Accelerating Municipal Bond Market Development in Emerging Economies: An Assessment of Strategies and Progress
The advantages of using municipal bonds to finance urban infrastructure are increasingly evident to policymakers in emerging economies, some of whom are undertaking efforts to accelerate the development of municipal bond markets in their countries. Many of these efforts use the strengths of the U.S. municipal market as a guide to suggest the kinds of market characteristics necessary to attract issuers as well as investors to the marketplace. Features of the U.S. market are often difficult to recreate in these countries in the short run, but policymakers are using a variety of innovative techniques to approximate essential market characteristics. This article reviews these efforts in four emerging economies: Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa.
Local Government Units` Access to the Private Capital Markets
The devolution of functions and responsibilities to LGUs has translated to the expectations of an improved delivery of public goods and services. However, LGU funding, mainly coming from the national government, loans from the government-owned financial institutions and Municipal Development Fund, have not been sufficient to meet the LGU requirement. This study provides results and analyses that can assist the government in developing a policy and institutional framework for the establishment of a municipal credit system well participated by the private sector.
Wpp$$: Who is to Blame for the Wppss Disaster
as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Joseph Califano as secretary of Health and Human Services, Attorney General Edwin Meese, and Raymond Peck as administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—are cautionary tales illustrating the consequences of failure to recognize the subtle demands of inducing an agency to move in a different direction, assembling external support for a controversial policy, or identifying the president's "real" interests. In explaining how these failures might have been avoided, Heymann argues that properly understood, "the management of politics is the pursuit of wholesale and lasting advantages for one's self, one's organization, and one's policies" (p. 142). The Politics of Public Management is not a work of scholarship. It has neither footnotes nor a bibliography; its recognition of related literature is confined to a single, largely dismissive, paragraph in the preface; and the choice of cases is highly selective. The discussion is loosely structured in a way that suggests it may have originated as a course. The book is rather a thoughtful personal reflection, didactic in purpose and tone. Its value lies in drawing attention to a neglected actor, the appointed executive, and in advancing the notion that by virtue of their knowing more about their departments than anyone else, appointed executives are in a position to make consequential contributions to public policy formation. Had Heymann grounded his argument in ideas drawn from the work of John Kingdon, Murray Edelman, Charles Lindblom, James March, Hugh Heclo, or others who have been concerned with the role of appointed executives or had he drawn on a greater variety of empirical materials, his book might have had value beyond that of supplementary reading.