Ensuring State and Municipal Solvency

Presents July 2010 discussions among government officials, academics, capital markets experts, and others on strategies for alleviating state and municipal budget problems, including short-term federal aid to reward active restructuring of finances

Pacific Economic Monitor: Budget Analysis

The Monitor provides an update of developments in Pacific economies and explores topical policy issues

The RPSEA Rip-Off: How the Natural Gas Industry Extracted a Billion-Dollar Boondoggle from Congress

The report, "The RPSEA Rip-Off: How the Natural Gas Industry Extracted a Billion-Dollar Boondoggle from Congress," describes how companies with profits that totaled more than $100 billion in 2005 set up a taxpayer-funded subsidy establishing a 10-year,$1.5 billion research program to find ways to extract oil and gas from "ultra-deepwater" depths and hard-to-access onshore areas. American taxpayers will begin doling out about $400 million -- and possibly more than a billion dollars -- over 10 years to a research consortium that includes wealthy oil and gas companies due to a provision slipped quietly into the enormous 2005 energy bill.The Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) was set up by the Gas Technology Institute (GTI), a group that was successor to another gas industry organization that had lost a dedicated source of funding from pipeline operators worth more than$200 million annually. GTI subsequently led the effort to help replace those lost funds with taxpayer dollars. The subsidy it secured is a relic of the tenure of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who ensured that much of the program's money would be guaranteed without further congressional action. RPSEA and GTI established offices in DeLay's former district of Sugar Land, Texas.The report documents the law's journey to passage and illustrates what is wrong with the lawmaking process and how some of the world's richest corporations are able to foist industry research costs onto taxpayers. The measure was slipped into a conference report in the dead of night, after conferees had signed off on what they thought was a final bill. The plan incorporated the use of a non-profit consortium to make the legislation look less like a special favor for a known entity. The legislative leaders who inserted the measure were among the top recipients of campaign contributions from the members of the front group

"Revisiting Bretton Woods, Proposals for Reforming the International Monetary Institutions"

Mikesell outlines the activities of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over their history and evaluates their success in meeting their original and subsequent goals. He analyzes the debate over the IMF's role in managing the international monetary system, managing currency crises, and providing credit to newly capitalist countries and examines proposals that the World Bank do more to promote private investment in developing countries, make more loans for expanding social and economic objectives, and improve the efficiency of its operations. Mikesell recommends that (1) the World Bank Group and IMF should be merged to form a single organization, the World Bank and Fund Group (WBFG); (2) neither the IMF nor the WBG should be given responsibility for establishing and managing an exchange rate target zone system or for stabilizing the exchange rates of the major currencies; (3) the establishment of additional institutional constructs to deal with financial crises should be deferred; (4) the WBG should move rapidly to change the composition of its lending by making fewer loans to governments and state enterprises and more loans to the private sector, including nongovernmental, nonprofit entities; and (5) the WBG should be gradually downsized by reducing the number of countries eligible for loans.

Giving in Numbers: 2013 Edition

Developed by CECP in association with The Conference Board, "Giving in Numbers: 2013 Edition" is based on data from 2companies including 60 of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune 500. The sum of contributions across all respondents of the 2012 Corporate Giving Survey (CGS), from which the data is pulled, totaled more than $20 billion in cash and in-kind giving. This report not only presents a profile of corporate philanthropy in 2012, but also pinpoints how corporate giving is evolving and becoming more focused since before the recession of 2008 and 2009. This is the ninth annual report on trends in corporate giving

Trade-Off Time: How Four States Continue to Deliver

Highlights performance measures used in Indiana, Maryland, Utah, and Virginia to ensure results-driven budgeting by defining goals, assessing priorities and trade-offs, targeting cuts with precision, and creating a culture of results-focused budgeting

Giving In Numbers: 2014 Edition

Developed by CECP, in association with The Conference Board, 'Giving in Numbers: 2014 Edition' is based on data from 261 companies, including 62 of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune 500. The sum of contributions across all respondents of the recent survey on 2013 contributions totaled more than $25 billion in cash and in-kind giving. This report not only presents a profile of corporate philanthropy and employee engagement in 2013, but also pinpoints how corporate community engagement is evolving and becoming more focused following the end of the Great Recession. This is the tenth annual report on trends in corporate giving

Will HIPC Matter? The Debt Game and Donor Behaviour in Africa

foreign aid, low-income countries, international organizations

Toward establishing a universal basic health norm.

Vast improvements in human health have been made during the past century. Indeed, gains in increased life expectancy and reduced physical impediments for much of the population were greater than in any previous century. Yet the gains were not uniform across the world or even within individual countries. The variations in health status among people cannot for the most part be explained through genetic differences. Instead, in most instances the variations in the last century and at the turn of the current century correspond to the variations in the distribution of control over material resources.</jats:p

Big Governance Research: Institutional Constraints, the Validity Gap and BIM

The pressing questions about governance today require research on a scale, and of a complexity, that the existing institutional environment for research has great difficulty supporting. This article identifies some of the current institutional constraints on governance research, and examines a set of institutional innovations that enable a form of 'big governance research' that begins to meet the information and knowledge requirements of contemporary governance questions. It presents the organisation and methodology of the multi-country study 'Modes of Service Delivery, Collective Action and Social Accountability in Brazil, India and Mexico' (henceforth BIM, for Brazil, India and Mexico). The authors argue that the organisational and funding model that this study has created permits the type of interdisciplinary, process-oriented, and multi-country or multi-region research needed to answer governance questions of international concern