Over the last three decades, Europe's generous social benefits have encouraged a massive surge of 'welfare migration,' especially of low skilled laborers. At the same time, the US has attracted many highly skilled migrants, which in turn promotes internal innovation. Restrictions on the international mobility of labor are arguably the largest policy obstructions for the international economy today. A variety of studies suggest that even a small reduction in barriers to migration will resul...

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...

This book suggests that drastic reforms are required to reverse the ever-increasing size of the state, a trend experienced in most western nations. The report proposes a reassessment of the scale of government to achieve a reduction in taxation and spending.

Unlock the potential of transit-oriented development in developing countries. Urban railways can improve mobility, accessibility, and economic growth. This insightful guide provides strategies for financing these systems through land value capture, turning transit investments into sustainable urban development.This practical resource is for policymakers, urban planners, and investors seeking to:Implement land value capture schemesR...

Often described as complex, opaque and unfair, the EU budget financing system is an “unfinished journey.” One of the most critical issues is that EU revenue, drawn from the cashbox of national taxation, remains impalpable to the general public.The nature of the EU as a union of states and their nationals makes the visibility of EU revenue unavoidable. The political sustainability of a move that would put the legitimacy of EU revenue at the forefront of public discussion will depend...

The Uses of Social Investment provides the first study of the welfare state, under the new post-crisis austerity context and associated crisis management politics, to take stock of the limits and potential of social investment. It surveys the emergence, diffusion, limits, merits, and politics of social investment as the welfare policy paradigm for the 21st century, seen through the lens of the life-course contingencies of the competitive knowledge economy and modern family-hood. F...

In one of the most provocative books ever published on America's social welfare system, economist Janet Currie argues that the modern social safety net is under attack.Unlike most books about antipoverty programs, Currie trains her focus not on cash welfare, which accounts for a small and shrinking share of federal expenditures on poor families with children, but on the staples of today's American welfare system: Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start, WIC, and public housing. These pro...

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...

This book offers a comprehensive empirical analysis of South African inflation dynamics, using a variety of techniques including counterfactual analysis. The authors elaborate the roles in inflation of thresholds, nonlinearities and asymmetries introduced by economic conditions such as the size of exchange rate changes and volatility, GDP growth, inflation, output gap, credit growth, sovereign spreads and fiscal policy, providing new policy evidence on the impact of these. Ndou and Gumata ...