Financial Report of the United States Government
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
Costs of Democracy
Author: Devesh Kapur
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-06-13
Total Pages: 383
ISBN-13: 019909313X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of the most troubling critiques of contemporary democracy is the inability of representative governments to regulate the deluge of money in politics. If it is impossible to conceive of democracies without elections, it is equally impractical to imagine elections without money. Costs of Democracy is an exhaustive, ground-breaking study of money in Indian politics that opens readers’ eyes to the opaque and enigmatic ways in which money flows through the political veins of the world’s largest democracy. Through original, in-depth investigation—drawing from extensive fieldwork on political campaigns, pioneering surveys, and innovative data analysis—the contributors in this volume uncover the institutional and regulatory contexts governing the torrent of money in politics; the sources of political finance; the reasons for such large spending; and how money flows, influences, and interacts with different tiers of government. The book raises uncomfortable questions about whether the flood of money risks washing away electoral democracy itself.
Why Nations Fail
Author: Daron Acemoglu
Publisher: Currency
Published: 2013-09-17
Total Pages: 546
ISBN-13: 0307719227
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBrilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.
Public Financial Management and Its Emerging Architecture
Author: Mr. M. Cangiano
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Published: 2013-04-05
Total Pages: 468
ISBN-13: 1475512198
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed an influx of innovations and reforms in public financial management. The current wave of reforms is markedly different from those in the past, owing to the sheer number of innovations, their widespread adoption, and the sense that they add up to a fundamental change in the way governments manage public money. This book takes stock of the most important innovations that have emerged over the past two decades, including fiscal responsibility legislation, fiscal rules, medium-term budget frameworks, fiscal councils, fiscal risk management techniques, performance budgeting, and accrual reporting and accounting. Not merely a handbook or manual describing practices in the field, the volume instead poses critical questions about innovations; the issues and challenges that have appeared along the way, including those associated with the global economic crisis; and how the ground can be prepared for the next generation of public financial management reforms. Watch Video of Book Launch
Debt and Entanglements Between the Wars
Author: Mr.Thomas J Sargent
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Published: 2019-11-08
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 1513511793
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWorld War I created a set of forces that affected the political arrangements and economies of all the countries involved. This period in global economic history between World War I and II offers rich material for studying international monetary and sovereign debt policies. Debt and Entanglements between the Wars focuses on the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, four countries in the British Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland), France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, offering unique insights into how political and economic interests influenced alliances, defaults, and the unwinding of debts. The narratives presented show how the absence of effective international collaboration and resolution mechanisms inflicted damage on the global economy, with disastrous consequences.
The Political Economy of Government Auditing
Author: Carlos Santiso
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-05-18
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 1134021526
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Political Economy of Government Auditing addresses the elusive quest for greater transparency and accountability in the management of public finances in emerging economies; and, more specifically, it examines the contribution of autonomous audit agencies (AAAs) to the fight against corruption and waste. Whilst the role of audit agencies in curbing corruption is increasingly acknowledged, there exists little comparative work on their institutional effectiveness. Addressing the performance of AAAs in emerging economies, Carlos Santiso pursues a political economy perspective that addresses the context in which audit agencies are embedded, and the governance factors that make them work or fail. Here, the cases of Argentina, Brazil and Chile are examined, as they illustrate the three – parliamentary, court and independent – models of AAAs in modern states, and their three distinct trajectories of reform, or lack of reform. Beyond Latin America, considerations on the reform of government auditing in other countries, developed and developing are also taken up as, it is argued, while institutional arrangements for government auditing matter, political factors ultimately determine the effectiveness of AAAs. Reforming AAAs, it is concluded, must consider the trajectory of state building, the role of law in public administration and the quality of governance. An important contribution to the comparative study of governance institutions, and especially those tasked with overseeing the budget and curbing corruption, The Political Economy of Government Auditing will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, development studies, administrative law, and public finance; as well as to development practitioners and policy-makers in developing countries, donor governments and international institutions.
Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014
Author: Mrs.Sage De Clerck
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Published: 2015-03-10
Total Pages: 470
ISBN-13: 1498379214
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 2007–09 international financial crisis underscored the importance of reliable and timely statistics on the general government and public sectors. Government finance statistics are a basis for fiscal analysis and they play a vital role in developing and monitoring sound fiscal programs and in conducting surveillance of economic policies. The Government Finance Statistics Manual 2014 represents a major step forward in clarifying the standards for compiling and presenting fiscal statistics and strengthens the worldwide effort to improve public sector reporting and transparency.
Globalizing Patient Capital
Author: Stephen B. Kaplan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-07-15
Total Pages: 411
ISBN-13: 110718231X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamines China's overseas financial investments in the developing world, and its impact on national economic policymaking in the Americas.
Making Politics Work for Development
Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Published: 2016-07-14
Total Pages: 350
ISBN-13: 1464807744
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGovernments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
Affluence and Influence
Author: Martin Gilens
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-07-22
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 0691153973
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy policymaking in the United States privileges the rich over the poor Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy—but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections. With sharp analysis and an impressive range of data, Martin Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings are staggering: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans' preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not. Gilens shows that representational inequality is spread widely across different policy domains and time periods. Yet Gilens also shows that under specific circumstances the preferences of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, the poor, do seem to matter. In particular, impending elections—especially presidential elections—and an even partisan division in Congress mitigate representational inequality and boost responsiveness to the preferences of the broader public. At a time when economic and political inequality in the United States only continues to rise, Affluence and Influence raises important questions about whether American democracy is truly responding to the needs of all its citizens.
