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In the 1940s Henry J. Kaiser was a household name, as familiar then as Warren Buffett and Donald Trump are now. Like a Horatio Alger hero, Kaiser rose from lower-middle-class origins to become an enormously wealthy entrepreneur, building roads, bridges, dams, and housing. He established giant businesses in cement, aluminum, chemicals, steel, health care, and tourism. During World War II, his companies built cargo planes and Liberty ships. After the war, he manufactured the Kaiser-Frazer automobile. Along the way, he also became a major force in the development of the western United States, including Hawaii. Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West is the first biography of this r...
Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The contributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine this institutional transformation from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, offering detailed case studies of decentralization in eight countries: Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda. Some of these c...
"The analysis of the distributional impact of policy reforms on the well-being or welfare of different stakeholder groups, particularly on th e poor and vulnerable, has an important role in the elaboration and implementation of poverty reduction strategies in developing countries. In recent years this type of work has been labeled as Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and is increasingly implemented to promote evidence-based policy choices and foster debate on policy reform options. While information is available on the general approach, techniques, and tools for distributional analysis, each sector displays a series of specific characteristics. These have implications for the analysi...
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In 1999, Indonesia embarked on a reform of regional governance that brings self-governance to rural districts and municipalities, i.e., the administrative and democratic capacity needed to apply basic services like healthcare, national legislation and environment policies. This edited volume is the first book, which not only deals with the 1999 legislation but also shows how the deficiencies and contradictions of this legislation reduced implementation between 2001 and 2004 to a try-out. The book also discusses the adaptations that were the focus of the debate on the revision of the 1999 legislation that resulted in the 2004 update legislation and the amendment of the 1945 Constitution. Anthropological case studies of five provinces complement and deepen the findings of the more general survey reports.
This paper takes stock of the economic performance of resource rich countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the past forty years. While those countries have maintained high levels of income per capita, they have performed poorly when going beyond the assessment based on standard income level measures. Resource rich countries in MENA have experienced relatively low and non inclusive economic growth as well as high levels of macroeconomic volatility. Important improvements in health and education have taken place but the quality of the provision of public goods and services remains an important source of concerns. Looking forward we argue that the success of economic reforms in MENA rests on the ability of those countries to invest boldly in building inclusive institutions as well as high levels of human capacity in public administrations.
Public resources--if invested well in public infrastructure and services--can catalyze private and community e orts and unleash an inclusive growth and development process. But too often public projects are selectedto support political patronage, poorly designed, underfunded, long delayed, very costly, or badly implemented, with little bene t to the population. This is a critical challenge for many countries, both rich and poor. This book identi es eight key institutional features that countries need to adopt to ensure that public investments support growth and development. The Power of Public Investment Management provides a clear, nontechnical discussion on approaches to improving project ...