Economics and Finance

The purpose of this book is to introduce the substantial literature on consumption tax policy and the taxation of capital income, the early literature on optimal tax theory in dynamic overlapping generations' models, the more recent literature on optimal taxation in the Ramsey growth model and models of endogenous growth, and the literature on taxation in open economies. The book summarises the main arguments for and against consumption taxation, presents the main theoretical and empirical results of the technical literature, and, finally, extends the literature in a number of useful ways by complicating the models used to study tax issues. These extensions include bequeathing behaviour, the time consistency problem, the capital levy, charity and privately produced public goods, environmental externalities and renewable resources, durable goods and land, and money used in exchange and as an asset. Chapters are self-contained as far as possible, and each uses a variety of models rather than just one to study the issue at hand. Models and notation are explained each time they are used.

Over the past decade, management accounting has seen changes not just within existing domains of the field but has also witnessed extensions outside its established realms of activity. Wider systemic transformations including changes in political regimes, novel conceptions of management controls, the impact of globalizing forces on commercial affairs, shifts in notions of effective knowledge management, governance and ethics, and technological advances, including the rise of broadband, have all impacted management accounting endeavours. The field is as fast changing as it has ever been. This book captures key facets of current thoughts, concerns, and issues in management accounting. The book consists of eighteen chapters. The topic areas covered in some chapters reflect established management accounting topics such as budgeting and responsibility accounting, contract theory analysis, contingency frameworks, performance measurement systems and strategic cost management which are considered within the perspective of changing concerns facing modern organizations and present day management thought. Other chapters deal with newly emerging concerns in management accounting, including network relations, integrated cost management systems, knowledge management pursuits, environmental management accounting and accounting and digitization. Each chapter encompasses discussions of basic premises complemented by insights from modern day practice, research, and thought.

This book is based on detailed historical research in the USA and Germany, and represents a challenge to current orthodoxy on corporate governance. It is a challenging and informed examination of the links between the general business environment and the operations, decisions, and organizations of firms. The author also explores the links between corporate governance and innovation. The eight chapters are: Innovation, resource allocation, and governance; Transforming the debates on corporate governance; The foundations of managerial control in the USA; The post‐war evolution of managerial control in the United States; Challenges to post‐war managerial control in the USA; US corporate responses to new challenges; From managerial to contested control in Germany; and The emerging challenges to organizational control in Germany.

This book is a detailed study of rural reform in China. After the death of Mao, and with the ascendency of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began a programme of agricultural reform intended to increase productivity. Three major changes moved the agricultural sector from a centrally planned system to a more market-oriented one. First was the replacement of collective teams by farming by households. Second, an increase in free markets for rural products, and an increase in state prices for farm products, and the partial elimination of the two-tier price system. Third were changes in the economic structure that facilitated greater productivity and a 250% increase in average real rural incomes between 1979 and 1986. This book is unique in that it studies a single township (Dahe in Hebei Province) in depth over the two periods, thus providing data about the effects of reform at village level.

Among the questions tackled by Simon Domberger in this book are the following: When should organizations contract out services traditionally produced in‐house? Is outsourcing another ephemeral management fad, or is it an efficient and effective means of delivering services and of adding value? What are the characteristics of strategically sound contracting decisions? And how can organizations prosper from the outsourcing revolution? The book is based on over a decade of research and consulting experience, and its conclusions have many practical implications. It develops an analytical decision‐making framework for the assessment of contracting options, and has relevance in both the private and public sectors. It contains many illustrations and over 30 international case studies; over 50 companies and public sector organizations are discussed, including Microsoft, BP, Marks & Spencer and Samsung. The book is divided into four parts. Part I begins by considering the ‘make or buy’ decision, and this is followed by a discussion of the shifting boundaries of organizations, which revisits some of the critical issues underlying the theory of the firm. Part II examines in detail the benefits and costs of contracting. Part III examines the strategic aspects of contracting, involving the implementation of actual policies. Part IV looks at structural change associated with contracting, at the level of both individual sectors and the whole economy. Each chapter has a guide to further reading at its end.

Written by an international team of authors, this book provides the first systematic account of the control of corporate Europe based on voting block data disclosed in accordance with the European Union's Large Holdings Directive (88/627/EEC). The study provides detailed information on the voting control of companies listed on the official markets in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and as a benchmark comparison, the US. The authors record a high concentration of control of corporations in many European countries, with a single blockholder frequently controlling more than 50% of the corporate votes. In contrast, a majority of UK‐listed companies have no blockholder owning more than 6% of shares. These chapters devoted to individual countries illustrate how blockholders can use legal devices to leverage their voting power over their cash‐flow rights or how incumbents prevent outsiders from gaining voting control.

The book compares attitudes towards public and private welfare as well as developments in three social policy domains in the United Kingdom and Germany since the 1990s. Focusing on aspects such as fairness and social justice, it investigates to what extent perceptions towards the welfare state and collective forms of solidarity have changed in the context of profound social and economic change. Reviewing developments in family, pensions, and labour market policies, and taking account of both public provision as well as the role of companies, it asks whether the two countries have become more similar to each other since the 1990s. The chapters illustrate a considerable degree of policy dynamics, including far-reaching change in some areas which challenges conventional depictions of traditional welfare models. However, despite some degree of convergence in areas such as family policy, important cross-national differences in the provision and role of social policy remain.

Much of the discussion of Russia's recent post-Communist history has amounted, both in Russia and the West, to a series of monologues by strong-minded people with starkly divergent views. In contrast, the author of this book's conversations with influential, intelligent participants and observers provide the reader with a broad, nuanced view of what has and has not happened in the last 14 years, and why. Conversations from Russia thus serve as a reference volume, both for academics who study Russia and for laypeople who only have vague perceptions of what has occurred in Russia since the collapse of Communism. In conversations with important figures like Boris Yeltsin, George Soros, Anatoly Chubais, and Yegar Gaidar, the author considers questions like why the Soviet Union fell apart under Gorbachev, what went wrong with economic reforms after Gorbachev, whether the privatization of Russian assets could have been managed differently, and what the prospects are for the Russian economy in the near future. She ties the interviews together with an introduction, ultimately reaching her own judgment on each issue considered in the conversations.

This book develops “Macroeconomic Uncertainty Strategy” (MUST) as a tool for coping with the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on risk management, performance assessment, and strategies for value enhancement. The essential elements of a corporate strategy for managing uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment includes setting corporate objectives for risk management, measuring risk, choosing operational and financial instruments for risk management, filtering out macroeconomic influences on performance, and developing compensation schemes that enhance shareholder value when macroeconomic fluctuations bias performance measures. The information obtained through conventional accounting systems become seriously misleading in response to macroeconomic fluctuations with the consequence that alternative ways to obtain relevant information must be considered. Conventional measures of exchange rate, interest rate, and inflation risk are similarly misleading with the consequence that a comprehensive view of the macroeconomic impact on the firm—recognizing the interdependence between macroeconomic variables—must be developed. Most of all, strategies to deal with macroeconomic fluctuations should be considered on a strategic level in the firm in order to establish shareholder wealth maximization as the objective of risk management and reward systems. Shareholder wealth maximization also requires that external stakeholders obtain information that allows them to evaluate the competitiveness of the firm without obfuscation by macroeconomic events.

This book uses comparative institutional analysis to explain differences in national economic performance. Countries have their own rules for corporate governance and they have different market arrangements; and these differences in rules and organization affect the way firms behave. Countries also tend to develop conventions of organizational architecture whether their hierarchies are functional, horizontal, or decentralized. This affects the way in which they process information, and information management is increasingly seen as being of crucial importance to a firm's performance. This book accords more importance to these factors than to the factors conventionally used in applying a neoclassical model of economic efficiency. It applies game theory, contract theory, and information theory. By describing the rules and norms in Japan, the USA, and the transitional economies, the book shows how firms can achieve competitive advantage in international markets if these conventions and rules are well suited to the industrial sector in which the firms operate. The book is particularly concerned with how Japan, with its main bank and lifelong employment systems, as well as information-sharing firm organizational structure, might reform its institutions to maintain competitive advantage in the world economy.