This book addresses the increasingly urgent question: How can governments be made more accountable for the quality of their environmental stewardship?It explores:Enhanced national State of the Environment reporting and integration of environmental outcomes in key national indicators.Mainstreaming environmental goals, targets, and risks by integrating them in fiscal policy and the annual budget—a government’s most important policy instrument.Promoti...

This paper analyzes the main sources of fiscal risks, including from unexpected changes in macroeconomic variables and banking crises, which can have major consequences for countries' fiscal and public debt sustainability. It builds on an overview of existing practices in a wide range of countries to provide practical suggestions on how to promote disclosure of such risks and on risk mitigation and management. The paper was written in response to requests from IMF member countries for advi...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) refer to arrangements under which the private sector supplies infrastructure assets and infrastructure-based services that traditionally have been provided by the government. PPPs are used for a wide range of economic and social infrastructure projects, but they are used mainly to build and operate roads, bridges and tunnels, light rail networks, airports and air traffic control systems, prisons, water and sanitation plants, hospitals, schools, and public bu...

Over the past decade, Indonesia has developed into an important regional and global economy, as well as an active participant in the G20. The chapters in this book document the substantial improvements in the quality of macroeconomic policy that Indonesia has achieved, while also clearly laying out an agenda of measures that should be taken to safeguard these gains and further lower vulnerabilities going forward. Rather than just demonstrating progress in key macroeconomic indicators, the ...

Why the global recession is in danger of becoming another Great Depression, and how we can stop itWhen the United States stopped backing dollars with gold in 1968, the nature of money changed. All previous constraints on money and credit creation were removed and a new economic paradigm took shape. Economic growth ceased to be driven by capital accumulation and investment as it had been since before the Industrial Revolution. Instead, credit creation and consumptio...

Why the dollar is—and will remain—the dominant global currencyThe U.S. dollar's dominance seems under threat. The near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008–2009, political paralysis that has blocked effective policymaking, and emerging competitors such as the Chinese renminbi have heightened speculation about the dollar’s looming displacement as the main reserve currency. Yet, as The Dollar Trap powerfully argues, the financial crisis, a dysfuncti...

Economics, demystified!From the collapse of housing prices to the thousand-point drops in the stock market, the past has been full of economic crises. These changes not only affect the overall market—they can also drastically influence your personal finances and day-to-day life. In this easy-to-understand guide, Peter Sander explains how the financial system works, as well as the most important concepts, terms, and programs in economics. Using simple language, he d...

The government budget is not like a household budget. This report introduces the financial operations used by a central government with a free-floating currency, and explains how they differ from that of a household or corporation. The focus is on what constraints such a government faces, and explains why such governments only face a limited risk of involuntary default.It introduces a simplified framework for the monetary system, along with the operating procedures that are associa...

Why is China booming while the American economy lags?Despite a globally challenging economic environment, production in China has grown by an astounding 7% to 14% a year, every year, for the past 20 years. Americas GDP, by contrast, fell during the serious recession of 2008-9, and is now struggling to achieve even a tepid 3% growth. Why should this be?Over time, economic thought and attitudes in the U.S. and other Western nations increasingly diverged from the underlying vi...

Want to get the most out of your International Finance course?Nowadays the value of daily foreign exchange trading is more than one hundred times the value of annual international trade in goods and services. As result of the great importance of international financial transactions, the subject of international finance continues to develop as fast as—or faster than—any other field in economics and finance. International Finance For Dummies sheds light on t...

In this highly original piece of work, Steven D. Gjerstad and Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith analyze the role of housing and its associated mortgage financing as a key element of economic cycles. The authors combine data from both laboratory and real markets to provide insight into the bubble propensity of real-world economic actors and use novel historical analysis on the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and all of the post-World War II recessions to establish the critical roles of ...

A penetrating critique tracing how under-regulated trading between European and U.S. banks led to the 2008 financial crisis—with a prescription for preventing another meltdown There have been numerous books examining the 2008 financial crisis from either a U.S. or European perspective. Tamim Bayoumi is the first to explain how the Euro crisis and U.S. housing crash were, in fact, parasitically intertwined. Starting in the 1980s, Bayoumi outlines the cumul...