FINANCIAL TIMES BEST ECONOMICS BOOKS OF 2020Advanced nations are headed for a new era of bigger government, with government expenditure set to increase enormously over the next three decades. In all advanced economies, health spending will be driven irresistibly upward by the costs of precision medicine and other new technologies, and the need to repair weaknesses highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic. Governments will also be compelled to spend big on fighting global warming, fix...

1976 was a febrile, transitional year in cultural history, coming after Watergate and Vietnam and before the AIDS epidemic and the rise of the Conservative movement. Bicentennial triumphalism sounded dissonant against a violent past and uncertain future. Marc Robinson here explores how innovative artists across disciplines – drama, dance, music, film, visual art – responded to this period, before zeroing in on avant-garde theater. Over 1976, five landmark productions could be seen within m...

Playwright and actor David Greenspan has been a leading figure in Manhattan's downtown performance scene for over twenty years. His numerous accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship and four Obie Awards for his acting and writing, and most recently a fifth Obie for Sustained Achievement. Tony Kushner once declared Greenspan "probably all-around the most talented theater artist of my generation," and the New York Times has called his performances "irresistible." The Myopia and...

This book examines the theory and practice of performance budgeting, which aims to link the funding of government agencies to the results they deliver to improve the efficiency of public spending. In a combination of thematic studies and case studies, it clearly presents the diverse range of contemporary performance budgeting models and examines their effectiveness. Its coverage is truly international, spanning developed, developing, and middle-income countries. Reflecting this, its case s...

An effective system of corporate governance has both internal and external aspects that have to be sufficiently responsive if governance is to succeed. In this book, Ahmed Naciri examines these two core aspects or the latest buzzword in business and management theory.Internal aspects include ownership structure, the board of directors and committees, internal control, risk management, transparency and financial reporting. External aspects can either be market-oriented, or can take ...

This book shows you how to take timeless storytelling structures and make them immediate, now, for fiction that's universal in how it speaks to the reader's heart and contemporary in detail and impact. Each chapter includes brief excerpts and descriptions of fiction from many times, many genres - myth and fairy tale, genre and mainstream fiction, film plots of all types, short story and novel. Find 20 fundamental plots that recur through all fiction - with analysis and examples - that outl...

Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from glo...

This book helps readers evaluate their chances of obtaining formal venture capital or investment from angels. It takes a realistic approach and will save them time and effort in locating equity capital. It describes the venture business; the players and how much money is available. It discusses venturist's preferences and where to find them. It provides profiles of typical angels and the kind of investments they make. It covers angel clusters and corporate angels and hints on where to find...

In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compet...

The behavior of managers-such as the rewards they obtain for poor performance, the role of boards of directors in monitoring managers, and the regulatory framework covering the corporate governance mechanisms that are put in place to ensure managers' accountability to shareholder and other stakeholders-has been the subject of extensive media and policy scrutiny in light of the financial crisis of the early 2000s. However, corporate governance covers a much broader set of issues, which requ...

This evaluation assesses the Bank Group's support for environmental sustainability in both the public and private sectors over the past 15 years. It identifies several crucial constraints that need to be addressed, perhaps most importantly insufficient government commitment to environmental goals and weak institutional capacity to deal with them. But constraints within the Bank Group, including insufficient attention to longer-term sustainable development, must be reduced as well. The Ba...