The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasury rose, and then rose again in its place in the twentieth, and rose again in the twenty-first century, to become, the biggest single challenge to the authority of the prime minister. No longer subordinate at all. Naked power, ambition, the knowledge that some were virtually unsackable, command over the purse and the backing of the mighty resource of the Treasury compared to the puny No. 10, ensured that Chancellors could be a power to themselves, strutting around Westminster and Whitehall at times like an overmighty baron in medieval England, making the job of prime minister at times impossible. Reaching this elevated position was not preordained, as we shall see in this chapter, and occurred through seven successive pulses, each associated with a commanding figure, usually the Chancellor, who has shaped the office, much as our landmark prime ministers have done to their own office. There are three great contemporary problems with the Treasury: its handicapping of the prime minister in shaping government strategy, its prioritising of financial over economic policy, and a diminishing role of Parliament in its oversight, have all had long roots.

The fiscal system of the United States exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States makes decisions about how to allocate resources using a fiscal system that assumes a baseline of private ownership from which Congress may depart by generating “revenue” and appropriating funds to the executive branch to spend for a specific purpose. This chapter describes three aspects of this allocative framework that contributed to the country’s tragic failure to meet the coronavirus challenge. First, scorekeeping, the process for predicting what legislation will “cost” and what it will “save” to meet the political desire to minimize the need to borrow. A decade before the coronavirus pandemic the Affordable Care Act created a significant “Prevention and Public Health Fund,” but as Professor Westmoreland first documented, Congressional scorekeeping rules that treat preventive investment as worthless encouraged Congress to “raid” the fund to spend on purposes other than public health, which it did. Second, Congress’ reliance on short-term appropriations to retain influence over the executive branch. Although essential to the separation of powers, the parasitic power of the purse and its insistence on short-term spending packages repeatedly stymied and hobbled federal relief with short-, medium-, and long-term impacts on the nation’s health and economic wellbeing. Third, the executive’s asymmetric discretion over spending. The president’s discretion to refuse to spend made it possible for President Trump to frustrate the efforts of Congress to continue the country’s support for the World Health Organization by declining to allocate appropriated funds for the organization in the midst of the pandemic.

Whether domestic and international contexts affect governments’ abilities to alter total expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility is our focus in Chapter 6. We develop expectations about the influence of government ideology and majority status together with contextual factors and other budgetary components on each of our four budgetary components. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. Building on the results from the panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model from Chapter 5, we specify separate reduced-form models for each of our budget component variables to test our theoretical expectations. Across the results we present in this chapter, we find very few statistically significant effects, especially in terms of long-run effects, on the four budgetary components. The strongest results are for the influence of contextual factors on budgetary volatility, specifically when increasing unemployment and economic openness. When unemployment or economic openness increases, we find that budgetary volatility increases under majority left governments in both the short- and long-runs. This evidence indicates that right and left governments differ in how much they respond to both domestic and international contexts.

Government budgets can be complex and contentious. Chapter 1 explains the importance of understanding government budgetary behavior and argues for taking a more realistic view of the process. If governments change part of the budget, then they may need to jostle other budgetary pieces as well. We introduce the broad brushstrokes of our theoretical argument that explains when governments have the desire and power to alter budgets, given both their ideological preferences and contextual factors. We acknowledge that spending increases or decreases in some policy areas may require shifts in budgets for other areas, so we use a compositional methodological approach to investigate those changes. In addition, we foreshadow how our theoretical argument also helps to explain the linkages between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility. To test theories about these linkages we use panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) models. In order to make our findings from the complex models that we use to test our theoretical propositions accessible, we will use a series of graphical interpretation strategies and present technical details of our models and graphs in appendices. Overall, Chapter 1 sets the stage for a book that unravels the brainteaser of government budgetary behavior across countries and years.

In Chapter 9 we talk about how to find requests for proposals/quotes/applications for your organization, or for community organizations you are working with, how to write a good prposal, and things you can do when money is tight.

We turn to the larger pieces of the budget in Chapter 5, where we focus on two objectives. First, we ask how the components of the budgets fit together by conducting causality tests for the full range of possible relationships between expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility using a panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model. We find that changes to expenditures and revenues drive changes to deficits, and we also find that changes to deficits lead to revenue changes. Second, using findings from these causality tests from the pVAR model, we then test our expectations about ideology and context on total spending, revenues, budget deficits, and budgetary volatility. Once we include these causal relationships in our models, we find that government ideology and majority status do not appear to alter either total expenditures or revenues, but a shift from a left to a right majority government is associated with a long-run decrease in deficits. For budgetary volatility, a move from a left to a right majority government corresponds with a positive significant increase in volatility. These findings fit our expectations that it is political competition that shifts budgets, with government ideology many times proctoring for those differences.

In Chapter 2, we begin with a discussion of the vast literature on political budgeting. We identify three main types of approaches in the extant literature – studies focusing on single budgetary categories, studies of budgetary changes, and studies of aggregate budgetary components. While each of these approaches has provided helpful insights into the relationships between politics and budgeting, they have ignored or greatly simplified the complex tradeoffs and interworkings of budgetary components. Our theoretical argument of political budgeting engages with both the compositional tradeoffs that occur across expenditure categories and the simultaneous interplay between expenditures, revenues, budgetary volatility, and deficit components of budgets. We argue that government ideology and the priorities of core supporters of governments drive their general budgetary priorities; however, domestic and international contexts can make it easier or harder for governments to implement these priorities. Focusing on the contexts of government power, electoral timing, economic conditions, globalization, and conflict affect governments’ budgetary abilities, we put forth a theoretical argument that governments may be unable to fulfil their ideological preferences when external contexts constrain their behavior.

New product development processes need to be compliant to regulatory requirements, and this chapter highlights the salient processes and quality systems to put into place to achieve success. Project management is made simple with specific tools provided here. Customer feedback is channeled into specific product characteristics, and the right tools are shown in this chapter. The biopharma industry has statistics showing less than 10% of starting compounds succeed in reaching market approval, and this chapter explains what causes these failures. The key issues that have repeatedly caused failure during device and diagnostic product development are also pointed out. Ethical decisions have to be made during product development as shown in this chapter. Outsourcing is a real option due to the availability of many contract research and manufacturing organizations, and judicious use of this option is discussed in this chapter. Key milestones that reduce risk and show transition from early stage to preclinical prototype stages are reviewed here. Does the popular concept of minimum viable product in software development apply in biomedicine prototyping? Other similar questions that help the reader understand pitfalls and best practices are answered here.

Chapter 4 is focused on the analysis of the influence populists’ rule has on two institutions: competition agencies and courts. It examines the competition agency’s independence, operating capabilities, mandate, and judicial review of the agency’s actions. In each of these areas the exact manifestations of the influence of populists’ governments on the institutional organization of competition law systems are scrutinized. The discussed manifestations include: a politically driven appointment process, the limited autonomy of decision-makers, leadership changes, staff fluctuation and decrease in expertise, scarce resources, prioritization of consumer protection, the scope of the agency’s mandate, and weakening of the independent and expert character of judicial review.

Any community involved in revitalization work will benefit from having a strategic language plan in place, with clearly identified short and long term goals. Ideally, projects are a carefully planned set of activities within a specific time frame and with well-defined outcomes. This chapter sets out a series of steps, beginning from the “good idea” and progressing through assessing the needs that a project will address, outlining the project and relating its intended outcomes to the broader strategic needs and goals of the community. It then covers specific details that need to be addressed in planning, such as resources, audience, budget, funding, timeline and other matters, before moving on to implementation, contingency plans and evaluation. The capsule provides a set of tips on how to maximize use of emotional resources and minimize use of money, emphasizing how much can be achieved through positive attitudes and commitment, even without financial resources.

This chapter offers practical guidance for funding language revitalization projects, particularly for language activists and community members. Some organizations devoted to endangered languages provide grants for revitalization efforts; funding may also be available from government bodies (mainly in the US and Canada) and other grants and scholarships. For smaller projects, crowd funding and other community initiatives have the additional benefits of raising awareness of the language revitalization program and involving the wider community. The factors that reviewers consider in assessing formal funding proposals are discussed, including the importance, feasibility and design of the project; the applicant’s connection to the community and ability to complete the work; and the appropriateness of the budget, including guidance on common budget categories and expenses. The capsule reports on a survey investigating attitudes of NGOs in Guatemala towards language revitalization; local organizations and institutions with a vested interest in local people were more likely to provide practical and financial support for revitalization initiatives.

This chapter charts the overall course and key episodes of the National Government during Ramsay MacDonald’s premiership (1931-1935) and that of Stanley Baldwin (1935-37), considering in particular the fortunes of popular Conservatism in the constituencies. It has four sections. The first explores how the Conservatives exploited the financial and political crises of August 1931 to construct a new anti-socialist paradigm that gave the outgoing Labour government’s alleged failing a concrete form around which all Conservatives could mobilise. The second and third sections outline the National Government’s work in securing economic recovery and responding to the plight of the unemployed. It argues that this reflected a culture of active and imaginative government. The final section explores the relationship between party and ‘national’ political identities in the constituencies. IT argues that the process of defining the National Government in the interests of local Conservatism introduced the rank and file to a broader range of political discourses, which complemented but did not supplant their preoccupation with rehabilitating a traditional politics of place.

Chapter 4 examines the role of international administrative mechanisms (linked with a judicial mechanism) in the provision of reparations for international crimes. It questions whether reparations should be dealt with primarily by administrative mechanisms such as trust funds or claims commissions, and examines these questions through the lens of the legal framework and experience of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims (TFV), as the main administrative mechanism dealing with reparations for international crimes. Considering the important questions that the TFV raises regarding reparations and the central role it has played thus far in the ICC context, the book devotes a separate chapter to the TFV to fully engage with the unique dimensions of its mandates, the challenges it faces and whether it can serve as a model for the development of other administrative mechanisms for reparations for international crimes. This chapter carefully analyses the TFV within the ICC structure, its reparations and assistance mandates, the role it has played in the implementation of the first decisions on reparations, and how this role should further develop. It also discusses the practical implications of the activities of the TFV on reparative justice, and its practical challenges, including scarcity of resources.

This chapter focuses on the factors that influence the erosion, transport, and storage of sediment at global and drainage-basin scales. It examines global variations in sediment fluxes by rivers and the factors that influence these variations, including human effects. It introduces the concepts of the sediment delivery ratio and the sediment budget, and demonstrates how estimation of sediment budgets provides insight into spatial patterns of sediment production, storage, and transport within drainage basins. It also shows how sediment budgets have been used to understand human impacts on sediment dynamics at drainage-basin scales and discusses the value of sediment budgets for watershed management. It reviews approaches that have been used to try to examine sediment movement at watershed scales, such as various fine-sediment tracing technologies, and addresses challenges to estimating sediment dynamics at large scales, including the sediment-budget closure problem.

Do a large fraction of legislators reject compromises, even when the compromise moves policy toward their preferred outcome? This chapter uses surveys of state legislators and elected city officials to assess what fraction of officials reject half-loaf compromises that give them some, but not all of what they seek on policy. Nearly a quarter of state legislators say they would reject a proposal that moves the gas tax toward their preferred outcome. Legislators’ rejection of half-loaf compromises exacerbates the difficulties of solving problems in a political environment polarized along ideological lines.