Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State

Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State PDF

Author: Wenkai He

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0674074637

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Wenkai He shows why England and Japan, facing crises in public finance, developed the tools and institutions of a modern fiscal state, while China, facing similar circumstances, did not. He’s explanation for China’s failure at a critical moment illuminates one of the most important but least understood transformations of the modern world.

Paths Toward the Modern Fiscal State

Paths Toward the Modern Fiscal State PDF

Author: Wenkai He

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

(Cont.) As a problem that had to be solved, they forced experimentation, "selected" effective institutional arrangements and competent financial officials, and facilitated a continuous learning and accumulation of effective elements in a process full of uncertainties. Socio-economic conditions, such as the size of consumption and the degree of concentration of production, were important to sustain this process in which various elements came to form a mutually reinforcing system. The lack of such an interactive process is used to explain the absence of a modem fiscal state in China. This institutional model reconciles the uncertainties and multiplicity of possible outcomes in the early stages of the process and the eventual observed outcome. This dissertation contributes to the study of institutional dynamics, which aims to understand how specific institutions emerge and consolidate.

The Rise of Fiscal States

The Rise of Fiscal States PDF

Author: Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-05-24

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1107013518

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Leading economic historians present a groundbreaking series of country case studies exploring the formation of fiscal states in Eurasia.

Making the Modern American Fiscal State

Making the Modern American Fiscal State PDF

Author: Ajay K. Mehrotra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9781107619739

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US system of public finance underwent a dramatic transformation. The late nineteenth-century regime of indirect, hidden, partisan, and regressive taxes was eclipsed in the early twentieth century by a direct, transparent, professionally administered, and progressive tax system. In Making the American Fiscal State, Ajay K. Mehrotra uncovers the contested roots and paradoxical consequences of this fundamental shift in American tax law and policy. He argues that the move toward a regime of direct and graduated taxation marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - a new form of statecraft that was guided not simply by the functional need for greater revenue but by broader social concerns about economic justice, civic identity, bureaucratic capacity, and public power. Between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the Great Depression, the intellectual, legal, and administrative foundations of the modern fiscal state first took shape. This book explains how and why this new fiscal polity came to be.

Averting a Great Divergence

Averting a Great Divergence PDF

Author: Peer Vries

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-08-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 135012169X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The most significant debate in global economic history over the past twenty years has dealt with the Great Divergence, the economic gap between different parts of the world. Thus far, this debate has focused on China, India and north-western Europe, particularly Great Britain. This book shifts the focus to ask how Japan became the only non-western county that managed, at least partially, to modernize its economy and start to industrialize in the 19th century. Using a range of empirical data, Peer Vries analyses the role of the state in Japan's economic growth from the Meiji Restoration to World War II, and asks whether Japan's economic success can be attributed to the rise of state power. Asserting that the state's involvement was fundamental in Japan's economic 'catching up', he demonstrates how this was built on legacies from the previous Tokugawa period. In this book, Vries deepens our understanding of the Great Divergence in global history by re-examining how Japan developed and modernized against the odds.

The New Localism

The New Localism PDF

Author: Bruce Katz

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0815731655

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work. In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges. Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation. This new locus of power—this new localism—is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern societies: economic competitiveness, social inclusion and opportunity; a renewed public life; the challenge of diversity; and the imperative of environmental sustainability. Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on. New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction. In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales. Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision. As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

No Great Wall

No Great Wall PDF

Author: Felix Boecking

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-05-11

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1684175720

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"This book, an in-depth study of Nationalist tariff policy, fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. It argues instead that during the second Sino-Japanese War, China’s international trade, the Nationalist government’s tariff revenues, and hence its fiscal policy and state-making project all collapsed. Because tariffs on China’s international trade produced the single greatest share of central government revenue during the Nanjing decade, the political existence of the Nationalist government depended on tariff revenue. Therefore, Chinese economic nationalism, both at the official and popular levels, had to be managed carefully so as not to jeopardize the Nationalist government’s income. Until the outbreak of war in 1937, the Nationalists’ management of international trade and China’s government finances was largely successful in terms of producing increasing and sustainable revenues. Within the first year of war, however, the Nationalists lost territories producing 80 percent of tariff revenue. Hence, government revenue declined just as war-related expenditure increased, and the Nationalist government had to resort to more rapacious forms of revenue extraction—a decision that had disastrous consequences for both its finances and its political viability."

This Time Is Different

This Time Is Different PDF

Author: Carmen M. Reinhart

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-08-07

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0691152640

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.

Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries

Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries PDF

Author: Deborah Brautigam

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-01-10

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1139469258

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

There is a widespread concern that, in some parts of the world, governments are unable to exercise effective authority. When governments fail, more sinister forces thrive: warlords, arms smugglers, narcotics enterprises, kidnap gangs, terrorist networks, armed militias. Why do governments fail? This book explores an old idea that has returned to prominence: that authority, effectiveness, accountability and responsiveness is closely related to the ways in which governments are financed. It matters that governments tax their citizens rather than live from oil revenues and foreign aid, and it matters how they tax them. Taxation stimulates demands for representation, and an effective revenue authority is the central pillar of state capacity. Using case studies from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, this book presents and evaluates these arguments, updates theories derived from European history in the light of conditions in contemporary poorer countries, and draws conclusions for policy-makers.

Public Interest and State Legitimation

Public Interest and State Legitimation PDF

Author: Wenkai He

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-09-30

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1009334530

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Safeguarding public interest was vital to early modern state legitimacy in Western Europe and East Asia. Wenkai He identifies similar patterns in state-society interactions surrounding public goods provision and explores how conflicts over public interest led to calls for fundamental political change and to modern representative politics.