Palgrave Studies in Public Debt, Spending, and Revenue – serie

This book examines the interplay of professional norms and political accountability in the process of making decisions about whether, how, and how much debt state and local governments should incur. The careful analysis of accountability in actual decisions, focusing particularly on whether and how individual and collective decision-making behavior responds to general (stipulated) norms and situational (negotiated) expectations in their broader social contexts, is a familiar approach in the study of management and public organizations generally, but has not been extensively applied to this area of public financial decision making. Political economists, especially those identified with the public-choice approach, have done extensive macro-level normative and theoretical analysis of public debt, but not in an empirically rich fashion. This book therefore constitutes a missing link that uses analyses of selected cases to advance conceptual understandings of organizational accountability spaces in general, and decisions to incur public indebtedness and the implications of those decisions specifically, by examining the intersection of the macro, meso, and micro levels of expectations for and practices of public financial decision making.

This Handbook is a comprehensive anthology of up-to-date chapters contributed by current researchers in budget forecasting. Editors Daniel Williams and Thad Calabrese had previously found substantial deficiencies in public budgeting forecast literature with current research failing to address such matters as practices related to forecasting expenditure factors, the consequences of forecast bias, or empirical examination of the effectiveness of many deterministic methods actually used by many governments. This volume comprehensively addresses the state of knowledge about budget forecasting for practitioners, academics, and students and serves as a comprehensive resource for instruction alongside serving as a reference book for those engaged in budget forecasting practice.

This Handbook is a comprehensive anthology of up-to-date chapters contributed by current researchers in budget forecasting. Editors Daniel Williams and Thad Calabrese had previously found substantial deficiencies in public budgeting forecast literature with current research failing to address such matters as practices related to forecasting expenditure factors, the consequences of forecast bias, or empirical examination of the effectiveness of many deterministic methods actually used by many governments. This volume comprehensively addresses the state of knowledge about budget forecasting for practitioners, academics, and students and serves as a comprehensive resource for instruction alongside serving as a reference book for those engaged in budget forecasting practice.

This book examines budgeting by analyzing the local government budget as a complex system, thus adding a new dimension to traditional budget textbooks. It is designed to complement existing texts—not replace—by putting the budget in a complex system, general equilibrium framework. A complex systems framework adds to conventional budget analysis in at least four ways: It looks at the budget as the result of many variables that are outside the finance department’s purview; it understands that there are multiple interdependences among these variables; it suggests analysis of non-obvious relationships among actions in the budget process in order to optimize results; and it argues that the actors in the process must understand that their budgetary behaviors have indirect and far-reaching implications that go beyond the budget document.  This book also uses concepts seldom discussed in the budgetary literature—that of governance, including concepts of the facilitative state,with adjustments for exogenous shocks; the forms of decision making; and the political climate of the jurisdiction. This framework notes methods of success of firms in the private sector that operate in environments of rapid technological change. While becoming a popular theoretical framework for how private sector firms change, dynamic capability analysis has received little attention in the public management field. This book utilizes DC since public sector organizations also face rapidly changing environments. Lastly, the book discusses the potential relationship between the local budget and local community welfare maximization.