Bücher veröffentlicht von Brookings Institution Press

School boards are fighting for their survival. Almost everything that they do is subject to regulations handed down from city councils, state boards of education, legislatures, and courts. "Besieged" is the first full-length volume in many years to systematically examine the politics that surround school boards.

In their new book, Jack Triplett and Barry Bosworth analyze services sector productivity, demonstrating that fundamental changes have taken place in this sector of the U.S. economy.

This policy-oriented book of essays by noted scholars and experts considers the key trends shaping Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic, to climate change, economic disruptions, demographics and other domestic concerns, and shifts in the global order.

"American public policy has had a long history of technological optimism. The success of the United States in research and development contributes to this optimism and leads many to assume that there is a technological fix for significant national problems. Since World War II the federal government has been the major supporter of commercial research and development efforts in a wide variety of industries. But how successful are these projects? And equally important, how do economic and policy factors influence performance and are these influences predictable and controllable?Linda Cohen, Roger Noll, and three other economists address these questions while focusing on the importance of R&D to the national economy. They examine the codependency between technological progress and economic growth and explain such matters as why the private sector often fails to fund commercially applicable research adequately and why the government should focus support on some industries and not others. They also analyze political incentives facing officials who enact and implement programs and the subsequent forces affecting decisions to continue, terminate, or redirect them. The central part of this book presents detailed case histories of six programs: the supersonic transport, communications satellites, the space shuttle, the breeder reactor, photovoltaics, and synthetic fuels. The authors conclude with recommendations for program restructuring to minimize the conflict between economic objectives and political constraints."

This book examines the current difficulties facing the U.S. steel industry and policy options to tackle them.

"Whether the nation would be better served by an income tax or by a consumption tax has been debated by tax experts for decades. In practice, tax systems everywhere are mixed or ""hybrid"" systems. And while legislators have reasons for enacting such systems, the mix results in inequities, inefficiencies, and abuse.For Uneasy Compromise, Brookings brought together some of the nation's most knowledgeable tax experts and analysts to address the question: How should lawmakers grapple with the problems that arise from the side-by-side existence of principles of consumption taxation with principles of income taxation? Rather than propose rules for an ideal system that will never exist, this book addresses the problems created by a hybrid system. In so doing, it offers policymakers a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of our current tax system and the tools for evaluating proposed refinements."

Catherine Gwin examines the evolution of U.S. policy toward the World Bank and the impact of the United States on the institution's policies and operations. Beginning with the U.S. role in the start-up of the Bank, Gwin describes the ebb and flow of the U.S. support: the increasing activism of Congress in U.S.-World Bank policy starting in the 1970s, the breakdown in the bipartisan character of support for the Bank in the early 1980s, followed by renewed U.S. attention in response to the debt crisis, and the later entry of Russia and other transforming economies into the Bank. Gwin disputes both those who see the Bank as under the thumb of the United States and those who see it as unresponsive to U.S. concerns. She suggests that the U.S. policy toward the World Bank has always reflected an underlying ambivalence toward both development assistance and multilateral cooperation. As a result, U.S. policy in the Bank has been erratic-often reflecting the swings in U.S. politics and foreign policy rather than presenting a coherent view of the development financing role of the World Bank and a rigorous concern for the effectiveness of Bank operations.

The growth rate of national income has fluctuated widely in the United States since 1929. In this volume, Edward F. Denison uses the growth accounting methodology he pioneered and refined in earlier studies to track changes in the trend of output and its determinants. At every step he systematically distinguishes changes in the economy's ability to produce-as measured by his series on potential national income-from changes in the ratio of actual output to potential output. Using data for earlier years as a backdrop, Denison focuses on the dramatic decline in the growth of potential national income that started in 1974 and was further accentuated beginning in 1980, and on the pronounced decline from business cycle to business cycle in the average ratio of actual to potential output, a slide under way since 1969. The decline in growth rates has been especially pronounced in national income per person employed and other productivity measures as growth of total output has slowed despite a sharp acceleration in growth of employment and total hours at work. Denison organizes his discussion around eight table that divide 1929-82 into three long periods (the last, 1973-82) and seven shorter periods (the most recent, 1973-79 and 1979-82). These tables provide estimates of the sources of growth for eight output measures in each period. Denison stresses that the 1973-82 period of slow growth in unfinished. He observes no improvement in the productivity trend, only a weak cyclical recovery from a 1982 low. Sources-of-growth tables isolate the contributions made to growth between "input" and "output per unit of input.? Even so, it is not possible to quantify separately the contribution of all determinants, and Denison evaluates qualitatively the effects of other developments on the productivity slowdown.

The sharp decline in U.S. productivity growth in the 1970s has brought about a renewed interest in economic policies to expand aggregate supply. Particular importance has been given to the role played by government intervention in the form of taxes, transfer payments, and regulation. This volume asks just what is known about the effect of government policy on the productive capacity of the nation. It also looks at the role played by capital formation, technological change, and the quality of the work force.

In the last quarter century the Soviet Union and the United States have repeatedly come into conflict in various parts of the third world. During this period the most backward third world countries have sometimes proved susceptible to radical revolution, but the countries well on the way to industrialization have moved away from left-wing economic and political policies. In the longer perspective the West has been winning the struggle for the third world. The changes in those countries have been the subject of intense published debate in the Soviet Union-debate on Marxist concepts of the stages of history, on theories of economic development and revolutionary strategy, and on foreign policy. Jerry F. Hough explores the breakup of the orthodox Stalinist position on these issues and the evolution of free-swinging discussion about them. He suggests that, paradoxically, many of the old Stalinist ideas retain their strongest hold in the United States, which has not fully recognized its victory in the third world and the importance of the West's great economic power. The United States too often assumes that radical regimes will inevitably follow the Soviet path of development and that the nature of a regime determines the nature of its foreign policy. Because of these misperceptions, Hough argues the United States misses many opportunities in the third world. It emphasizes military power, even to the extent of undermining its crucial economic power, and it fails to offer the face-saving gestures that would permit Soviet retreats. Hough presents a prescription for an American policy better suited to the new realities in the third world and to the changing Soviet attitude toward them.