Books in the SpringerBriefs in Economics series

This book compares urban finances in cities located in two different South Asian countries and assesses their fiscal health. It uses simulation to estimate the required augmentation in financial resources by the urban local bodies (ULBs) to reach a level of city development that is significantly better compared to existing levels. The book provides a systematic analysis of the fiscal health of two city corporations in Bangladesh, viz. Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) and Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC); and one city corporation in the Indian state of West Bengal viz. Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC). The choice of city corporations was based on the shared history and the similarity of heritage, culture, topography and socio-economic conditions. Both DNCC and DSCC as well as the KMC have a high population density, which puts immense pressure on the service delivery provided by these corporations of basic services such as water supply, sanitation facilities, street lighting, drainage and sewerage and waste disposal. This is compounded by poor fiscal health of the ULBs.  Using primary data collected through surveys and personal interviews and information obtained from official documents, the book estimates fiscal gaps of the ULBs and undertakes simple simulations to estimate potential revenue enhancements and expenditure requirements to deliver services at the internationally acceptable standards. It highlights under-exploited sources of revenue which can be better realized and also identifies untapped revenue sources that can be easily introduced, in order to significantly enhance city revenues. The book is an excellent resource not only for researchers studying this topic, but also for policy makers and urban planners, particularly those from developing countries having to deal with burgeoning cities with high migrant population density.

Conventional wisdom dictates that a fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. In particular, by incorporating the political effort behavior of private agents into a weak government model, we explore how income fluctuations affect the optimal budget deficits in a political economy.

This book offers an in-depth case study of Romania's land and agricultural reforms from mid-19th century and up to 2000, offering a historical account of agricultural reforms in post-communist Romania in the light of more than a century of social and economic development experiments.

This open access book tells the story of how Sweden is becoming a virtually cashless society. This highly topical book will be of interest to politicians, researchers, businesses, financial service providers and payment service providers, as well as fintech start-ups, regulators and other authorities.

The book collects the results of researchers in Japan, China, South Korea, and Indonesia on declining birthrates and aging, rapid technological innovation and societal changes, and recovery from natural disasters.Chapter 1 covers Japanese social welfare system reform and transformation of social governance.

This book provides an entry into the subjects of disparity and deprivation, by attending to issues that have a bearing on certain salient philosophical and conceptual aspects of these subjects.

Exploiting the corporate financial dataset compiled by the Development Bank of Japan, it shows empirical evidence that an excessive conservative financial policy of firms in good standing were responsible for sluggish reallocation of productive resources after the recovery of "zombie" firms.

Tohoku University and Iwate University, both at the center of post-disaster reconstruction following the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami;

This book theoretically and empirically explores why Japanese banks engaged in seemingly contradictory behaviors in the 1990s, namely, the credit crunch and evergreening, i.e., inefficient additional lending.

"The education to work transition of young people is key to a successful work-life and to fight youth unemployment.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. The authors of this book advise the economies of the European Union to become more entrepreneurial in promoting innovation and economic growth.

In this book, the basic information from each survey such as sampling methods, survey techniques, and available variables is provided and then compared to check the consistency across the same variables reported in different surveys.

This Brief sheds new light on three specific aspects of economic behavior - companies offering prize promotions, individuals making anonymous donations, and politicians creating political advertisements.

This book discusses the concepts, types, models, and patterns of crowdfunding to provide a comprehensive portrait of this newly developed market-based financial tool.

This volume develops original methods of analyzing biased technological progress in the theory and empirics of economic growth and income distribution.

This book presents the Balanced Development Index (BDI), measuring socioeconomic development in twenty-two European OECD member countries in a period 1999-2017. Compared to other composite measures of development, BDI looks beyond traditional development indicators, such as GDP, to create an index which gives equal weight to social, economic, objective, and subjective aspects of development. The BDI aggregates forty-two detailed indicators into four composite middle-level indexes: external economic (characterizing functioning of national economies in their international surroundings), internal economic (characterizing various aspects of domestic economic conditions), social expectations (public hopes and fears concerning economic, political and social conditions), and current social condition (including both objective and subjective social indicators)ΓÇöwhich are, in turn, aggregated into the general BDI index.

This book empirically analyzes the vulnerability of poor households in rural areas of Mexico and the effects of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program called PROGRESA-Oportunidades by adopting the two most recent sets of rural household panel data for 2003 2007.

Second, it presents a re-evaluation of Mexico's trade policies with China, from the import substitution industrialization (ISI) period in the early 1990s to the strengthening of economic and trade relations in recent years.

This brief analyzes each of the Major League Baseball (MLB) franchises in the American League, their past regular-season and postseason records and financial performances while operating as competitive, popular, and profitable or unprofitable enterprises.

This unique book develops an operational approach to preference and rationality as the author employs operators over binary relations to capture the concept of rationality.

While one may argue that Harrod (1939) and Domar (1946) have already achieved that, Shimomura's theory centers policy recommendations for sustaining the high economic growth against the productivity growth that would cause excess supply in the market.

This research focuses on the process of growth in the automobile industries in the ASEAN region. Thailand in particular has long treated automobile production as a national strategy, and this research puts considerable focus on Thailand's initiatives.

This book presents a technical approach to promoting the development of disaster and climate change risk financing and transfer strategies, and discusses several practical issues, chiefly focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean.

This book gives an introduction to R to build up graphing, simulating and computing skills to enable one to see theoretical and statistical models in economics in a unified way.

The data on various indices including sectoral indices help in measuring the relative efficiency of the market and understanding how liquidity and market capitalization affect the efficiency of the market.

This book adopts a linear optimization method and introduces a dynamic optimization simulation model for analyzing synthetic environmental policies as endogenous variables in order to improve the environment and provide more biomass energy.

The previous hyperinflation models surveyed in this book attempt to explain hyperinflation as a bubble phenomenon because they assume a constant real deficit financed by money. The mechanics of hyperinflation models in this book explains hyperinflation by a fiscal crisis, characterized by an increasing fiscal deficit.