multifaceted view of the topics discussed.

The 27 articles reprinted in this volume are among Peter Mieszkowski's most important contributions to public, urban and regional economics. Several of these pieces concern income distribution theory and policies for promoting equality in wages, housing and education.The first part of this book includes studies of labour markets, tax incidence and the distributive effects of trade unions and wage subsidies. Two important conclusions presented in these papers concern the local property tax: it is a tax on capital and it results in under-provision of local public goods. The second and third parts of the book address, respectively, the decentralization of cities and and tax reform. Issues discussed include: racial discrimination in housing markets, the design of land use regulation, the negative income tax, consumption taxes, and tax reform in transition countries, particularly Eastern European countries. These outstanding essays bring together, in an accessible form, the work of one of the most important scholars in the field of public finance and urban economics.

The original theory of capital cost and capital structure put forward by Nobel Prize Winners Modigliani and Miller has since been modified by many authors, and this book discusses some of them. The book's authors have created general theory of capital cost and capital structure - the Brusov-Filatova-Orekhova (BFO) theory, which generalizes the Modigliani-Miller theory to encompass companies of an arbitrary age (and arbitrary lifetime). Despite the availability of this more general theory, the classical Modigliani-Miller theory is still widely used in practice. In this book, the authors for the first time generalize it for cases of practical relevance: for the case of variable profit; for the case of advance tax-on-profit payments and interest on debt payments; for the case of several tax-on-profit and interest on debt payments per period; and for the combination of all three effects. These generalizations lead to valuable theoretical results as well as significantly widen of practical application this theory in practice and increase of the quality of finance management of the company. As well, the book investigates the applications of said results in corporate finance, investments, taxation and ratings, where employing a generalized Modigliani-Miller theory can be very fruitful.

The Asian-Pacific countries as well as India and Russia offer multinational companies all the benefits of booming economies in a world of recession. However, the investor must be aware of the tax regime under which he will operate. This survey presents the rates, definitions of taxable income and the incentives available in a complete, yet concise form. It goes on to review tax minimisation strategies and concludes with a comparison of the overall tax burdens for investors in each country derived from the Devereux/Griffith formulae - a methodology well known within the EU, but applied to this region for the first time.

Economic growth and development critically depends on the quality of infrastructure. Each aspect of the economy and its infrastructure are linked systemically. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly being promoted as the solution to the shortfall in financing needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Public-private partnerships enable the public entity to utilize the expertise and efficiencies of the private sector to deliver services and facilities that traditionally have been delivered by the public sector, either through public sector employees or by traditional procurement methods. To be beneficial to all stakeholders, a PPP project requires careful planning, implementation, and strong governance. This book breaks down the steps involved and the traps to circumvent. Despite its globally growing importance, project finance has been somewhat underrepresented in research. This book analyzes project finance from an interdisciplinary perspective-finance, management, and international business-and includes international laws of arbitrage and perspectives of international financial institutions as never endeavored by any previous research projects. The book also includes case studies assessing the relevance of private-public partnerships by comparing the country expectations and the real outcomes. The gap between expectations and results does not necessarily mean that significant progress has not been made. To the contrary, the book suggests that some of the original targets set may have been unrealistic, and that the requisite financial resources-or the financial sector policies that could have generated those resources-may have been lacking.

In this book, an expert in the field explains why the United States is the world's largest debtor nation and how America's relationship to creditor states is of growing economic, diplomatic, and even national security concern. Foreign countries are not merely investing in U.S. corporations but are purchasing them outright: Abu Dhabi bought Citigroup securities, Kuwait purchased a large block Merrill Lynch stock, and China bought Morgan Stanley's convertible securities-and this happened before the September 2008 meltdown of Wall Street. The means by which wealthy foreign states make these purchases are sovereign wealth funds, their surplus capital that they are seeking to invest in order to generate the greatest return. Currently, the largest sovereign wealth funds are held by the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is part), Norway, Singapore, Kuwait, and the People's Republic of China; Qatar and Libya are also in the top ten. The United States has no such fund (although the state of Alaska does). This book takes a close look at China's and Norway's sovereign wealth funds to explain how they work. The author also uses domestic examples (Harvard's endowment, the California's state employees' retirement fund) to propose how the United States could create a sovereign wealth fund, speculating that such a fund could solve the looming Social Security funds shortfall. Most important, the book elucidates the national security aspects of not having an American sovereign wealth fund when so many other nations-both friend and foe-have them.

This book examines how macro-fiscal policy can lead to gender-aware human development in an emerging economy like India, with special reference to gender budgeting. Integrating gender lens in macro-fiscal policies has been widely recognized in international and national policy making and budgeting. The book highlights the gender diagnosis-the measurement issues relate to construction of gender outcome variables; the statistical invisibility of unpaid care economy sector and how deficiency in public infrastructure can accentuate the private costs; the analytical link between gender outcome variables and macro-fiscal policy frameworks; the role and impact of fiscal transfers on gender equality outcomes at subnational levels; time series of gender budgets in India across sectors and its fiscal marksmanship; gender disaggregated public expenditure benefit incidence analysis to understand the distributional impacts of public spending on women across income quintiles and suggest policy alternatives. The book uses unique database-time use survey data and the disaggregated demand for grants, expenditure budgets using gender lens. The book employs case study, simple statistical tools for the analysis and econometric methodology.

This book introduces recent developments in both theoretical and empirical analyses of local public economics. Theories of those economics as well as empirical analyses have been developed dramatically in various directions in recent years. One direction has been to reflect real economic circumstances, especially in Japan. In the early 2000s, Japan experienced the so-called great merger (or consolidation) of municipalities in the Heisei era (1999 through the present), with the number of municipalities shrinking from 3,232 to 1,821 for increasing administrative and financial efficiency. This phenomenon is mainly due to a drastic change in demography in Japan: the dimishing birthrate and aging population. Following the consolidation, regional coordination has been undertaken to raise overall administrative and financial efficiency. In sum, various types of public policies for tackling the decreasing birthrate and aging population have been carried out. Urban sprawl and the timing of municipal mergers are dealt with from a broad point of view, and public child care services and tax competition are investigated from a policy standpoint. Another direction has been to incorporate new ideas for forming theoretical frameworks for local public finance, most of which have been based on static situations. In the recent trend toward globalization, local governments have attended not only to the welfare of residents but also to the interests of regional economic development. In addition, decision making by local governments has tended to be affected by political activities. Thus, the endogenous growth setting and lobbying activities for the activities of local governments are discussed in the book. With these new directions for analyses, the author tackles the topics of tax competition, cross-border shopping, local provision of public goods, and soft budgets, thus covering a broad range of aspects of local public finance.