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In most countries, parliament has the constitutional mandate to both oversee and hold government to account. In light of the increased focus on good governance, academics and legislative strengthening practitioners are re-examining parliament's oversight function with a view to increasing public financial accountability, curbing corruption, and contributing to poverty reduction. This volume brings together research from many different perspectives and many different legislative settings worldwide. As the country case studies in section III demonstrate, the accountability mechanisms or oversight tools available to the legislature vary based on constitutionally defined powers of the legislature, institutional arrangements between the branches of government, divisions of authority between national, regional, and local governments, the degree of legitimacy conferred on the legislature, and the resources available to it. The budget process provides critical opportunities. Section II of this volume is devoted to examining budget oversight from the formulation and approval of the budget, to implementation and the ex post examination of the public accounts. Special attention is also paid to mechanisms to assist parliaments such as Public Accounts Committees and independent parliamentary budget offices. This title will be of interest to parliamentarians and parliamentary staff, legislative strengthening practitioners, and students of legislative development.

In most Westminster governments the essential characteristics of central government audit can be traced to the British Exchequer and Audit Act 1866. The Act was the pinnacle of government finance and accountability reforms implemented in the middle decades of the nineteenth century which were motivated by the need both to control and reduce government spending. The well-recognised Victorian affection for retrenchment gained its influence over these reforms through the contributions of key committed individuals, most importantly the politicians William Gladstone and Sir James Graham and the civil servant Sir Charles Trevelyan, all of whom were unremitting advocates of economy.

The fight against corruption is a developmental imperative. While international efforts have achieved some significant results, they also illustrate the extent of the challenges that remain. A key lesson of experience is that tackling corruption needs to be waged simultaneously on two fronts: prevention and enforcement. Both approaches are complementary and self-reinforcing. The vast scale of illicit financial flows from the proceeds of corruption and the challenges associated with national and international asset recovery efforts call, in particular, for significant investments in prevention and a broadening of prevention tools. Income and asset disclosure (IAD) systems are gaining prominence as a tool in the fight against corruption, and have the potential to support efforts in both prevention and enforcement. This contribution is recognized in the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) and other international anticorruption agreements. Chapter one of this guides provides an overview of the objectives of IAD systems, identifies the relevant international anticorruption instruments, and provides a summary of key considerations that should influence the design, implementation, and enforcement of an IAD framework. Chapters two and three drill down into the design of IAD systems and address practical aspects of implementation.

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge. Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form \"common knowledge.\" Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, knowledge of the knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures. He shows that public ceremonies are powerful not simply because they transmit meaning from a central source to each audience member but because they let audience members know what other members know. For instance, people watching the Super Bowl know that many others are seeing precisely what they see and that those people know in turn that many others are also watching. This creates common knowledge, and advertisers selling products that depend on consensus are willing to pay large sums to gain access to it. Remarkably, a great variety of rituals and ceremonies, such as formal inaugurations, work in much the same way. By using a rational-choice argument to explain diverse cultural practices, Chwe argues for a close reciprocal relationship between the perspectives of rationality and culture. He illustrates how game theory can be applied to an unexpectedly broad spectrum of problems, while showing in an admirably clear way what game theory might hold for scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are not yet acquainted with it. In a new afterword, Chwe delves into new applications of common knowledge, both in the real world and in experiments, and considers how generating common knowledge has become easier in the digital age.

The last decade of financial crisis, “financialization” and “quantitative easing” has been a feast of public learning about money and finance. Anthropology, history, and political economy rediscovered a “forgotten” history of money as fundamentally a public good rather than basically a private one. This article discusses the rediscovery of the two competing basic historical theories of money. It also notes that, after a turbulent decade of class and political polarization, including a worldwide pandemic, we also learned that under capitalism it just cannot be publicly conceded that money, if we want to, costs nothing, even though that is scientifically true. The article then reflects upon the current return of inflation and the turn toward “hard and dear money,” and what that might mean.

This is a comprehensive, critical introduction to the sociology of money, covering many currently taught topics, from the origins of money to its function today. Though our coins, bank notes and electronic tokens do function as means of exchange, money is in fact a social, intangible institution. This book argues that money does indeed rule the world. Exploring the unlikely origins of money in early societies and amidst the first civilisations, the book moves onto its inherent liaison with finance, including the logic of financial markets. Turning to the contemporary politics of money, monetary experiments and reform initiatives such as Bitcoin and positive money, it finally reveals the essentially monetary constitution of modern society itself. Through criticising the simplistic exchange paradigm of standard economics and rational choice theory, it argues instead that money matters because it embodies social relations.

In April 1485, a marble sarcophagus was found on the outskirts of Rome. It contained the remains of a young Roman woman so well-preserved that she appeared to have only just died and the sarcophagus was placed on public view, attracting great crowds. Such a find reminds us of the power of the dead body to evoke in the minds of living people, be they contemporary (survivors or mourners) or distanced from the remains by time, a range of emotions and physical responses, ranging from fascination to fear, and from curiosity to disgust. Archaeological interpretations of burial remains can often suggest that the skeletons which we uncover, and therefore usually associate with past funerary practices, were what was actually deposited in graves, rather than articulated corpses. The choices made by past communities or individuals about how to cope with a dead body in all of its dynamic and constituent forms, and whether there was reason to treat it in a manner that singled it out (positively or negatively) as different from other human corpses, provide the stimulus for this volume. The nine papers provide a series of theoretically informed, but not constrained, case studies which focus predominantly on the corporeal body in death. The aims are to take account of the active presence of dynamic material bodies at the heart of funerary events and to explore the questions that might be asked about their treatment; to explore ways of putting fleshed bodies back into our discussions of burials and mortuary treatment, as well as interpreting the meaning of these activities in relation to the bodies of both deceased and survivors; and to combine the insights that body-centered analysis can produce to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of the body, living and dead, in past cultures.

This volume combines the analyses of leading experts on the various elements affecting economic growth and the policies required to spur that growth. Ascent after Decline: Regrowing Global Economies after the Great Recession identifies the main challenges to the economic recovery, such as rising debt levels, reduced trade prospects, and global imbalances, as well as the obstacles to growth posed by fiscal conundrums and lagging infrastructure. It also examines the way forward, beginning with the role of the state and then covering labor markets, information technology, and innovation. The common thread throughout the book is the view that economic re-growth will depend in large measure on smart policy choices and that the role of government has never been more crucial than at any time since the great depression. As members of the World Bank community, these issues are of particular importance to us, since without a resurrection of strong economic growth in major economies, the likelihood of rapid economic development in poorer developing countries is dampened. This is troubling because we have seen progress in many parts of the globe in the past decade, including in Africa, and these gains will be arrested as long as the global economy is in disarray. Donors will withdraw, investment will retrench, and prospects will dim. This immiserizing welfare outcome is to be avoided. The volume is intended to shed light on those areas of policy that reduce the prospects of a prolonged period of stress and decline by 'regrowing growth.'