Public finance is crucial to a country's economic growth, yet successful reform of public finances has been rare. Ethiopia is an example of a country that undertook comprehensive reform of its core financial systems, independent of the IMF and the World Bank, and successfully transformed itself into one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. With Ethiopia's twelve-year reform as its guiding case study, this book presents new analytical frameworks to help governments develop better financial reforms. It shows in detail how four core financial systems-budgeting, accounting, planning, and financial information systems-can be reformed. One of the principal findings presented is that governments must establish basic public financial administration before moving to more sophisticated public financial management. Other key findings include the identification of four strategies of reform (recognize, improve, change, and sustain), the centrality of ongoing learning to the process of reform, and the importance of government ownership of reform. This book will be of interest to researchers and policymakers concerned with public finance, developmental economics, and African studies.

Public finance is crucial to a country's economic growth, yet successful reform of public finances has been rare. Ethiopia is an example of a country that undertook comprehensive reform of its core financial systems, independent of the IMF and the World Bank, and successfully transformed itself into one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. With Ethiopia's twelve-year reform as its guiding case study, this book presents new analytical frameworks to help governments develop better financial reforms. It shows in detail how four core financial systems-budgeting, accounting, planning, and financial information systems-can be reformed. One of the principal findings presented is that governments must establish basic public financial administration before moving to more sophisticated public financial management. Other key findings include the identification of four strategies of reform (recognize, improve, change, and sustain), the centrality of ongoing learning to the process of reform, and the importance of government ownership of reform. This book will be of interest to researchers and policymakers concerned with public finance, developmental economics, and African studies.

Seven decades of the intense Steelers-Browns rivalry.Football historians regard the games between the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers as the basis for one of the greatest rivalries in NFL history. Authors Richard Peterson and Stephen Peterson, in telling the engaging story of these teams who play only a two-hour drive along the turnpike from each other, explore the reasons behind this intense rivalry and the details of its ups and downs for each team and its fans. The early rivalry was a tale of Browns dominance and Steelers ineptitude. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Browns-led by Hall of Famers ranging from Otto Graham and Marion Motley in the 1950s to Jim Brown, Bobby Mitchell, and Leroy Kelly in the 1960s-won 32 of the first 40 games played against the Steelers. In the 1970s, the Steelers-led by Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and the Steel Curtain-finally turned things around. When the AFL and NFL merged in 1970, Art Rooney agreed to move the Steelers only if the Browns also moved into the AFC and played in the same division so that their rivalry would be preserved. Despite the fierce rivalry, these cities and their fans have much in common, most notably the working-class nature of the Steeler Nation and the Dawg Pound and their passion, over the decades, for their football teams. Many fans are able to regularly making the 130-mile trip to watch the games. From the first game on October 7, 1950, where Cleveland defeated the Steelers 30-17, to last season's infamous helmet incident with Mason Rudolph and Myles Garrett, the rivalry remains as intense as ever.

This book challenges the conventional idea of what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of extended urban fabrics - the missing urbanism - in the new global cities developed today, it argues that these cities are merely statistical accumulations of density that lack the positive attributes of a genuine urban condition. Cities as urban places cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of an architecture that is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets, and engaged in the structure of urban blocks to form a complex field pattern of interactive solids and voids. Broad in scope, the book explores the nature of the fundamental relationship between architecture and urbanism as one of spatial formation. As an independently designed entity, the city forms the ordering framework in which architecture is partially subordinated to the mutual sustainability of the overall urban fabric. If a new urban architecture is to be an integral constituent of public place making, it must be composed using a radically different paradigm of positive, figurally constructed 'space' rather than the indefinite background of 'anti-space' as exemplified in the chapter on Mies van der Rohe's architectural quest for the ineffable modern void. These two different spatial models are explored in depth in the eponymous article, 'Space and Anti Space,' first published in the Harvard Architectural Review in 1980, which forms the core of the book and postulates that the underlying attitudes toward spatial formation, at both domestic and urban scales, determine our ability to shape place and human experience. In a series of essays, articles and urban projects extensively illustrated by plans, analytic diagrams, and dramatic images, this book makes a visual and verbal argument for the steps that need to be taken to re-urbanise the city in order to achieve an urbanity consisting of multiple discrete places that depend on the essential concept of contained geometrical space. These spatial ideas are illustrated in this book in three proposals: for Rome, in 'Roma Interrotta,' 1979; Paris, the 'Consultation Internationale pour L'Amenagement du Quartier des Halles,' 1980; and New York in the 'World Trade Center Site Innovative Design Study,' 2002.

In the deciding game of the 1992 National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves, the Pittsburgh Pirates suffered the most dramatic and devastating loss in team history when former Pirate Sid Bream slid home with the winning run. Bream's infamous slide ended the last game played by Barry Bonds in a Pirates uniform and sent the franchise reeling into a record twenty-season losing streak. The Slide tells the story of the myriad events, beginning with the aftermath of the 1979 World Series, which led to the fated 1992 championship game and beyond. It describes the city's near loss of the team in 1985 and the major influence of Syd Thrift and Jim Leyland in developing a dysfunctional team into a division champion. The book gives detailed accounts of the 1990, 1991, and 1992 division championship seasons, the critical role played by Kevin McClatchy in saving the franchise in 1996, and summarizes the twenty losing seasons before the Pirates finally broke the curse of "the slide" in 2013, with their first playoff appearance since 1992.