Making Politics Work for Development

Making Politics Work for Development PDF Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464807744
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

Making Politics Work for Development

Making Politics Work for Development PDF Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464807744
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

Transparency in Government Operations

Transparency in Government Operations PDF Author: Mr.J. D. Craig
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 155775697X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Transparency in government operations is widely regarded as an important precondition for macroeconomic fiscal sustainability, good governance, and overall fiscal rectitude. Notably, the Interim Committee, at its April and September 1996 meetings, stressed the need for greater fiscal transparency. Prompted by these concerns, this paper represents a first attempt to address many of the aspects of transparency in government operations. It provides an overview of major issues in fiscal transparency and examines the IMF's role in promoting transparency in government operations.

Transparency in Politics and the Media

Transparency in Politics and the Media PDF Author: Nigel Bowles
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857734598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or 'open government'. These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making. However, the role of the media in these initiatives has not hitherto been examined. This volume analyses the challenges and opportunities presented to journalists as they attempt to hold governments accountable in an era of professed transparency. In examining how transparency and open government initiatives have affected the accountability role of the press in the US and the UK, it also explores how policies in these two countries could change in the future to help journalists hold governments more accountable. This volume will be essential reading for all practising journalists, for students of journalism or politics, and for policymakers.

The Economics of Transparency in Politics

The Economics of Transparency in Politics PDF Author: Gianluigi Galeotti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351890956
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to formulate economic models of the advantages and costs of transparency in various areas of public sector activity and to assess what level of obfuscation in politics is rational. The chapters are arranged in four parts. Part 1 is concerned with the manifestations of transparency and obfuscation in domestic democratic settings whilst Part 2 deals with the same realities but in an international context. Part 3 looks at corruption and Part 4 considers some of the implications of transparency and obfuscation for the working of governments and the formulation of public policies.

Open Budgets

Open Budgets PDF Author: Sanjeev Khagram
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815723377
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Explicates political economy factors that have brought about greater transparency and participation in budget settings across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This title presents the strategies, policies, and institutions through which improvements can occur and produce change in policy and institutional outcomes.

Transparency in International Law

Transparency in International Law PDF Author: Andrea Bianchi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107470242
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. Contributors explore the framing and content of transparency in their respective fields with regard to proceedings, institutions, law-making processes and legal culture, and a selection of cross-cutting essays completes the study by examining transparency in international law-making and adjudication.

Improving Fiscal Transparency to Raise Government Efficiency and Reduce Corruption Vulnerabilities in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe

Improving Fiscal Transparency to Raise Government Efficiency and Reduce Corruption Vulnerabilities in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe PDF Author: Mr.Bernardin Akitoby
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513532839
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
This departmental paper investigates how countries in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) can improve fiscal transparency, thereby raising government efficiency and reducing corruption vulnerabilities.

Advances in Economics and Econometrics

Advances in Economics and Econometrics PDF Author: Econometric Society. World Congress
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016045
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The first volume of edited papers from the Tenth World Congress of the Econometric Society 2010.

Troubling Transparency

Troubling Transparency PDF Author: David E. Pozen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545800
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.

Advice and Dissent

Advice and Dissent PDF Author: Alan S. Blinder
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 046509418X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A bestselling economist tells us what both politicians and economists must learn to fix America's failing economic policies American economic policy ranks as something between bad and disgraceful. As leading economist Alan S. Blinder argues, a crucial cultural divide separates economic and political civilizations. Economists and politicians often talk -- and act -- at cross purposes: politicians typically seek economists' "advice" only to support preconceived notions, not to learn what economists actually know or believe. Politicians naturally worry about keeping constituents happy and winning elections. Some are devoted to an ideology. Economists sometimes overlook the real human costs of what may seem to be the obviously best policy -- to a calculating machine. In Advice and Dissent, Blinder shows how both sides can shrink the yawning gap between good politics and good economics and encourage the hardheaded but softhearted policies our country so desperately needs.