Managing Urban America guides students through the challenges, politics, and practice of urban management—including managing conflict through politics, adapting to demographic and social changes, balancing budgets, and delivering a myriad of goods and services to citizens in an efficient, equitable, and responsive manner. The Eighth Edition has been thoroughly updated to include a discussion of the difficulties cities confront as they deal with the lingering economic challenges of the 2008 recession, the concept of e-government and how it affects the theory and practice of management, and the implications of environmental issues for urban government management.

This collection of fifteen original essays examines methods of policy evaluation, performance measurement, fiscal cutback effects, and strategies of economic development in American local government. Each essay addresses, not only techniques of analysis, but also the application of those techniques to actual local government policy problems in areas such as urban development, policing, economic development, citizen satisfaction with services, personnel, and licensing, among others.

This unique volume takes a very different approach to township or xiangzhen governance. It explores the structural constraints on township governance and the way that these constraints influence the day-to-day behavior of Chinese rural grassroots government leaders. Based on thoroughgoing interviews with township and village cadres and villagers, the book depicts how individual actions affect and are affected by the underlying institutional arrangements and hence captures the dynamic micro functions of grassroots government as well as macro evolutions of overarching political institutions in China. The down-to-earth presentation of this book engages readers to deeply feel the genuine life and dilemmas of cadres at the rural grassroots levels in China.The goal of this book is to analyze the fiscal standing, power structure and public service functions of township governments in the context of its subtle relationships with upper level governments as well as with sub-level villages and the rural grassroots society. Its comprehensive documentation and in-depth discussion provide the best depiction of rural governance in contemporary China.

A conceptual and analytical framework for understanding economic institutions and institutional change. Markets are one of the most salient institutions produced by humans, and economists have traditionally analyzed the workings of the market mechanism. Recently, however, economists and others have begun to appreciate the many institution-related events and phenomena that have a significant impact on economic performance. Examples include the demise of the communist states, the emergence of Silicon Valley and e-commerce, the European currency unification, and the East Asian financial crises. In this book Masahiko Aoki uses modern game theory to develop a conceptual and analytical framework for understanding issues related to economic institutions. The wide-ranging discussion considers how institutions evolve, why their overall arrangements are robust and diverse across economies, and why they do or do not change in response to environmental factors such as technological progress, global market integration, and demographic change.