Reforming Fiscal Institutions in Resource-Rich Arab Economies

2019 ◽  
pp. 237-272
Author(s):  
Kamiar Mohaddes ◽  
Jeffrey B. Nugent ◽  
Hoda Selim
Keyword(s):  
Relative Price ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Sovereign Wealth Funds ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
Fiscal Institutions ◽  
Policy Proposals

This chapter traces the evolution of the fiscal institutions of resource-rich Arab economies (RRAEs) since pre-oil days. It then identifies challenges faced by RRAEs and variations in their severity over time. Finally, it articulates specific policy reforms aimed at dealing with these challenges. These include making budgets and budgetary processes more transparent and inclusive, minimizing expenditures which could be vulnerable to corruption or lead to relative price distortions and environmental damage, integrating short-term with medium- and long-term time horizons, and making use of appropriately designed budgetary rules and sovereign wealth funds. It also points to the need for institutional reforms going well beyond budgets and other fiscal institutions to labor laws, efficient judicial systems, greater checks and balances between government branches, and more competitive conditions for private enterprise. In some cases, however, these policy proposals may give rise to tradeoffs that will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Evolution in the Enabling Factors for Transformational Change in Forestry and Land Use Policy Processes: The Case Of Redd+ in Cameroon

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.L. Chia ◽  
D. Hubert ◽  
S. Carudenuto ◽  
O. Sene
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Transformational Change ◽  
Land Use Policy ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Enabling Factors ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Mitigate Climate Change

To mitigate climate change through forestry and land use, countries are expected to shift away from policies and practices that drive deforestation to ones that reduce forest loss. This paper draws on political economy concepts to assess the evolution in the enabling measures for transformational change in forestry and land use policy processes in Cameroon. The findings indicate that actors have diverse stances on the capacity of existing policy measures to guarantee transformational change. The policy environment has evolved with proposals on institutional arrangements and policy reforms that are far from concrete reforms as expected. There is significant room for fine-tuning proposed policy and institutional reforms to enable Cameroon respond to its international emission reduction commitments. For example, putting forward clear-cut incentive and regulatory mechanisms; enhance and create new anti-deforestation coalitions; generate concrete specific/tailored sector ideas and information; and enhance negotiations between sectoral interests. However, these can only be achieved in the long-term with continuous support.

Germany and its Eurozone Crisis Policy: The Impact of the Country's Ordoliberal Heritage

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Hillebrand
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Support ◽  
Eurozone Crisis ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
German School ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Policy Proposals ◽  
Bail Out

This article looks critically at the widely held view that Germany has not done enough to help overcome the Eurozone crisis. According to this line of argument, Germany has refused to comprehensively bail out crisis countries, offer mutual support in order to counter speculative attacks or endorse demand-side growth policies. This is allegedly because of a more narrowly defined national self-interest, increased EU-skepticism, and hegemonic ambitions. This article takes the perspective that such criticisms are primarily rooted in a Keynesian reading of the Eurozone troubles, whereas German policies are informed by another rationale: the ideas of so-called ordoliberalism. Generally, this traditional German school emphasizes the importance of principles, rule-based behavior, and long-term goals—and it believes in the (microeconomic) functioning of markets. Consequently, ordoliberals perceive the crisis as resulting from unsustainable debt levels and a lack of competitiveness in southern Europe, concomitant with a failure of Eurozone institutions. Based on this diagnosis, policy proposals are primarily targeted at debt reduction, as well as structural and EU institutional reforms. While Germany's crisis policy thus appears rational from an ordoliberal perspective, it is considered to be at variance with, and inadequate from the viewpoint of a Keynesian approach.

The Second Start of Transformation in Ukraine?

2014 ◽  
pp. 30-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Grigoryev ◽  
E. Buryak ◽  
A. Golyashev
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Investment Climate ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Personal Consumption ◽  
Governance Quality ◽  
Political Turmoil

The Ukrainian socio-economic crisis has been developing for years and resulted in the open socio-political turmoil and armed conflict. The Ukrainian population didn’t meet objectives of the post-Soviet transformation, and people were disillusioned for years, losing trust in the state and the Future. The role of workers’ remittances in the Ukrainian economy is underestimated, since the personal consumption and stability depend strongly on them. Social inequality, oligarchic control of key national assets contributed to instability as well as regional disparity, aggravated by identity differences. Economic growth is slow due to a long-term underinvestment, and prospects of improvement are dependent on some difficult institutional reforms, macro stability, open external markets and the elites’ consensus. Recovering after socio-economic and political crisis will need not merely time, but also governance quality improvement, institutions reform, the investment climate revival - that can be attributed as the second transformation in Ukraine.

Sovereign Wealth Funds and Long-Term Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boubacar Diallo ◽  
Fulbert Tchana Tchana ◽  
Albert G. Zeufack
Keyword(s):  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Sovereign Wealth Funds ◽  
Sub Saharan

Enhancing community welfare through improved water quality: a case for applying staggered pollution charges in the river Musi sub-basin of Andhra Pradesh, India

Water Policy ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 469-483
Author(s):  
Tishya Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Andhra Pradesh ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Pollution Prevention ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Marginal Costs ◽  
Community Acceptance ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Over Time

In conditions of severe water-pollution and dormant community acceptance of accumulating environmental damage, the regulator's role goes beyond pollution prevention and more towards remediation and solutions based on the community's long-term expectations of economic benefits from clean water. This paper suggests a method to enable these benefits to become perceptible progressively, through participatory clean-up operations, supported by staggered pollution charges. It analyses the relevant literature on pollution prevention and applies a cost-based “willingness to pay” model, using primary basin-level data of total marginal costs. It develops a replicable demand-side approach imposing charge-standard targets over time in urban-industrial basins of developing countries.

Defining the Environment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cymie R. Payne
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Jus Post Bellum ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
Environmental Integrity ◽  
Healthy Functioning

The principle of ‘environmental integrity’ is a fundamental aspect of jus post bellum. Human life, economy, and culture depend on a healthy, functioning environment. However, environmental integrity is a complex concept to describe. Doctrinal thresholds for legally material environmental damage (significant, long-term, widespread) do not capture it. This chapter interrogates the jus post bellum literature and then turns to scholarship on wilderness management in the Anthropocene era, which also engages with the meaning of ‘environmental integrity’, ‘naturalness’, ‘unimpaired’, or, in the words of the Factory at Chorzów case which sets the international law standard for reparations of damage, ‘the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if that act had not been committed’. Recognition that pristine or historical conditions are often impossible to recover or maintain leads to the legal, ethical, and scientific analysis of evolving environmental norms that this chapter offers.

The Conceptual Framework: Growth, Institutions, and Social Orders

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Lorenzo Capussela
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Reversible Process ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
Social Orders

This chapter lays out one part of the theoretical framework of the book, drawn from institutional economics. This literature maintains that institutions are the main determinant of long-term growth, and that to remain ‘appropriate’ institutions must evolve in synchrony with an economy’s progress through the stages of its development. Their evolution depends on a society’s openness to political creative destruction. Limited-access social orders tend to constrain it, to safeguard elites’ rents, and typically undermine progressive institutional reforms, breaking that synchrony. The transition from that social order to the open-access one is an endogenous and reversible process, in which inefficient institutions, which allow elites to extract rents, coexist with appropriate ones, which constrain their power and make it contestable. The hypothesis is advanced that Italy has not yet completed this transition, and that the tension between its efficient and inefficient institutions can endogenously generate shocks, which open opportunities for equilibrium shifts.

Marine Environmental Damage: The Compensability of Ecosystem Service Loss in International Law

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-641
Author(s):  
Günther Handl
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Marine Environment ◽  
Oil Pollution ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
Full Compensation ◽  
Environmental Loss ◽  
National Practice ◽  
Marine Environmental

AbstractKey maritime conventions governing liability and compensation for pollution of the marine environment, foremost among them the 1992 Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Convention and the 2003 Supplementary Fund Protocol (the CLC/Fund regime), exclude compensation for pure environmental loss. This article discusses whether anything less than full compensation of damage to the marine environment, including the loss of ecosystem services, comports with contemporary international public policy or law. After reviewing and rejecting traditional arguments opposing such compensability, the article contrasts the CLC/Fund regime’s environmental claims practice with emerging trends in decision on the international legal plane and in select domestic legal systems, all of which support full compensation. The article thus concludes that an adjustment of the CLC/Fund regime’s environmental claims approach is desirable to align it with this international (and national) practice and thereby to protect the long-term integrity of the regime itself.

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