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In Governing for the Long Term, Alan M. Jacobs investigates the conditions under which elected governments invest in long-term social benefits at short-term social cost. Jacobs contends that, along the path to adoption, investment-oriented policies must surmount three distinct hurdles to future-oriented state action: a problem of electoral risk, rooted in the scarcity of voter attention; a problem of prediction, deriving from the complexity of long-term policy effects; and a problem of institutional capacity, arising from interest groups' preferences for distributive gains over intertemporal bargains. Testing this argument through a four-country historical analysis of pension policymaking, the book illuminates crucial differences between the causal logics of distributive and intertemporal politics and makes a case for bringing trade-offs over time to the center of the study of policymaking.

The purpose of this book is to survey the literature on social welfare policies and planning of different nations in order to explain some of the major problems that are encountered in comparative research and to highlight what has been learned so far.

We propose a theory of monetary policy and macroprudential interventions in financial markets. We focus on economies with nominal rigidities in goods and labor markets and subject to constraints on monetary policy, such as the zero lower bound or fixed exchange rates. We identify an aggregate demand externality that can be corrected by macroprudential interventions in financial markets. Ex post, the distribution of wealth across agents affects aggregate demand and output. Ex ante, however, these effects are not internalized in private financial decisions. We provide a simple formula for the required financial interventions that depends on a small number of measurable sufficient statistics. We also characterize optimal monetary policy. We extend our framework to incorporate pecuniary externalities, providing a unified approach to both externalities. Finally, we provide a number of applications which illustrate the relevance of our theory.

Is there a role for governments in emerging countries to accelerate economic development by intervening in product and factor markets? To address this question, we study optimal dynamic Ramsey policies in a standard growth model with financial frictions. The optimal policy intervention involves pro-business policies like suppressed wages in early stages of the transition, resulting in higher entrepreneurial profits and faster wealth accumulation. This, in turn, relaxes borrowing constraints in the future, leading to higher labor productivity and wages. In the long run, optimal policy reverses sign and becomes pro-worker. In a multi-sector extension, optimal policy subsidizes sectors with a latent comparative advantage and, under certain circumstances, involves a depreciated real exchange rate. Our results provide an efficiency rationale, but also identify caveats, for many of the development policies actively pursued by dynamic emerging economies.

We study optimal monetary and fiscal policies in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets, and nominal rigidities. Our approach uses small-noise expansions and Fréchet derivatives to approximate equilibria quickly and efficiently. Responses of optimal policies to aggregate shocks differ qualitatively from what they would be in a corresponding representative agent economy and are an order of magnitude larger. A motive to provide insurance that arises from heterogeneity and incomplete markets outweighs price stabilization motives.

National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Urban studies scholars have engaged in a lively debate on how to reformat comparative methods in the face of critical scrutiny of the discipline’s purported universalism. We share the enthusiasm for a reformatted urban comparativism and, in this paper, we turn to the thorny and more pragmatic question of how to actually carry it out. While traditional comparisons in urban studies have sought to find variation among similar cases by selecting a priori, in this article we propose to compare the findings of different researchers through a posteriori, that is, after the research has been done. We also argue that urban researchers need to focus on urban processes rather than cities; on repeated instances rather than on controlling for difference; and on mid-level abstraction rather than on grand theory or descriptive empirical cases. We put this strategy to work by comparing empirical research previously carried out by the authors on how two Latin American cities became international urban ‘best practices’: Bogotáas a sustainable transport model and Porto Alegre as a model of local participatory budgeting. The comparison highlights the tension between the simplified policy narratives that were mobilised to circulate Bogotáand Porto Alegre as international ‘best practices’ and the broader multi-scalar institutional reforms that these ‘best practice’ narratives have left behind in their global circulations. In doing so, we show the potential of a posteriori comparisons to analyse contemporary global urban dynamics and provide some explicit methodological tactics on how to do comparisons in a more systematic way. 面对针对其学科的所谓普遍主义的批判性审视，城市研究学者就如何将比较方法重新格式化展开了激烈的辩论。我们也对城市研究比较方法的重新格式化充满热情，在这篇论文中，我们转向如何实施这个棘手而更实际的问题。城市研究中的传统比较方法试图通过选择先验来发现相似案例之间的差异，而在本文中，我们建议通过后验（即在研究完成后 ）来比较不同研究人员的发现。我们还认为，城市研究者需要关注各种城市过程，而不是不同的城市；需要关注重复的例子，而不是控制差异；需要关注中关抽象，而不是宏大的理论或描述性的经验案例。我们实施这一策略的方法是比较两位作者之前进行的、关于两个拉丁美洲城市如何成为国际城市“最佳实践”的实证研究：波哥大作为可持续交通模式，阿雷格里港作为地方参与式预算模式。这种比较凸显了简化的政策叙述和更广泛的多层次体制改革之间的紧张关系，前者被用于将波哥大和阿雷格里港作为国际“最佳实践”进行宣传，而后者则被排斥在这种宣传之外。藉此，我们展示了用后验比较来分析当代全球城市动态所具有的潜力，并就如何以更系统的方式进行比较提供了一些明确的方法策略。

The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that austerity is in fact the preferred response among most voters. We develop potential explanations for this surprising preference and demonstrate the empirical limitations of accounts centered on economic interests or an intuitive framing advantage. Instead, we show that the preference for austerity is highly sensitive to its political backers and precise composition of spending cuts and tax hikes. Using a novel approach to estimate support for historical austerity programs, we contend that governments’ strategic crafting of policy packages is a key factor underlying the support for austerity.