THE ROLE OF ACCOUNTING IN PUBLIC EXPENDITURE AND MONETARY POLICY IN THE FIRST CENTURY AD ROMAN EMPIRE

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Oldroyd

Previous authors have argued that Roman coinage was used as an instrument of financial control rather than simply as a means for the state to make payments, without assessing the accounting implications. The article reviews the literary and epigraphic evidence of the public expenditure accounts surrounding the Roman monetary system in the first century AD. This area has been neglected by accounting historians. Although the scope of the accounts supports the proposition that they were used for financial control, the impetus for keeping those accounts originally came from the emperor's public expenditure commitments. This suggests that financial control may have been encouraged by the financial planning that arose out of the exigencies of funding public expenditure. In this way these two aspects of monetary policy can be reconciled.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Emmanouil-Marios L. Economou ◽  
Nicholas C. Kyriazis ◽  
Nikolaos A. Kyriazis

By analyzing the case of Athens during the Classical period (508-323 BCE) the main thesis of this paper is that under direct democracy procedures and the related institutional setup, a monetary system without a Central Bank may function relatively well. We focus on the following issues: (i) Τhe procedures of currency issuing in the Athenian city-state, (ii) why the Athenian drachma become the leading international currency in the Mediterranean world (iii) how and towards which targets monetary policy without a Central Bank was possible (iv) defining the targets of monetary policy and the mechanisms for its implementation (v) the role of money in the economy (vi) the issue of deficit spending (vii) the reasons of the replacement of the Athenian drachma as a leading currency by others from the Hellenistic period onwards (viii) the correlation of our findings regarding the decentralized character of monetary policy in Classical Athens to today’s realities, such as the issue of cryptocurrencies. Our analysis shows that monetary policy without a Central Bank was possible, with its foremost aim being the stability of the currency (mainly, silver coins) in order to enhance trust in it and so, make it an international currency which could outcompete other currencies. Since there was no Central Bank like today, monetary policy decisions were taken by the popular assembly of citizens in combination with the market forces themselves.


2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. L. Welborn

Several recent studies have argued for the importance of democratic practices and ideology for a proper understanding of the issues and debates reflected in Paul's Corinthian correspondence. This new perspective stands in tension with older scholarship which emphasised the role of patronage in the structure and dynamics of the house churches that made up the ekklēsia of Christ-believers at Corinth. This essay draws upon new research into the political sociology of Greek cities in the early Empire, which highlights evidence of the continuing vitality of democratic assemblies (ekklēsiai) in the first and second centuries, despite the limitations imposed upon local autonomy by Roman rule. Special attention is devoted to the epigraphic evidence of first-century Corinth, whose political institutions and social relations were those of a Roman colony. The essay seeks to ascertain whether the politics of the Christ groups mimicked those of the city in which they were located or represented an alternative.


1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. C. Frend

Thus Gibbon opened the thirty-seventh chapter of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a lengthy chapter devoted to the twin topics of ‘the institution of monastic life’ and ‘the conversion of the northern barbarians’. The connection between the history of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church was indeed indissoluble. The Church was destined to follow the pattern of the empire by gradually degenerating as it grew in strength from original purity in the life of Christ and the Apostles to become a corrupt and baleful influence on the fortunes of secular society. Looking back over twenty years of research and writing (1767–87) he wrote near the beginning of his final chapter, ‘In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion and I can only resume in a few words, their real or imaginary connection with the ruin of ancient Rome.’ He goes on to list ‘potent and forcible causes of destruction’ by barbarians and Christians respectively. As he finally laid down his pen on 27 June 1787 at Lausanne, he concluded with a sentence whose strict accuracy has sometimes been doubted: ‘It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.’ The date of this decision was 15 October 1764. Here we survey briefly the role of ‘religion’, i.e. Christianity in the ruin of the Roman Empire.


Author(s):  
Mark Rush

This article discusses the evolution of U.S. civil rights and civil liberties through the lens of Supreme Court decisions. It traces the evolution of negative rights against the state and positive liberties from nineteenth-century property rights decisions through early-twenty-first century decisions regarding same-sex marriage. It also traces the shift in the Court’s approach to rights cases from one in which the state is regarded as a threat to individual rights to one in which the state plays a complex role of balancing rights claims. As well, the article demonstrates that rights claims and cases have become more complex as notions of the “public interest” become more contested when the pursuit of general interests has a disproportionate effect on the interests of particular social groups.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-78
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Szunke

The changes in the modern monetary policy, which took place at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in response to the global financial crisis led to the transformation of the place and the role of central banks. The strategic aim of the central monetary institutions has become preventing financial instability. So far, central banks have defined financial stability as a public good, which took care independently of other monetary purposes (Pyka, 2010). Unconventional monetary policy resulted in changes the global central banking. The aim of the study is to identify a new paradigm of the role and place of the central bank in the financial system and its new responsibilities, aimed at countering financial instability.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Evans

Sport is considered to be apolitical. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, sport and discourses around sport support and sustain dominant hegemony in various ways. This is just as true for the public school origins of modern sport as it is for contemporary global sport. Whether it be the capitalist ethic of the American Dream, or the imperial, British, ethic of ‘fair play,’ sport does not exist independent from ideology. Instead, sport is used as a social disciplining tool that underhandedly justifies, disciplines, and “normalizes” social behavior, culture, and dominant ideologies. This thesis begins with an examination of the role of sport as a tool for social disciplining but, alongside, also delves into instances when sport has provided individuals the opportunity to reconstitute their identities and subjective autonomies against dominant cultural hegemonies. Through analyses of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century cultural texts (literature and film), I argue that sport functions to both interpolate us as subjects and awaken us from docility in order lead us to critically engage with the world. The aim of this project is to identify these different functions of sport as social discourse and theorize a route by which sport can become more authentically emancipatory in the global present.


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-87
Author(s):  
Albert Sanchez-Graells

This piece reflects on the role of public procurement regulation in the face of a situation, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, generating an extremely urgent need for the public sector to buy additional supplies and equipment. Counterintuitively, at a time of heightened public expenditure, public procurement rules are ‘deactivated’. That does not mean that unusual procurement mechanisms are not ‘activated’, though, as the example of the EU’s Joint Procurement Agreement shows. It also does not mean that ‘reactivating’ public procurement regulation will not present challenges, some of which deserve careful consideration.


Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith

This chapter examines the role of taxation in the culture of contentment. In the age of contentment, macroeconomic policy has come to center not on tax policy but on monetary policy. Higher interest rates, it is hoped, will curb inflation without posing a threat to people of good fortune. Those with money to lend, the economically well-endowed rentier class, will thus be rewarded. The chapter first considers the role of monetary policy in the entirely plausible and powerfully adverse attitude toward taxation in the community of contentment before discussing the relationship between taxation and public services, and between taxation and public expenditures. It shows that public services and taxation have disparate effects on the Contented Electoral Majority on the one hand, and on the less affluent underclass on the other.


1989 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn F. Pitts

In recent years the ‘rex sociusque et amicus’ of the Roman Empire—frequently, if mistakenly, called a ‘client king’—has been the subject of much study, notably by D. Braund. Although ostensibly Braund and others are discussing the position and role of these kings on all the Roman frontiers, they concentrate in the main on those in the east. This is perhaps inevitable, since literary and epigraphic evidence abounds for the east, while it is scarce and often ambiguous for the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. Unfortunately direct comparison between east and west is meaningless: conditions which can be seen to apply to Rome's relations with her neighbours in the east cannot always be transferred to the west. In Greece and Asia Minor Rome was dealing with developed societies who could be integrated into a Roman administrative system; in the west, on the other hand, the peoples living beyond the frontiers, and indeed within them, were culturally less well-developed; here Rome had, on the whole, to negotiate with constantly changing tribal chiefs rather than with established monarchies.


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