The Zondervan 2010 Minister's Tax and Financial Guide is the most accessible, easy-to-follow workbook of its kind, explaining complex tax concerns in plain language. For 2010, this guide includes a line-by-line explanation of the 1040 Form as well as information on recent changes in the tax code, sound retirement planning helps, compensation planning guidance, and maximizing business expense reimbursements.
This series introduces the core areas of chemical science, covering important concepts in an easy, accessible style. Each title contains a number of experiments and demonstrations, approached through the process of problem, hypothesis, experiment and conclusion. All the books support the QCA schemes of work and contain: definitions of important terms and explanations of key concepts; formulae and word equations; and the periodic table with explanatory notes. This title explores the concepts of the states of matter.
September 1996 How institutional arrangements affect incentives governing the size, allocation, and use of budgetary resources and improve transparency and accountability -- binding key players to particular fiscal outcomes and making it costly for them to misbehave. Campos and Pradhan examine how institutional arrangements affect incentives that govern the size, allocation, and use of budgetary resources. They use a diagnostic questionnaire designed to elicit the relative strengths and weaknesses of specific systems in terms of instilling fiscal discipline, strategically assigning spending priorities, and making the best use of limited resources. In applying their methodology to a sample of seven countries (Australia, Ghana, Indonesia, Malawi, New Zealand, Thailand, and Uganda), they also examine how donor assistance affects expenditure outcomes. They first compare the far-reaching reforms introduced in Australia and New Zealand, two countries at the cutting edge of institutional reform. In New Zealand, reform focused on achieving general fiscal discipline and technical efficiency (getting the best output at the least cost). In Australia, reform focused on strategic priorities and a shift from central to line agencies to identify savings within hard budget constraints. The two countries took dramatically different paths, but both sought to alter the incentives that affect the size, allocation, and use of resources, and to improve transparency and accountability, binding key players to particular fiscal outcomes and making it costly for them to misbehave. Systems in Indonesia and Thailand were reasonably effective in instilling fiscal discipline, but Indonesia seemed to be somewhat better at allocating resources to protect basic social services and alleviate poverty during periods of fiscal austerity. Thailand's overcentralized system did not capitalize on useful information from line agencies and lower levels of government. Donors play a central role in spending outcomes in the three African countries studied -- Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda. Donors provided incentives for short-term fiscal discipline, but the way they imposed spending cuts impeded the prioritizing of expenditures, and multiple donor projects fragmented the budget. Donor conditionality on the composition of expenditures, and donor-driven attempts to improve technical efficiency, were ineffective. Lack of transparency and accountability meant that rules were not enforced and budgets were often remade in an ad hoc, centralized way, so that the flow of resources to line agencies was unpredictable. This paper -- a product of the Public Economics Division, Policy Research Department -- is part of a larger effort in the department to improve the allocation and use of public expenditures. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project The Impact of Budgetary Institutions on Expenditure Outcomes (RPO 680-30).
Geothermal energy represents one of the key options for Indonesia to achieve a comprehensive approach to national energy development. The rapid increase in fossil-fuel based energy consumption, which is subject to volatility in the world oil market, is the main challenge facing the country's energy supply. This study documents key issues that have constrained the development of geothermal power in Indonesia, including tariffs, tendering processes, financial considerations, permitting, and interagency coordination. It also makes recommendations to unlock the potential of the sector, including a new tariff regime, improvements to the tendering process, renegotiation of power purchase agreements, and innovative modes of financing.
Twenty Years of Education Transformation in Gauteng 1994 to 2014: An Independent Review presents a collection of 15 important essays on different aspects of education in Gauteng since the advent of democracy in 1994. These essays talk to what a provincial education department does and how and why it does these things - whether it be about policy, resourcing or implementing projects. Each essay is written by one or more specialist in the relevant focus area. The book is written to be accessible to the general reader as well as being informative and an essential resource for the specialist reader. It sheds light on aspects of how a provincial department operates and why and with what consequences certain decisions have been made in education over the last 20 turbulent years, both nationally and provincially. There has been no attempt to fit the book's chapters into a particular ideological or educational paradigm, and as a result the reader will find differing views on various aspects of the Gauteng Department of Education's present and past. We leave the reader to decide to what extent the GDE has fulfilled its educational mandate over the last 20 years.
New technologies present governments with opportunities and challenges in a range of key policy areas such as employment, competitiveness, equity, and sustainability. A consensus is that the national government can play an important role in stimulating innovation. This report explores policy options to facilitate Indonesia's technological transformation and unlock its economic growth potential.
This book examines clean energy investment needs and financing gaps in Asia and the Pacific and discusses how they are being addressed. It reviews existing financing options and approaches for clean energy, and includes country examples of how these have been applied. Innovative solutions for mobilizing private finance and managing risks associated with clean energy investments are also discussed. The book is the first of two volumes that look at various approaches and instruments that have been tried, tested, and utilized to scale up clean energy development in the region.
