Fixing Failed States
Author: Ashraf Ghani
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 0195398610
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSocial science.
Posts
Fixing Fragile States
Author: Seth D. Kaplan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2008-06-30
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 0275998290
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFragile states are a menace. Their lawless environments spread instability across borders, provide havens for terrorists, threaten access to natural resources, and consign millions of people to poverty. But Western attempts to reform these benighted places have rarely made things better. Kaplan argues that to avoid revisiting the carnage and catastrophes seen in places like Iraq, Bosnia, and the Congo, the West needs to rethink its ideas on fragile states and start helping their peoples build governments and states that actually fit the local landscape. Fixing Fragile States lays bare the fatal flaws in current policies and explains why the only way to give these places a chance at peace and prosperity is to rethink how development really works. Flawed governance systems, not corrupt bureaucrats or armed militias, are the cancers that devour weak states. The cure, therefore, is not to send more aid or more peacekeepers but to redesign political, economic, and legal structures-to refashion them so they can leverage local traditions, overcome political fragmentation, expand governance capacities, and catalyze corporate investment. After dissecting the reasons why some states prosper and others sink into poverty and violence, Fixing Fragile States visits seven deeply dysfunctional places—including Pakistan, Bolivia, West Africa, and Syria—and explains how even the most desperate of them can be transformed.
The Metropolitan Revolution
Author: Bruce Katz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2013-06-19
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 0815721528
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAcross the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders – mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists – are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a priority, and equipping workers with the skills they need. In The Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight success stories and the people behind them. · New York City: Efforts are under way to diversify the city's vast economy · Portland: Is selling the "sustainability" solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world · Northeast Ohio: Groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes · Houston: Modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder · Miami: Innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations · Denver and Los Angeles: Leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises · Boston and Detroit: Innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century The lessons in this book can help other cities meet their challenges. Change is happening, and every community in the country can benefit. Change happens where we live, and if leaders won't do it, citizens should demand it. The Metropolitan Revolution was the 2013 Foreword Reviews Bronze winner for Political Science.
The Ideology of Failed States
Author: Susan L. Woodward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-04-03
Total Pages: 327
ISBN-13: 1107176425
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContests to reorganize the international system after the Cold War agree on the security threat of failed states: this book asks why.
Fixing Haiti
Author: Jorge Heine
Publisher: United Nations University Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9280811975
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHaiti may well be the only country in the Americas with a last name. References to the land of the "black Jacobins" are almost always followed by the phrase "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere". To that dubious distinction, on 12 January 2010 Haiti added another, when it was hit by the most devastating natural disaster in the Americas, a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake. More than 220,000 people lost their lives and much of its vibrant capital, Port-au-Prince, was reduced to rubble. Since 2004, the United Nations has been in Haiti through MINUSTAH, in an ambitious attempt to help Haiti raise itself by its bootstraps. This effort has now acquired additional urgency. Is Haiti a failed state? Does it deserve a Marshall-plan-like program? What will it take to address the Haitian predicament? In this book, some of the world's leading experts on Haiti examine the challenges faced by the first black republic, the tasks undertaken by the UN, and the new role of hemispheric players like Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as that of Canada, France and the United States.
Fixer-Upper
Author: Jenny Schuetz
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2022-02-22
Total Pages: 119
ISBN-13: 081573929X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPractical ideas to provide affordable housing to more Americans Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about political divides and inequality in the United States. But these discussions too often miss one of the most important factors in the divisions among Americans: the fundamentally unequal nature of the nation’s housing systems. Financially well-off Americans can afford comfortable, stable homes in desirable communities. Millions of other Americans cannot. And this divide deepens other inequalities. Increasingly, important life outcomes—performance in school, employment, even life expectancy—are determined by where people live and the quality of homes they live in. Unequal housing systems didn’t just emerge from natural economic and social forces. Public policies enacted by federal, state, and local governments helped create and reinforce the bad housing outcomes endured by too many people. Taxes, zoning, institutional discrimination, and the location and quality of schools, roads, public transit, and other public services are among the policies that created inequalities in the nation’s housing patterns. Fixer-Upper is the first book assessing how the broad set of local, state, and national housing policies affect people and communities. It does more than describe how yesterday’s policies led to today’s problems. It proposes practical policy changes than can make stable, decent-quality housing more available and affordable for all Americans in all communities. Fixing systemic problems that arose over decades won’t be easy, in large part because millions of middle-class Americans benefit from the current system and feel threatened by potential changes. But Fixer-Upper suggests ideas for building political coalitions among diverse groups that share common interests in putting better housing within reach for more Americans, building a more equitable and healthy country.
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.
Why States Recover
Author: Greg Mills
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2015-01-03
Total Pages: 706
ISBN-13: 1849045402
DOWNLOAD EBOOKState failure takes many forms. Somalia offers one extreme. The country's prolonged civil war led to the collapse of central authority, with state control devolving to warlord-led factions that competed for the spoils of local commerce, political power, and international aid. Malawi, on the other hand, is at the other end of the scale. During President Bingu's second term in office, the country's economy collapsed as a result of poor policies and Bingu's brand of personal politics. On the surface, Malawi's economy seemed largely stable; underneath, however, the polity was fractured and the economy broken. In between these two extremes of state failure are all manner of examples, many of which Mills explores in the fascinating and profoundly personal Why States Recover. Throughout he returns to his key questions: how do countries recover? What roles should both insiders and outsiders play to aid that process? Drawing on research in more than thirty countries, and incorporating interviews with a dozen leaders, Mills examines state failure and identifies instances of recovery in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. For anyone interested in the reasons behind states' failure, and remedies to ensure future economic stability, it is important reading.
Understanding Influence
Author: Professor Sultan Barakat
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2014-09-28
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1472427572
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDespite the increasing volume of research on state building, the use and uptake of findings by those involved in policy-making remains largely under-examined. As such, the main themes running through this book relate to issues of research influence, use and uptake into policy. It grapples with problems associated with decision-making dynamics, knowledge management and the policy process and draws on concepts and analytical models developed within the public policy and research utilization literature, from linear models of instrumental use to the enlightenment function of research.
The Fix
Author: Jonathan Tepperman
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2016-09-20
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 110190299X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWe all know the bad news. Our economies are stagnant. Wages are flat and income inequality keeps rising. The Middle East is burning and extremism is spreading. Frightened voters are embracing populist outsiders and angry nationalists. And no wonder: we are living in an age of unprecedented, irreversible decline—or so we’re constantly being told. Jonathan Tepperman’s The Fix presents a very different picture. It identifies ten pervasive and seemingly impossible challenges—including immigration reform, economic stagnation, political gridlock, corruption, and Islamist extremism—and shows that, contrary to the general consensus, each has a solution, and not merely a hypothetical one. By taking a close look at overlooked success stories—from countries as diverse as Canada, Botswana, and Indonesia—Tepperman discovers practical advice for problem-solvers of all stripes, making a data-driven case for optimism in a time of crushing pessimism.
