The Handbook is a virtual encyclopedia of public financial management, written by topmost experts, many with a background in the IMF and World Bank. It provides the first comprehensive guide to the subject that has been published in more than ten years. The book is aimed at a broad audience of academics/students, government officials, development agencies and practitioners. It covers both bread-and-butter topics such as the macroeconomic and legal framework for budgeting, budget preparation and execution, procurement, accounting, reporting, audit and oversight, as well as specialist subjects such as government payroll systems, local government finance, fiscal transparency, the management of fiscal risks, sovereign wealth funds, the management of state-owned enterprises, and political economy aspects of budgeting. The book sets out numerous examples and case studies describing good practice in public financial management, and is highly relevant for use in both advanced and developing countries.

This volume presents a compelling package for anyone interested in public sector reform. It effectively combines a wide range of well-researched reviews of national experiences with state-of-the-art thematic chapters in key reform areas such as IT governance, public sector leadership and accountability. The result is a robust, insightful and sometimes sobering series of accounts of the promises and pitfalls of efforts to reform the institutions and practices of public governance around the world. A must-read. Paul t Hart, Australian National University This major Handbook provides a state-of-the-art study of the recent history and future development of international public management reform. Through a careful cross-country analysis spanning the last three decades this timely volume critically evaluates whether countries are converging towards a single public management model. The book goes on to investigate unresolved issues surrounding leadership, e-government, accountability and computer systems failure currently facing reformers. Shaun Goldfinch and Joe Wallis have brought together a number of eminent scholars from across Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia to explore the role of economic ideas, human resources and the state of public management reform in twelve countries. Providing a broad global overview of public management and facilitating a greater understanding of the difficult issue of reform, this book will find widespread appeal amongst academics and postgraduate students of public administration as well as practitioners in the field.

Michael Crew and David Parker have compiled a comprehensive, up-to-date and detailed analytical work on leading research issues in the economics of regulation. With contributions from international specialists in economic regulation, the Handbook provides a comprehensive discussion of major developments in both the theory and practice of regulatory economics. This book will be an indispensable source for both students and practitioners of regulation. The Handbook begins by looking at the principles, history and methods of regulation before turning to specialist themes including: pricing and social welfare regulating service quality consumer representation performance benchmarking environmental regulation calculating the cost of capital information revelation and incentives the economics of access charging regulatory governance regulatory policy in developing countries particular issues in the regulation of the telecommunications, energy, transport and water sectors. The International Handbook on Economic Regulation is essential reading for researchers in the economics of regulation and students of regulation on final year undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses. As a major reference work, it is of value and assistance to economists in regulatory offices, regulated companies and government departments.

The financial system and its regulation have undergone exponential growth and dramatic reform over the last thirty years. This period has witnessed major developments in the nature and intensity of financial markets, as well as repeated cycles of regulatory reform and development, often linked to crisis conditions. The recent financial crisis has led to unparalleled interest in financial regulation from policymakers, economists, legal practitioners, and the academic community, and has prompted large-scale regulatory reform. The Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation is the first comprehensive, authoritative, and state of the art account of the nature of financial regulation. Written by an international team of leading scholars in the field, it takes a contextual and comparative approach to examine scholarly, policy, and regulatory developments in the past three decades. The first three parts of the Handbook address the underpinning horizontal themes which arise in financial regulation: financial systems and regulation; the organization of financial system regulation, including regional examples from the EU and the US; and the delivery of outcomes and regulatory techniques. The final three Parts address the perennial objectives of financial regulation, widely regarded as the anchors of financial regulation internationally: financial stability, market efficiency, integrity, and transparency; and consumer protection. The Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of financial regulation, economists, policy-makers and regulators.

Under growing pressure from within and outside their economies, countries around the world have embarked upon wide-ranging programmes of financial reform. This handbook provides country studies of contemporary developments in financial reform in a selection of both developed and developing countries from Western Europe, North America, South America, Asia and Australia. The outcome is an account of the contemporary world-wide attempt to refashion the way in which the financial services industry (and especially the banking sector) is regulated and supervised.

The turmoil in financial markets that resulted from the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States indicates the need to dramatically transform regulation and supervision of financial institutions. Would these institutions have been sounder if the 2004 Revised Framework on International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards (Basel II accord)—negotiated between 1999 and 2004—had already been fully implemented? Basel II represents a dramatic change in capital regulation of large banks in the countries represented on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: Its internal ratings–based approaches to capital regulation will allow large banks to use their own credit risk models to set minimum capital requirements. The Basel Committee itself implicitly acknowledged in spring 2008 that the revised framework would not have been adequate to contain the risks exposed by the subprime crisis and needed strengthening. This crisis has highlighted two more basic questions about Basel II: One, is the method of capital regulation incorporated in the revised framework fundamentally misguided? Two, even if the basic Basel II approach has promise as a paradigm for domestic regulation, is the effort at extensive international harmonization of capital rules and supervisory practice useful and appropriate? This book provides the answers. It evaluates Basel II as a bank regulatory paradigm and as an international arrangement, considers some possible alternatives, and recommends significant changes in the arrangement.

ÔThe publication of this book could hardly be more timely; it fills a gap in present-day discussion of the reasons for the recent ongoing financial crises, and who was responsible. The balance between the governance and regulation of the international finance market underpins how securely we proceed into the future. At a time when sovereign defaults dominate public discussion, this issue is of quintessential importance. The editors are to be congratulated for this important publication.Õ Ð Christoph Paulus, Humbolt University of Berlin, Germany This thought-provoking book adds a new perspective to the analysis of how regulation should respond to the global financial crisis of 2008Ð2009. It focuses on the ÔprivateÕ as opposed to ÔpublicÕ aspect of regulation, and highlights the works of the publicÐprivate dialectic in regulation and enforcement. The expert authors examine what is perhaps the single most important sector in which public and private regulation and enforcement intersect: the arena of banking and global finance. The detailed analysis of these particular areas of finance thus provides a means for investigating aspects of the important topic of private regulation and enforcement in financial markets. A number of pertinent questions are addressed, including: How does private regulation and enforcement enhance or detract from the legitimacy of the process by which these market segments are managed and controlled? How does private regulation and enforcement manifest independence of action and judgment, as compared with public regulation? How does private regulation and enforcement measure up along dimensions of quality, relative to public regulation? and, finally, What forms of accountability characterize private as opposed to public regulation and enforcement? Illustrating the works of the publicÐprivate dialectic in regulation and enforcement, this challenging book will prove a fascinating read for academics, scholars and practitioners with an interest in regulation and governance issues, and in financial and banking law.