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Showing 1521 - 1540 of 2079 items
By Dick M Carpenter, William Mellor. 2016
Bottlenecker (n): a person who advocates for the creation or perpetuation of government regulation, particularly an occupational license, to restrict…
entry into his or her occupation, thereby accruing an economic advantage without providing a benefit to consumers.The Left, Right, and Center all hate them: powerful special interests that use government power for their own private benefit. In an era when the Left hates "fat cats" and the Right despises "crony capitalists," now there is an artful and memorable one-word pejorative they can both get behind: bottleneckers.A "bottlenecker" is anyone who uses government power to limit competition and thereby reap monopoly profits and other benefits. Bottleneckers work with politicians to constrict competition, entrepreneurial innovation, and opportunity. They thereby limit consumer choice; drive up consumer prices; and they support politicians who willingly overstep the constitutional limits of their powers to create, maintain, and expand these anticompetitive bottlenecks.The Institute for Justice's new book Bottleneckers coins a new word in the American lexicon, and provides a rich history and well-researched examples of bottleneckers in one occupation after another-from alcohol distributors to taxicab cartels-pointing the way to positive reforms.By Cox, Gary W. 2016
How did England, once a minor regional power, become a global hegemon between 1689 and 1815? Why, over the same…
period, did she become the world's first industrial nation? Gary W. Cox addresses these questions in Marketing Sovereign Promises. The book examines two central issues: the origins of the great taxing power of the modern state and how that power is made compatible with economic growth. Part I considers England's rise after the revolution of 1689, highlighting the establishment of annual budgets with shutdown reversions. This core reform effected a great increase in per capita tax extraction. Part II investigates the regional and global spread of British budgeting ideas. Cox argues that states grew only if they addressed a central credibility problem afflicting the Ancien R#65533;gime - that rulers were legally entitled to spend public revenue however they deemed fit.By Christian Seidl, Kirill Pogorelskiy, Stefan Traub. 2013
This is the first book that performs international and intertemporal comparisons of uniform tax progression with empirical data. While conventional…
measures of tax progression suffer from serious disadvantages for empirical analyses, this book extends uniform measures to progression comparisons of countries with different income distributions. Tax progression is analyzed in terms of Lorenz curve and Suits curve equivalents of net incomes and taxes. The authors derive six distinct definitions of the relation "is more progressive than", which are then utilized for an empirical analysis of 13 countries included in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). In two thirds of all international comparisons of tax progression, the authors report a clear ranking of the respective countries in terms of progression dominance. Tax based definitions of greater progressivity perform best. These observations are yet reinforced by statistical tests. The book also provides an account of the institutional background of the involved countries in order to facilitate the interpretation of the data. Moreover, the authors conduct intertemporal comparisons of tax progression for selected countries and perform a sensitivity analysis with respect to the parameterization of the equivalence scale.By Hannu Nurmi, Manfred J Holler. 2012
The developments over a thirty-year time span in the study of power, especially voting power, are traced in this book,…
which provides an up-to-date overview of applications of n-person game theory to the study of power in multimember bodies. Other theories that shed light on power distribution (e.g. aggregation theory) are treated as well. The book revisits the themes discussed in the well-known 1982 publication "Power, Voting and Voting Power" (edited by Manfred J. Holler). Thirty years later this essential topic has been taken up again and many of the authors from its predecessor participate here again in discussing the state-of-the-art, demonstrating the achievements of three decades of intensive research, and pointing the way to key issues for future work.By Dominique Lepelley, William V. Gehrlein. 2011
The likelihood of observing Condorcet's Paradox is known to be very low for elections with a small number of candidates…
if voters' preferences on candidates reflect any significant degree of a number of different measures of mutual coherence. This reinforces the intuitive notion that strange election outcomes should become less likely as voters' preferences become more mutually coherent. Similar analysis is used here to indicate that this notion is valid for most, but not all, other voting paradoxes. This study also focuses on the Condorcet Criterion, which states that the pairwise majority rule winner should be chosen as the election winner, if one exists. Representations for the Condorcet Efficiency of the most common voting rules are obtained here as a function of various measures of the degree of mutual coherence of voters' preferences. An analysis of the Condorcet Efficiency representations that are obtained yields strong support for using Borda Rule.By Shashank Shah, V E Ramamoorthy. 2013
Corporate debacles, financial and economic crises and environmental disasters in different parts of the globe over the last two decades…
are seen as indicators for a transformation in business conduct by scholars and practitioners alike. A need for corporate goals to move on from simply maximizing shareholder profit to optimizing stakeholder welfare is being echoed in various quarters. Upon this backdrop, this book shows how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can be a means for global unity and universal welfare and how corporations, as associations of individuals, can identify their 'collective spirits' in terms of environmentally aware, socially responsible and financially rewarding missions and goals. The book examines CSR from an altruistic viewpoint rather than as a strategic tool, where the quality of initiatives and the welfare they create are more important than the simple amount of work done. It traces the evolution of CSR in the Indian and international contexts, yet provides a unique approach to CSR based on Indian traditions, culture and value systems, which are universal in their appeal and timeless in their application. It includes several case studies on CSR and environmental best practices, covering both Indian and international companies that have moulded and influenced the corporate landscape.By Simon Johnson, David Weil. 2016
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts…
and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level. The first volume in the series, African Successes: Governments and Institutions considers the role governments and institutions have played in recent developments and identifies the factors that enable economists to predict the way institutions will function.By Simon Johnson, Sebastian Edwards, David N. Weil. 2016
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts…
and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level. The first volume in the series, African Successes: Governments and Institutions considers the role governments and institutions have played in recent developments and identifies the factors that enable economists to predict the way institutions will function.By Tsvi Kahana, Anat Scolnicov. 2016
This collection of essays draws together innovative scholars to examine the relationship between two legal and political phenomena: the shrinking…
of the state as a monopoly of power in favour of the expansion of power over individuals in private hands, and the change in the nature of rights. The authors expertly discuss the implications of the changing boundaries of state power, the legal responses to this development, its application to human rights, and re-conceptualizations of public life as obligations are handed over to private hands. This innovative book deals with an important set of problems and offers a fresh perspective of different legal themes in an integrated fashion.By Per-Olov Johansson, Bengt Kriström. 2012
This book presents research on a kind of water use conflicts that is becoming more and more common and important:…
How to best manage moving water in times of increasing demand for electricity as well as environmental services. How should decisions be made between water use for electricity generation or for environmental and recreational benefits? The authors develop a simple general equilibrium model of a small open economy which is used to derive a cost-benefit rule that can be used to assess projects that divert water from electricity generation to recreational and other uses (or vice versa). The cost-benefit rule is then applied to the specific case of a proposed change at a Swedish hydropower plant. The book provides a manual for the evaluation of river regulations which can easily be replicated in other studies.By Alfred Greiner, Bettina Fincke. 2015
Public debt has become a severe problem for a great many economies. While the effects of tax policies on the…
allocation of resources are readily derived, the mechanisms that make public deficits and debt influence the economy are not so easily understood. This book elaborates on the effects of public debt starting from the intertemporal budget constraint of the government. It is shown under which conditions a government can stick to the intertemporal budget constraint and then, demonstrated how public debt affects the growth process and welfare in market economies. The effects are derived for models with complete labor markets as well as taking into account labor market imperfections. The focus in this book is on fiscal policy issues, but it also deals with monetary policy aspects. The theoretical analysis is complemented with empirical time series analyses on debt sustainability and with panel studies dealing with the relationship between public debt and economic growth.By Norman Schofield, Gonzalo Caballero. 2010
This book presents the latest research in the field of Political Economy, dealing with the integration of economics and politics…
and the way institutions affect social decisions. The authors are eminent scholars from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Spain, Italy, Mexico and the Philippines. Many of them have been influenced by Nobel laureate Douglass North, who pioneered the new institutional social sciences, or by William H. Riker who contributed to the field of positive political theory. The book focuses on topics such as: case studies in institutional analysis; research on war and the formation of states; the analysis of corruption; new techniques for analyzing elections, involving game theory and empirical methods; comparing elections under plurality and proportional rule, and in developed and new democracies.By Maria Gallego, Norman Schofield. 2011
Combining elements of economic reasoning and political science has proven to be very useful for understanding the broad variation in…
economic development around the world. In a sense research in this field goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith's original plan in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. Leadership or Chaos by Norman Schofield and Maria Gallego is intended as an advanced, self-contained text in political economy dealing with social choice. The theory and empirical analysis are used to examine democratic institutions and elections in the developed world, and the success or failure of moves to democratization in the less developed world. The book closes with a consideration of current quandaries with regard to political and economic stability and climate change and a discussion of the moral foundations of our society.By Jeffrey A. Dubin. 2012
Taxpayer compliance is a voluntary activity, and the degree to which the tax system works is affected by taxpayers' knowledge…
that it is their moral and legal responsibility to pay their taxes. Taxpayers also recognize that they face a lottery in which not all taxpayer noncompliance will ever be detected. In the United States most individuals comply with the tax law, yet the tax gap has grown significantly over time for individual taxpayers. The US Internal Revenue Service attempts to ensure that the minority of taxpayers who are noncompliant pay their fair share with a variety of enforcement tools and penalties. The Causes and Consequences of Income Tax Noncompliance provides a comprehensive summary of the empirical evidence concerning taxpayer noncompliance and presents innovative research with new results on the role of IRS audit and enforcements activities on compliance with federal and state income tax collection. Other issues examined include to what degree taxpayers respond to the threat of civil and criminal enforcement and the important role of the media on taxpayer compliance. This book offers researchers, students, and tax administrators insight into the allocation of taxpayer compliance enforcement and service resources, and suggests policies that will prevent further increases in the tax gap. The book's aggregate data analysis methods have practical applications not only to taxpayer compliance but also to other forms of economic behavior, such as welfare fraud.By Pantelis Sklias, Nikolaos Tzifakis. 2012
The Greek economic crisis has imperilled the stability of the eurozone, generating much global anxiety. Policymakers, analysts, and the media…
have daily debated the course of the Greek economy, prescribing ways to move forward. This collection of essays progressively moves from an analysis of the causes of the crisis and the policy responses so far to a debate on some of the countryʼs advantages and capabilities that should underpin its new development model and propel the return to growth. The book analytically chooses to view the glass as half-full and seeks to provide motivation and inspiration for change by indicating some of the economic sectors where Greece maintains a comparative advantage. Therefore, it challenges the emerging picture of Greece as a country doomed to failure, where everything falls apart.By Nikolaos Tzifakis. 2012
The Greek economic crisis has imperilled the stability of the eurozone, generating much global anxiety. Policymakers, analysts, and the media…
have daily debated the course of the Greek economy, prescribing ways to move forward. This collection of essays progressively moves from an analysis of the causes of the crisis and the policy responses so far to a debate on some of the countryʼs advantages and capabilities that should underpin its new development model and propel the return to growth. The book analytically chooses to view the glass as half-full and seeks to provide motivation and inspiration for change by indicating some of the economic sectors where Greece maintains a comparative advantage. Therefore, it challenges the emerging picture of Greece as a country doomed to failure, where everything falls apart.By P. K. Jain, Seema Gupta, Surendra S. Yadav. 2014
The book examines the various aspects of non-financial central public sector enterprises (PSEs) in India, for a period from 1986-87…
to 2010-11. The analysis is based on all the key financial ratios; namely, profitability, efficiency, liquidity, leverage and productivity. Liberalization and globalization have caused competition in India and have lowered the profit margins. At the same time, Indian government has reduced subsidies and budgetary support for PSEs to curtail their own fiscal deficit. Strategic and economic reforms were also introduced in PSEs to make their operations commercially profitable so that they are not dependent on the government to meet their financial requirements on the one hand, and have their own earnings to finance their expansion/modernization requirements as well as their social obligations, on the other. To what extent, the PSEs have succeeded in this objective constitutes one major aspect of the present research work. The other equally important aspect examined is financial performance of the PSEs which have opted for disinvestment and have signed memorandum of understanding (MoU)/ self obligations. The Indian Government has desired the central PSEs to be profitable in their operations in post-liberation era of 1990s. For this purpose, two major instruments, namely, disinvestment and MoUs, were introduced. This book examines, in detail, financial performance of PSEs which had opted for disinvestment and have signed MoU. Based on analysis/ findings and literature on the subject, the book contains some concrete suggestions that would prove extremely helpful to Indian Government to further improve their financial performance. By Michael Bell, David M. Levinson, Henry X. Liu. 2012
This book contains selected peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability (INSTR) Conference…
held at the University of Minnesota July 22-23, 2010. International scholars, from a variety of disciplines--engineering, economics, geography, planning and transportation--offer varying perspectives on modeling and analysis of the reliability of transportation networks in order to illustrate both vulnerability to day-to-day and unpredictability variability and risk in travel, and demonstrates strategies for addressing those issues. The scope of the chapters includes all aspects of analysis and design to improve network reliability, specifically user perception of unreliability of public transport, public policy and reliability of travel times, the valuation and economics of reliability, network reliability modeling and estimation, travel behavior and vehicle routing under uncertainty, and risk evaluation and management for transportation networks. The book combines new methodologies and state of the art practice to model and address questions of network unreliability, making it of interest to both academics in transportation and engineering as well as policy-makers and practitioners.By Noriatsu Matsui, Yukio Ikemoto, Pk. Md. Rahman. 2012
The study of poverty dynamics is important for effective poverty alleviation policies because the changes in income poverty are also…
accompanied by changes in socioeconomic factors such as literacy, gender parity in school, health care, infant mortality, and asset holdings. In order to examine the dynamics of poverty, information from 1,212 households in 32 rural villages in Bangladesh was collected in December 2004 and December 2009. This book reports the analytical results from quantitative and qualitative surveys from the same households at two points of time, which yielded the panel data for understanding the changes in situations of poverty. Efforts have been made to include the most recent research from diverse disciplines including economics, statistics, anthropology, education, health care, and vulnerability study. Specifically, findings from logistic regression analysis, polychoric principal component analysis, kernel density function, income mobility with the help of the Markov chain model, and child nutrition status from anthropometric measures have been presented. Asset holdings and liabilities of the chronically poor as well as those of three other economic groups (the descending non-poor, the ascending poor, and the non-poor) are analyzed statistically. The degrees of vulnerability to poverty are examined by years of schooling, landholding size, gender of household head, social capital, and occupation. The multiple logistic regression model was used to identify important risk factors for a household's vulnerability. In 2009, some of the basic characteristics of the chronically poor were: higher percentage and number of female-headed households, higher dependency ratio, lower levels of education, fewer years of schooling, and limited employment. There was a low degree of mobility of households from one poverty status to another in the period 2004-2009, implying that the process of economic development and high economic growth in the macroeconomy during this time failed to improve the poverty situation in rural Bangladesh.By Michael Heise. 2013
Despite the success of policymakers and the European Central Bank in calming down financial markets since the summer of 2012,…
European leaders are still facing formidable challenges in making the single currency work in a complex environment. This book starts with a review of the necessary elements of a currency union and highlights the reasons why the system has run into its present troubles. It points to important policy recommendations to be drawn from a structural analysis of the currency union, achievements and failures of the currency union and ways to improve fiscal sustainability and arrive at stable macroeconomic performance for the union. It highlights the importance and the effectiveness of structural reforms that have to accompany fiscal consolidation and discusses the appropriate tools of crisis management and why a restructuring of the Eurozone is not the right step. Based on these considerations, a long-term target picture for the Eurozone as a part of the EU is outlined, providing a valuable contribution to a hopefully intense public debate in the coming years.