Creating a Eurasian Union offers a detailed analysis of the economies of the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and the proposed Eurasian Union. The authors employ econometric analysis of business cycles and cointegration analysis to prove the fragility of the union's potential economic success. By providing a brief description of the economic integration of the former Soviet republics, this pioneering work analyses the on-going trial and error processes of market integration...

PULITZER PRIZE FINALISTAn epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world todayWhen the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pa...

Cities in developing countries are experiencing unprecedented urban growth. Unfortunately, this is often accompanied by the negative impacts of sprawl as a result of rapid motorization such as congestion, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, inefficient use of energy and time, and unequal accessibility. As these cities are often under severe fiscal constraints, they face great challenges in financing capital-intensive mass transit systems to reverse the course of these negative trends. De...

This book provides an overview of three generations of spatial econometric models: models based on cross-sectional data, static models based on spatial panels and dynamic spatial panel data models. The book not only presents different model specifications and their corresponding estimators, but also critically discusses the purposes for which these models can be used and how their results should be interpreted.

The European public debt problem was in the making long before the 2007-2009 recession, as budget deficits had become endemic. A similar crisis is now developing in America, where the same fundamental causes have been at work. The Public Debt Problem analyzes the situation of public debts in America and reviews official forecasts for the federal government. The author carefully explains the main concepts (budget deficit, public debt, etc.) and analytical tools (discounting, government acco...

Natural monopolies are not subject to the market-based principle of competition. Consequently, it is necessary to control companies in such monopoly positions with regard to their pricing. In the future, it will become more and more important to consider a possible change in the regulation regime when the future-oriented costs of equity - both in terms of price regulation and for conducting capital market-oriented business valuations - are to be determined. Based on the principal-agent pro...

First published in 1984. This book brings together and develops the economic theory relating to the design and operation of systems of non-central government — positing major developments in several areas. It considers what functions systems most suitably perform in non-central governments, and their appropriate size and structure. How these authorities might finance themselves — by taxes, charges or loans — is analysed in detail. It also examines the use of grants by higher tiers of gover...

The quick recovery of Asian economies from recent recessions in comparison to the struggling American and European economies can be attributed in part to the positive aggregate-demand externalities of their self-employment sectors. This book presents a behavioural analysis of this effect, with a detailed focus on producer households.

With increasing population and expanding demand for urban infrastructure services, the capacities of local governments in many developing countries are overburdened. Adequate infrastructure is not only necessary for increasing productivity but also improving the quality of living. Given the primacy of public service delivery for cities to become engines of growth, this book answers two critical questions: Does low spending explain the state of poor public service delivery? How can urban lo...

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 ...

The overall objective of the book is to holistically assess the property tax systems in BRICS megacities. As megacities play a vital role within their respective countries – economically, administratively, and from a human development perspective – they experience the costs and benefits of urbanization simultaneously with major investment needs, rising poverty, and increasing congestion and pollution levels in the context of limited financial resources, raising the question for a suitable ...

This work focuses on urban governance in the developing world, its aim being to bring a holistic perspective to the debate on urban governance in Asia and around the globe. It has been divided into three sections: The first section is on rural interventions as they influence urbanization and its problems/solutions. The second focuses on urban governance, infrastructure programs, service delivery reforms and their evaluation. The third and final section focuses on urbanization and the envir...