Former ABFM Chair and Wildavsky Award Winner, James Savage, is joined by George Guess in publishing a new edition to their 2010 text, Comparative Public Budgeting Global Perspectives on Taxing and Spending. This book will publish January 2021 and is now available for pre-order through Cambridge University Press (click here) in hardback and paperback.
Here’s a synopsis of the book from the publisher:
Every government engages in budgeting and public financial management to run the affairs of state. Effective budgeting empowers states to prioritize policies, allocate resources, and discipline bureaucracies, and it contributes to efficacious fiscal and macroeconomic policies. Budgeting can be transparent, participatory, and promote democratic decision-making, or it can be opaque, hierarchical, and encourage authoritarian rule. This book compares budgetary systems around the world by examining the economic, political, cultural, and institutional contexts in which they are formulated, adopted, and executed. The second edition has been updated with new data to offer a more expansive set of national case studies, with examples of budgeting in China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, and Nigeria. Chapters also discuss Brexit and the European Union’s struggle to require balances budgets during the Euro Debt Crisis. Additionally, the authors provide a deeper analysis of developments in US budgetary policies from the Revolutionary War through the Trump presidency.
- This edition considers global changes in public budgeting and financial management that have occurred since the first edition’s publication in 2010
- Introduces eight ‘cultural clusters’ that enable readers to compare the history, development, and modern practices of public budgeting and financial management across different countries
- Allows readers without specialized training in public finance to understand the core functions of public budgeting
George M. Guess is Adjunct Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and is a former Scholar in Residence in Public Administration and Policy at American University. Guess is the author or co-author of ten books, including Building Democracy and International Governance; International Public Policy Analysis and Cases in Public Policy Analysis.
James D. Savage is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Savage is the author of Reconstructing Iraq’s Budgetary Institutions: Coalition State Building after Saddam (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities, and the Politics of the Academic Pork Barrel (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Making the EMU: The Politics of Budgetary Surveillance and the Enforcement of Maastricht, and Balanced Budgets and American Politics.