This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are...

This highly original book represents a major advance in the use of patents to compare countries' technological competitiveness. It tabulates and analyses 280,000 United States patents from countries across the world over a ten year period. Specifically, these patents were granted to...

This critical and thought-provoking book explores the causes and consequences of Europe's failed political and economic institutions. Europe's recession has created new challenges as market turmoil has shaken the foundations of the twin pillars of the new drive for European...

Examining the taxation and regulation of banks, this book highlights the views of practitioners, tax experts, policy makers and academics on the appropriateness and effectiveness of bank taxation in the light of the financial crisis. It covers the topical issues of whether the EU should...

Financing Decentralized Expenditures presents new original research papers on the structure of intergovernmental fiscal relations in virtually all types of countries and the design and implementation of transfer mechanisms between different levels of government. In developing, transition, and...

This research collection illustrates the wide range of methodologies and methods available for the evaluation of public programs. All these methods address the benefits of the programs and most compare the benefits to costs, but the types of benefits and their measures vary greatly across the...

Greening the Budget regards the fundamental cause of environmental degradation as government and market failure and proposes the use of budgets as an instrument of environmental policy to rectify this problem. The book focuses on the elements of the public budget which currently affect the...

Money, distribution and economic policy takes issue with the inappropriate treatment of money, effective demand and distribution issues in modern mainstream macroeconomics. It presents contributions which are critical of modern orthodoxy and which explore alternative approaches to macroeconomics...

This book argues that active labour market policies are necessary to improve the position of the unemployed but have so far performed relatively poorly. The contributing authors seek ways to improve active labour market policy and consider three means of doing so: improving the quality by better...