The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank is one of just a few regional central banks in the world and the only one where the member countries have pooled all their foreign reserves, the convertability of the common currency is fully self-supported, and the parity of the exchange rate has not changed. This occasional paper reviews recent developments, policy issues, and institutional arrangements in the member countries of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, and looks at the regional financial ...

Today's most complete, up-to-date reference for controlling credit risk exposure of all types, in every environmentMeasuring and Managing Credit Risk takes you far beyond the Basel guidelines to detail a powerful, proven program for understanding and controlling your firm’s credit risk. Providing hands-on answers on practical topics from capital management to correlations, and supporting its theories with up-to-the-minute data and insights, this authoritative book ...

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...

Tax systems raise large amounts of revenue for funding public sector's activities, and tax/transfer policy, together with public provision of education, health care, and social services, play a crucial role in treating the symptoms and the causes of poverty. The normative analysis is crucial for tax/transfer design because it makes it possible to assess separately how changes in the redistributive criterion of the government, and changes in the size of the behavioural responses to taxes an...

Costing and Pricing Public Sector Services is one of a series of books entitled “Essential Skills for the Public Sector”. It sets out the process of identifying service costs, establishing unit costs, and cost control, all essential activities for ensuring value for money and accountability. It is an important text for all those working in the a public and not for profit environment as it takes private sector principles and translates them into practical tools that can be applied to public...

Starting in the early 1990s many emerging and developing economies (EDEs) liberalized their capital accounts, allowing greater freedom for international lenders and investors to enter their markets as well as for their residents to borrow and invest in international financial markets. Despite recurrent crises, liberalization has continued and in fact accelerated in the new millennium. Integration has been greatly facilitated by progressively looser monetary policy in the United States, not...

When you engage with big business, reviewing their products with your honest opinion, two things happen:You feel heard because you were able to share your honest opinions about a product.Big business profits off the work you gave them for free.Sharing your feelings is nice, but in this transaction, only one side is truly rewarded.Don’t you deserve something in exchange for your honest review too?In Socialize for Equal...

This volume showcases the impact of the work of Douglass North, winner of the Nobel Prize and father of the field of new institutional economics. Leading scholars contribute to a substantive discussion that best illustrates the broad reach and depth of Professor North's work. The volume speaks concisely about his legacy across multiple social sciences disciplines, specifically on scholarship pertaining to the understanding of property rights, the institutions that support the system of pro...

This text provides guidance to policymakers on how to design and implement sound price-subsidy reforms. It draws on the experience of price-subsidy reform in 28 countries. The authors discuss economic and political considerations and make several recommendations concerning the speed of reform and social protection mechanisms. They discuss how the social impact of reform can be limited by establishing cost-effective and well-targeted temporary social protection mechanisms, and how governments ...

Trade finance has long been an important component of international financial flows. Firms in emerging market economies, in particular, rely heavily on bank-financed trade credits to support their export and import activities. This book examines why and how much trade finance flows decline during financial crises, with case studies of several Asian and Latin American countries. The authors draw from the analysis to present options for mitigating trade finance declines in the event of future c...

Nicolas Buclet Waste management issues can be approached in several ways. The question of which treatment technique to adopt is essentially a downstream problem. In our view the issue needed to be tackled further upstream. Waste management is not only a technical problem, it is also an area which involves various actors throughout society. In this book, as in the previous volume (Buclet, Godard, 2000), the organisation of waste management is seen in terms of regimes. A regime is an entire ...

This book is an introduction to the history of – and current measurement practice of – inflation for the United Kingdom. The authors describe the historical development of inflation measures in a global context, and do so without using formal mathematical language and related jargon that relates only to a few specialist scholars. Although inflation is a widely used and quoted statistic, and despite the important role inflation plays in real people’s lives – through pension uprating, train ...