International Public Finance

This pathbreaking text develops a seminal theory and discipline of international public finance, for the first time advancing public economics into the international arena. Offering a new post-Cold War approach that combines support for development, the environment, and international peacekeeping, it proposes an original system of global cooperation, resource allocation, taxation, and financing, focusing on the global commons and conflicts between environmental concerns and the economic needs of developing nations. Written to appeal to students at many levels, the book synthesizes and clarifies a wide range of theoretical, historical, and practical issues. It examines the very concept of finance and traces its development through its separation into private and public spheres. It then provides an overview of public finance theory, extending the main elements of the theory into an international context, with discussions of market failures, distributional equity, the political process, and coordination and stabilization among nations. Finally, the author shows how international public finance developed into its present patchwork of voluntary contributions and oligarchic power structures, and offers instead a comprehensive, systematic approach comprising international taxation, management of the global commons to generate revenues for international use, monetary and other measures, and international institutional reform. The book's theoretical framework puts important environmental, economic, and political issues into a fresh perspective, while its practical recommendations cover important subjects usually neglected, including disputed commons such as Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, the deep ocean bed, the high seas, air space, the electromagnetic spectrum, the geostationary orbit, and the pollution of what is apparently our last frontier--outer space--with high-speed "space junk." A pioneering exploration of a topic of vital and growing concern to most of the Earth's people, International Public Finance is a basic resource for a great variety of courses in development, finance, public administration, international relations, and environmental studies.