Download Free Yardstick Competition Among Governments Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Yardstick Competition Among Governments and write the review.

Measuring government effectiveness is essential to ensuring accountability, as is an informed public that is willing and able to hold elected officials and policy-makers accountable. There are various forms of measurement, including against prior experience or compared to some ideal. In Yardstick Competition among Governments, Pierre Salmon argues that a more effective and insightful approach is to use common measures across a variety of countries, state, or other relevant political and economic districts. This facilitates and enables citizens comparing policy outputs in their own jurisdictions with those of others. An advantage of this approach is that it reduces information asymmetries between citizens and public officials, decreasing the costs of monitoring by the former of the latter -along the lines of principal-agent theory. These comparisons can have an effect on citizens' support to incumbents and, as a consequence, also on governments' decisions. By increasing transparency, comparisons by common yardsticks can decrease the influence of interest groups and increase the focus on broader concerns, whether economic growth or others. Salmon takes up complicating factors such as federalism and other forms of multi-level governance, where responsibility can become difficult to disentangle and accountability a challenge. Salmon also highlights the importance of publics with heterogeneous preferences, including variations in how voters interpret their roles, functions, or tasks. This results in the coexistence within the same electorate of different types of voting behavior, not all of them forward-looking. In turn, when incumbents face such heterogeneity, they can treat the response to their decisions as an aggregate non-strategic relation between comparative performance and expected electoral support. Combining theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, Salmon demonstrates how yardstick competition among governments, a consequence of the possibility that citizens look across borders, is a very significant, systemic dimension of governance both at the local and at the national levels.
Measuring government effectiveness is essential to ensuring accountability, as is an informed public that is willing and able to hold elected officials and policy-makers accountable. There are various forms of measurement, including against prior experience or compared to some ideal. In Yardstick Competition among Governments, Pierre Salmon argues that a more effective and insightful approach is to use common measures across a variety of countries, state, or other relevant political and economic districts. This facilitates and enables citizens comparing policy outputs in their own jurisdictions with those of others. An advantage of this approach is that it reduces information asymmetries between citizens and public officials, decreasing the costs of monitoring by the former of the latter -along the lines of principal-agent theory. These comparisons can have an effect on citizens' support to incumbents and, as a consequence, also on governments' decisions. By increasing transparency, comparisons by common yardsticks can decrease the influence of interest groups and increase the focus on broader concerns, whether economic growth or others. Salmon takes up complicating factors such as federalism and other forms of multi-level governance, where responsibility can become difficult to disentangle and accountability a challenge. Salmon also highlights the importance of publics with heterogeneous preferences, including variations in how voters interpret their roles, functions, or tasks. This results in the coexistence within the same electorate of different types of voting behavior, not all of them forward-looking. In turn, when incumbents face such heterogeneity, they can treat the response to their decisions as an aggregate non-strategic relation between comparative performance and expected electoral support. Combining theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, Salmon demonstrates how yardstick competition among governments, a consequence of the possibility that citizens look across borders, is a very significant, systemic dimension of governance both at the local and at the national levels.
Multilevel governance divides powers, includes many veto players and requires extensive policy coordination among different jurisdictions. Under these conditions, innovative policies or institutional reforms seem difficult to achieve. However, while multilevel systems establish obstructive barriers to change, they also provide spaces for creative and experimental policies, incentives for learning, and ways to circumvent resistance against change. As the book explains, appropriate patterns of multilevel governance linking diverse policy arenas to a loosely coupled structure are conducive to policy innovation.
This volume the second by this editorial team addresses many of the issues to be resolved if we are to manage environmental public goods efficiently and sustainably. What is the right scale of governance? What makes for effective public private partnership? What makes governance systems effective? When do we need supranational governance? Given the complex nature of social-ecological systems these are hard questions. Breton and his collaborators answer them in ways that are both convincing and insightful. A very valuable contribution. Charles Perrings, Arizona State University, US Environmental policy, focusing on the control of pollution and on over-exploitation, easily overlooks the extensive range of interconnections between economic activities and natural systems. In this timely book, a number of specialists examine how crucial aspects of complex environmental problems and policy can be dealt with in decentralized governmental systems. Bridging the gap between the conventional environmental federalism literature and advances in environmental and ecological economics that have been made over the last two decades, this innovative book explores alternative solutions to the problem of assigning powers over the environment. It deals with important issues in environmental governance including interjurisdictional contracting, discounting, risk management, eliciting compliance, and environmental accounting in each case concentrating on the comparative advantage of governments at different jurisdictional levels in implementing optimal policies. Offering a comprehensive approach to environmental policy, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in environmental economics, environmental politics, governance and decentralization. It will also benefit practitioners and policy-makers with responsibilities over the environment.
This extensive book explores in detail a wide range of topics within the public choice and constitutional political economy tradition, providing a comprehensive overview of current work across the field. The expert contributions are underpinned by the notion of moving economic thinking away from the analysis of the logic of a situation given a set of well-established and well-enforced Ôrules of the gameÕ towards a deeper analysis of the logic behind the selection of the rules of the game themselves. Within this context, the theme of choice between rules (as well as the more conventional analysis within rules) across historical time and place, and in various thought experiments and conceptual situations, is explored in detail. Extensive case studies back theory with empirical evidence, and topics discussed include: the foundations of constitutional economics; constitutional political economy; political competition and voting; public choice and public policy; and extensions to public choice theory. This stimulating book will prove a thought-provoking read for academics and both under- and post-graduate students in the fields of economics (particularly public choice and Austrian economics), public policy and political science.
Markets and governments -- Institutions and governance -- Public goods -- Public finance for public goods -- Market corrections -- Voting -- Social justice -- Entitlements and equality of opportunity -- Choice of taxation -- The need for government.
Providing forty articles written by experts, this book explores the development of government spending and revenue policymaking, the legacy of John Maynard Keynes, taxes and tax policies, government budgeting and accounting, and government debt management. Topics include the implications of the federal balanced budget amendment, factors that affect implementation of fiscal policies, the relationship between tax assessment and economic prosperity, and debt management strategies by government institutions. It covers the role of government in formulating economic policies for growth and full employment and reviews issues associated with the implementation of fiscal policies.
Examines the politics of economic policy, focusing on forecasting, inflation, interest rates, market expectations, financial crises, disruptions in global markets, and tax policy, as well as state and local government budgeting, financial management, and policy initiatives for development and growth.
This book introduces students to the complex landscape of state-local intergovernmental relations today. Each chapter illustrates conflict and cooperation for policy problems including the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental regulation, marijuana regulation, and government management capacity. The contributors, leading experts in the field, help students enhance their understanding of the importance of state-local relations in the U.S. federal system, argue for better analysis of the consequences of state-local relations for the quality of policy outcomes, and introduce them to public service career opportunities in state and local government.
Methodologically, volume 20 features considerable breadth. Two articles support their conclusions with analytical modeling. Two others employ experimental methods using taxpayer/practitioner subjects. In addition, two use quasi-experimental empirical analyses. Of the last two articles, one uses survey methods, and the last is a review article.