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New York City has the largest council-sponsored Participatory Budgeting (PB) processes in North America. From its inception in Brazil, PB… was a process that empowered the least-advantaged members of the community by providing a way to propose budget allocations through voting. This book reports on a multi-methodological study of New York City’s participatory budgeting (PB) process from the perspective of a city resident over time. A participatory budgeting slogan purports that the initiative offers “real power” and “real money” to constituents at a local level. To critically examine such top-down assertions, and different than much that has been written about PB, this book researches and navigates its events the way a member of the community would see it. The study reveals a lack of transparency, manipulation by city agencies, the favorable treatment of insider proposed projects, and a failure to reveal the basis of project costs. It also finds that there is no singular participatory budgeting project in New York City. Instead, there are numerous participatory budget projects, as many as there are council members who engage in the practice. This book provides a ground-level view of these limitations and recommends substantial reform.
This book analyzes public debt from a political, historical, and global perspective. It demonstrates that public debt has been a… defining feature in the construction of modern states, a main driver in the history of capitalism, and a potent geopolitical force. From revolutionary crisis to empire and the rise and fall of a post-war world order, the problem of debt has never been the sole purview of closed economic circles. This book offers a key to understanding the centrality of public debt today by revealing that political problems of public debt have and will continue to need a political response. Today’s tendency to consider public debt as a source of fragility or economic inefficiency misses the fact that, since the eighteenth century, public debts and capital markets have on many occasions been used by states to enforce their sovereignty and build their institutions, especially in times of war. It is nonetheless striking to observe that certain solutions that were used in the past to smooth out public debt crises (inflation, default, cancellation, or capital controls) were left out of the political framing of the recent crisis, therefore revealing how the balance of power between bondholders, taxpayers, pensioners, and wage-earners has evolved over the past 40 years. Today, as the Covid-19 pandemic opens up a dramatic new crisis, reconnecting the history of capitalism and that of democracy seems one of the most urgent intellectual and political tasks of our time. This global political history of public debt is a contribution to this debate and will be of interest to financial, economic, and political historians and researchers. Chapters 13 and 19 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Innovation is often presented as being in the exclusive domain of the private sector. Yet despite widespread perceptions of public-sector… inefficiency, government agencies have much to teach us about how technological and social advances occur. Improving governance at the municipal level is critical to the future of the twenty-first-century city, from environmental sustainability to education, economic development, public health, and beyond. In this age of acceleration and massive migration of people into cities around the world, this book explains how innovation from within city agencies and administrations makes urban systems smarter and shapes life in New York City.Using a series of case studies, Smarter New York City describes the drivers and constraints behind urban innovation, including leadership and organization; networks and interagency collaboration; institutional context; technology and real-time data collection; responsiveness and decision making; and results and impact. Cases include residential organic-waste collection, an NYPD program that identifies the sound of gunshots in real time, and the Vision Zero attempt to end traffic casualties, among others. Challenging the usefulness of a tech-centric view of urban innovation, Smarter New York City brings together a multidisciplinary and integrated perspective to imagine new possibilities from within city agencies, with practical lessons for city officials, urban planners, policy makers, civil society, and potential private-sector partners.
Today, all it takes is one organizational misstep to sink a company's reputation. Social media can be a strict ethical… enforcer, with the power to convince thousands to boycott products and services. Executives are stuck on appeasing stakeholders—shareholders, employees, and consumers—but they ignore shapeholders, regulators, the media, and social and political activists who have no stake in a company but will work hard to curb what they see as bad business practices. And they do so at their own peril.In Shapeholders: Business Success in the Age of Activism, former congressman, Fortune 500 executive, and university president Mark Kennedy argues that shapeholders, as much as stakeholders, have significant power to determine a company's risks and opportunities, if not its survival. Many international, multi-billion-dollar corporations fail to anticipate activism, and they flounder on first contact. Kennedy zeroes in on the different languages that shapeholders and companies speak and their contrasting metrics for what constitutes acceptable business practice. Executives, he argues, must be visionaries who find profitable—and probable—collaborations to diffuse political tensions. Kennedy's decision matrix helps corporations align their business practices with shapeholder interests, anticipate their demands, and assess changing moral standards so that together they can plan a profitable route forward.
In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing, Harland Prechel examines how social structural arrangements that extended corporate property rights and increased managerial control… opened the door for misconduct and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had become by the end of the century, when the bank and energy sectors developed political strategies to participate in financial markets. His account adopts a multilevel approach that considers the political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded to answer two questions: how did banks and financial firms transition from being providers of capital to financial market actors? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market participants to engage in high-risk activities? After careful historical analysis, Prechel examines how organizational and political-legal arrangements contribute to current record-high income and wealth inequality, and considers societal preconditions for change.
"This is as good an analysis as you could wish to read." --The Financial TimesFrom bestselling author and NYU Business… School professor Scott Galloway comes a keenly insightful, urgent analysis of who stands to win and who's at risk to lose in a post-pandemic worldThe COVID-19 outbreak has turned bedrooms into offices, pitted young against old, and widened the gaps between rich and poor, red and blue, the mask wearers and the mask haters. Some businesses--like home exercise company Peloton, video conference software maker Zoom, and Amazon--woke up to find themselves crushed under an avalanche of consumer demand. Others--like the restaurant, travel, hospitality, and live entertainment industries--scrambled to escape obliteration.But as New York Times bestselling author Scott Galloway argues, the pandemic has not been a change agent so much as an accelerant of trends already well underway. In Post Corona, he outlines the contours of the crisis and the opportunities that lie ahead. Some businesses, like the powerful tech monopolies, will thrive as a result of the disruption. Other industries, like higher education, will struggle to maintain a value proposition that no longer makes sense when we can't stand shoulder to shoulder. And the pandemic has accelerated deeper trends in government and society, exposing a widening gap between our vision of America as a land of opportunity, and the troubling realities of our declining wellbeing.Combining his signature humor and brash style with sharp business insights and the occasional dose of righteous anger, Galloway offers both warning and hope in equal measure. As he writes, "Our commonwealth didn't just happen, it was shaped. We chose this path--no trend is permanent and can't be made worse or corrected."
Questo breve e-book è una versione ampliata dell'articolo "Privatizzazione in Pakistan" che l'autore ha scritto poco dopo il suo pensionamento… come Segretario Federale del Governo del Pakistan, Ministero delle Privatizzazioni nel 2012. Ha attirato molta attenzione e spinto a scrivere un libro completo sulla storia delle privatizzazioni in Pakistan e su altre questioni correlate, tra cui le prospettive e le sfide che dovrà affrontare a breve e medio termine.
State-owned enterprises make up roughly 10 percent of the world economy, yet they are woefully understudied. This handbook offers the… first synthesis of the topic since the 1980s and offers a comprehensive reference for a generation. The authors provide a detailed explanation of the theory that underpins the expansion of state-owned enterprises in the 21st century. Each chapter delivers an overview of current knowledge, as well as identifying issues and relevant debates for future research. The authors explain how state-owned enterprises are used in both developed and developing countries and offer an insight into complex and fascinating organizations such as the German municipal conglomerates or the multinational companies owned by states. New modes of governance and regulation have been invented to make sure they act in the public interest. This handbook brings together a wealth of international scholars, offering multiple theoretical perspectives to help shape a brave new world. It will be of interest to teachers and students of Economics, Public Administration and Business, academics, established researchers and PhD students seeking rigorous literature reviews on specific aspects of SOEs, as well as practitioners and decision makers in international organizations.
The current approach to resolving sovereign debt crises does not work: sovereign debt restructurings come too late and address too… little. Though unresolved debt crises impose enormous costs on societies, many recent restructurings have not been deep enough to provide the conditions for economic recovery (as illustrated by the Greek debt restructuring of 2012). And if the debtor decides not to accept the terms demanded by the creditors, finalizing a restructuring can be slowed by legal challenges (as illustrated by the recent case of Argentina, deemed as "the trial of the century").A fresh start for distressed debtors is a basic principle of a well-functioning market economy, yet there is no international bankruptcy framework for sovereign debts. While this problem is not new, the United Nations and the global community are now willing to do something about it. Providing guidance for those who intend to take up reform, this book assesses the relative merits of various debt-restructuring proposals, especially in relation to the main deficiencies of the current nonsystem. With contributions by leading academics and practitioners, Too Little, Too Late reflects the overwhelming consensus among specialists on the need to find workable solutions.
Reflecting the diverse and profound changes triggered by the latest wave of economic globalization, this book highlights various governance responses… at national, regional and global levels. The topics covered are wide-ranging and include economic history and development, European integration, exchange rate arrangements, industrial and labor economics, international cooperation and multilateralism, and public choice.The book is divided into three parts: The first part, which contains contributions by Barry Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau, is devoted to economic history. The second part examines open economy macroeconomics with a focus on Europe, including contributions by Jurgen von Hagen and Paul Krugman. The third part presents contributions to international political economy, and related interdisciplinary topics. This Festschrift is written in honor of Jorge Braga de Macedo, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics and a distinguished Portuguese academic whose work has an impressive global reach. The contributions, written by a selection of international authors, deal with his oeuvre covering the wide range of topics broached in this book, as his publication record amply attests.
A comprehensive, in-depth, and authoritative guide to China's financial system The Chinese economy is one of the most important in… the world, and its success is driven in large part by its financial system. Though closely scrutinized, this system is poorly understood and vastly different than those in the West. The Handbook of China’s Financial System will serve as a standard reference guide and invaluable resource to the workings of this critical institution.The handbook looks in depth at the central aspects of the system, including banking, bonds, the stock market, asset management, the pension system, and financial technology. Each chapter is written by leading experts in the field, and the contributors represent a unique mix of scholars and policymakers, many with firsthand knowledge of setting and carrying out Chinese financial policy. The first authoritative volume on China’s financial system, this handbook sheds new light on how it developed, how it works, and the prospects and direction of significant reforms to come.Contributors include Franklin Allen, Marlene Amstad, Kaiji Chen, Tuo Deng, Hanming Fang, Jin Feng, Tingting Ge, Kai Guo, Zhiguo He, Yiping Huang, Zhaojun Huang, Ningxin Jiang, Wenxi Jiang, Chang Liu, Jun Ma, Yanliang Mao, Fan Qi, Jun Qian, Chenyu Shan, Guofeng Sun, Xuan Tian, Chu Wang, Cong Wang, Tao Wang, Wei Xiong, Yi Xiong, Tao Zha, Bohui Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang, Ye Zhao, and Julie Lei Zhu.
The purpose of this book is to offer insights into the complex and often unclear context of public sector management,… providing a new theoretical and practical approach to the analysis and interpretation of these issues. The book is grounded in the awareness that the public sector has too often shown inefficiencies, despite the expensive measures taken, and from manifold perspectives such as the economic, social, organizational, and institutional ones, among others. It acknowledges the lack of behavioral, cultural, and context-oriented research in the field, thus proposing to innovate the debate and to expand the current understanding of which organizational features characterize modern public administrations, what factors influence the predominance of different models, with a special focus on the Italian setting, benefiting from a wholly comprehensive innovative methodological approach. The findings offer key implications for theory, practice, and policy-making, contending the importance of holistic approaches to the debate and abandoning pre-constituted schemes to put forth the relevance of behavioral models. It offers a key message: contextual-specific and cultural factors influencing individual behaviors are important and should better influence policy-making processes, towards "glocalization" in order to improve quality.
This book presents a synthesis of recent developments in axiomatic analyses of social welfare evaluation in social choice theory. It… covers three different contexts of social welfare evaluation, namely, social welfare evaluation within a generation, intergenerational social welfare evaluation involving infinitely many generations, and intergenerational social welfare evaluation with variable population sizes of generations. Analyzing these three different but related contexts of social welfare evaluation in a unified manner, the book places the emphasis on the close linkage between them and provides readers with new insight regarding the relationship between them. Evaluation criteria discussed in the book are firmly rooted in moral philosophy. Besides the axiomatic analyses of utilitarian and egalitarian evaluation criteria, newly developed results on compromised criteria between the utilitarian and egalitarian evaluation criteria are covered as well. The book is recommended to readers who seek an up-to-date integrated overview of a large and broad body of the literature on the axiomatic analysis of social welfare evaluation.
The book is a cross-section of the over all Italian development. Italy can be considered a microcosm that contains all… the imbalances and territorial differences that can be observed in the European macro-areas. Its north can now be considred integrated with the more developed European continental shelf. The Centre represents a local development in transition to a more visible technological change. The late south risks accumulating more socio-economic backwardness. For these reasons, we believe this volume is useful, with just a few pages presenting one of the most interesting cases of local industrial development, outside the mainstream of the industrial economy which saw in Fordism and Taylorism the best way for industrializaion. Here, on the contrary, it is argued that big fish cannot always consume the smallest one that flickers faster and its flexibility, that has social roots, can be an advantage in global markets. Technology appears to be the key to the future. Please note: This title is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Maldives or Bhutan)
This book delves into the many innovative changes that the financial industry has undergone in recent years. The authors investigate… these developments in a holistic manner and from a wide range of perspectives: both public and private, business and consumer, regulators and supervisors. Initially, they set the framework of their analysis by discussing innovation cycles in financial services. Thereafter, they tackle the issue of financial innovations and their consequences for financial stability. They then review the new approaches to financial consumers’ protection, which emerged in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The authors underline the fact that this new approach is heavily influenced by the recent innovative drive in the financial industry. Next, they switch their attention to the public sector, examining the innovative processes in monetary policy and central banks, structural innovations in the supervisory models and systems, and they assess some specific supervisory challenges regarding blockchain and the application of mathematics in the supervisory capacity. Additionally, the book examines a range of issues related to the private sector, such as recent developments regarding risk transferring mechanisms on the financial market, artificial intelligence and natural language processing for regulatory filings, the development of process management in insurance companies and other innovative products on the market. Finally, Innovation in Financial Services discusses how the digital transformation of the financial system impacts the interaction between the public and private sectors. The book is intended for graduate and postgraduate level students, researchers, public sector officers, as well as financial sector practitioners.
An urgent and witty manifesto, Monopolies Suck shows how monopoly power is harming everyday Americans and practical ways we can… all fight back.Something&’s not right. No matter how hard you work, life seems to only get harder. When your expenses keep going up but your income stays flat, when you&’re price-gouged buying medicine for your child&’s life-threatening allergy, when you live in a hyped-up state of fear and anxiety, monopoly power is playing a key role. In Monopolies Suck, antitrust expert and director at the Open Markets Institute, Sally Hubbard, shows us the seven ways big corporations rule our lives—and what must be done to stop them. Throughout history, monopolists who controlled entire industries like railroads and oil were aptly called &“robber barons&” because they extracted wealth from everyone else—and today&’s monopolies are no different. By charging high prices, skirting taxes, and reducing our pay and economic opportunities, they are not only stealing our money, but also robbing us of innovation and choice, as market dominance prevents new companies from challenging them. They&’re robbing us of the ability to take care of our sick, a healthy food supply, and a habitable planet by using business practices that deplete rather than generate. They&’re a threat to our private lives, fair elections, a robust press, and ultimately, the American Dream that so many of us are striving for. In this slim, accessible guide, Sally Hubbard gives us an easy-to-understand overview of the history of monopolies and antitrust law, and urges us to use our voices, votes, and wallets to protest monopoly power. Emboldened by the previous century when we successfully broke up monopoly power in the US, we have the tools to dismantle corporate power again today—before their lobbying threatens to undermine our economy and democracy for generations to come.
This is the inside story of the US–China trade war, how relations between these superpowers unraveled, darkening prospects for global… peace and prosperity, as told by two Wall Street Journal reporters, one based in Washington, D.C., the other in Beijing, who have had more access to the decision makers in the White House and in China’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound than anyone else.The trade battle between China and the U.S. didn’t start with Trump and won’t end with him, argue Bob Davis and Lingling Wei. The two countries have a long and fraught political and economic history which has become more contentious over the past three years—an escalation that has negatively impacted both countries' economies and the world at large—and holds the potential for even more uncertainty and disruption. How did this stand-off happen? How much are U.S. presidents and officials who haven't effectively confronted or negotiated with China to blame? What role have Chinese leaders, and U.S. business leaders who for decades acted as Beijing’s lobbyists in Washington, played in driving tensions between the two countries?Superpower Showdown is the story of a romance gone bad. Uniquely positioned to tell the story, Davis and Wei have conducted hundreds of interviews with government and business officials in both nations over the seven years they have worked together writing for the Wall Street Journal. Analyzing U.S.–China relations, they explain how we have reached this tipping point, and look at where we could be headed. Vivid and provocative, Superpower Showdown will help readers understand the context of the trade war and prepare them for what may come next.
The widespread adoption of AI and machine learning is revolutionizing many industries today. Once these technologies are combined with the… programmatic availability of historical and real-time financial data, the financial industry will also change fundamentally. With this practical book, you'll learn how to use AI and machine learning to discover statistical inefficiencies in financial markets and exploit them through algorithmic trading.Author Yves Hilpisch shows practitioners, students, and academics in both finance and data science practical ways to apply machine learning and deep learning algorithms to finance. Thanks to lots of self-contained Python examples, you'll be able to replicate all results and figures presented in the book.In five parts, this guide helps you:Learn central notions and algorithms from AI, including recent breakthroughs on the way to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence (SI)Understand why data-driven finance, AI, and machine learning will have a lasting impact on financial theory and practiceApply neural networks and reinforcement learning to discover statistical inefficiencies in financial marketsIdentify and exploit economic inefficiencies through backtesting and algorithmic trading--the automated execution of trading strategiesUnderstand how AI will influence the competitive dynamics in the financial industry and what the potential emergence of a financial singularity might bring about
What constitutes a good life? For most people, well-being involves more than a high income or material prosperity alone. Many… non-material aspects, such as health, family life, living environment, job quality and the meaningful use of time are at least as important. Together, these factors also influence the degree to which people are satisfied with their lives, and help to determine how happy they feel. This book argues that happiness and life satisfaction do not form a good basis for measuring well-being, and proposes an alternative method that not only considers the various aspects of well-being, but also the fact that people have their own views on what is important in life. Not limited just to theory, the book also presents a large-scale, representative survey involving more than 3000 adults from over 2000 Belgian families, which charted the various aspects of the individual well-being of Belgians. Focusing on the unequal distribution of these various aspects of well-being within families, the survey showed that some Belgians are more likely to suffer from cumulative deprivation in multiple dimensions. Based on this innovative study, the book describes which people in society are worst off – and these are not necessarily only people on low incomes or those who feel unhappy – and proposes that policymakers prioritise these individuals.
Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries… Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.