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The article offers information on the military logistics and security situations in Afghanistan. It offers information on the defence budget cuts in Europe, with the changes in the security strategy of the U.S. It mentions that integration process urges countries to various reforms. Information on the end of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan is presented.

The article focuses on the impact of introduction of the 2010 Budget for buildings in reference to two examples of New Zealand listed companies. Topics discussed include usefulness of the deferred tax liability, impacts of the budget announcement such as one-off decrease in profit and a significant increase in the deferred tax liability, and tax accounting policy suggestions.

Abstract: Using real-time data from the annual budgets over the period 1958–2009, we explore budgetary planning and implementation in the Netherlands. Three fiscal policy regimes are distinguished. Our key findings are the following. First, plans are on average unbiased, although they are overoptimistic during earlier parts of our sample and overly pessimistic during the later parts of our sample, when revenues are under-projected. Second, general economic conditions and the state of the public finances are important determinants of both plans and their implementation. Third, this is also the case for political and institutional factors. Expenditure overruns are partly related to political factors, whereas cautious revenue forecasts relate to the institutional setting. Fourth, under the most recent regime of “trend-based budgeting” implementation was strongest relative to planning. In fact, this regime may contain some elements that are useful for designing national fiscal arrangements elsewhere. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

What really went wrong with Greek public finances? This paper evaluates the evidence from the decade preceding the outbreak of the fiscal crisis in Greece shedding some light on specific factors behind deviations from fiscal plans. It explains that Greece only partly fits international evidence on the economic, political and institutional determinants of fiscal forecast errors. The weak domestic institutional budget framework emerges as the main reason for weak fiscal performance, while inconsistencies in the forecasts of international organisations place the effectiveness of their monitoring under question. In this light, the paper puts forward some ideas for improving the domestic institutional framework for conducting fiscal policy in Greece and briefly evaluates some relevant recent government initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the experience of the public employees labor union Monroe County Deputy Sheriffs Association (MCDSA) in Monroe County, Michigan between 2008 and 2011, after an attempt to cut the county's public safety budget. Topics include the MCDSA's affiliation with the union Police Officers Association of Michigan (POAM), the establishment of a political action committee (PAC) by the MCDSA, and a campaign against country board commissioners who supported the budget cuts. It is said that the MCDSA created a political partnership with other local labor unions.

In this symposium essay, we explore the theoretical implications of one particular type of fiscal limitation on state legislatures--namely special Tax Increase Limitation rules (TILs). We argue that there is no meaningful content to the term ?tax increase? as used in TILs. This incoherence allows legislative majorities who wish to do so to circumvent TILs. This fact about TILs, among others, explains the observed inefficacy of TILs in shrinking the size of state governments. Furthermore, TILs are not just harmless political theater. When combined with other common features of state fiscal constitutions, particularly Balanced Budget Requirements (BBRs), they tend to amplify revenue volatility. Revenue volatility is far from an imagined horrible, but is currently creating severe challenges for state revenue systems. Moreover, TILs potentially undermine jurisdictional competition, which is a relatively more effective means for controlling the size of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's goal is to highlight the main microeconomic and macroeconomic effects of the 2010 VAT hike in Romania and the Romanian firms' response to it. At 1st July 2010, the Romanian Government raised the Value Added Tax from 19% to 24%, causing chain increases that delayed with nine months the Romania's exit from recession. It intended to increase its receivables in a period in which the state budget had problems in collecting taxes. I have concluded that the main microeconomic effect was the plunge of the firms' sales and the macroeconomic one was the decrease of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Regarding the Romanian firms' reaction to the VAT increase, most of them have ignored the VAT hike and they did not have an important response to such a modification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ultra-low-cost wireless communications laboratory that is based on a commercial off-the-shelf field programmable gate array (FPGA) development board that is both inexpensive and available worldwide. The total cost of the laboratory is under USD $200, but it includes complete transmission, channel emulation, reception (coherent and noncoherent), and probing capabilities. Over 15 different modulation types are currently supported. The laboratory, aimed primarily to serve as a teaching aid for a professor teaching senior undergraduate courses and projects, allows students to have visual real-time demonstrations in wireless communications systems. The laboratory is also powerful enough to allow experienced researchers to carry out wireless communications research projects. In this context, the laboratory is particularly useful for universities in developing countries, where budgets are extremely limited. Numerical and written survey results are presented that were collected from two classes of students taught by the author in a university in Colombia, South America, and which show the effectiveness of the laboratory in teaching wireless communications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite favourable external circumstances, in the last decade the Portuguese economy developed a model of imbalance and dependence based on the disparity between production and consumption, which was financed from the outside and led to anaemic growth, severe deficits and explosive debt, much similar to the Latin American populist models of the past. The restrictions related to the adoption of the euro and inadequate economic policies are the determinants of this process, and, simultaneously, the barriers that need to be overcome. The internal devaluation/recessionary policy, wrongly presented as a close replacement for external devaluation/expansionary policy, underestimates the recessive effects on demand and the way it gets aggravated amidst strong indebtedness, fostering a deflationary spiral that tends to undermine the policy of austerity that is essential to reduce the imbalances. Doubts about the benefits of the abatement of all obstacles (including those of a monetary nature) to free trade among countries of very unequal development, long expressed by Friedrich List, are intensifying. In the absence of own currency, sovereignty and discretionary budgetary policy will be reduced in favour of prescribed rules, limiting economic policies to microeconomic and mesoeconomic frameworks. Due to the lack of an independent exchange rate mechanism, the exports sector sets the pace for the growth of the economy and of wages in the long term, while the impossibility to devaluate tends to lead to cumulative imbalances that are only offset by the occurrence of crises. Avoiding the latter requires paced wage and social policies, and increasing the rate of growth of the product and wages requires the development of an exports sector with high added value. This is the policy and strategy narrow path that Portuguese economy needs to tread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article inquires into the impact of personality factors on the selection and self-selection of parliamentary elites. I compare personality profiles of German MPs and the German population obtained through survey research, and for some comparisons I utilize elite and mass samples matched for education, gender, and age. I ask further if MPs' personalities have an impact on their preferences for expansionist or restricted government budgets and welfare state benefits, the extension or limitation of civic rights, and several other policies. Party affiliations of MPs are used as a control variable. I find that MPs' personality traits differ strikingly from those of the German population and from those of followers in most of the parties with which MPs are affiliated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of tightening budget constraints caused by the recent financial and economic crisis and population ageing, it has become increasingly important to explore which portfolio of public expenditure generates economic growth. This article, therefore, estimates the growth effects of the composition of public expenditure for the Swiss case. One main finding is that public expenditures on transport infrastructure, education and administration foster growth. As nonhigh-quality data, which can bias least square estimators, are pervasive in economics, statistically robust estimation methods are applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local emergency management offices are shouldering an increasingly large share of the responsibility for implementing homeland security policies, in addition to traditional emergency preparedness and response functions. One of the concerns about this devolution of responsibilities is the supposed lack of available funding at the local level. City and county budgets are constrained by anti-property tax revolts and the paradoxical rising expectations of citizens for more and better services. Emergency management offices compete in this milieu for attention from policy makers and adequate funding. Despite the importance of local funding, there is little understanding of how funding decisions are made. Utilizing a nationwide survey of county emergency management officers, this study helps provide some insights by evaluating the impact of subject threat assessments, past disaster experience, emergency management activity, community resources and location factors affecting the variance of emergency management local funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before this study, much of the research on interlocal collaboration has focused broadly on interlocal service agreements, of which interlocal cost-sharing is but one dimension. This study is one of the first to examine the nature of interlocal cost-sharing agreements for a specific (and critically important) functional area. A mail survey of Florida city and county finance officers finds that the most common interlocal cost-sharing partnership is between local general purpose governments rather than with local special purpose governments. The strongest incentives for interlocal cost-sharing are (1) inadequate funding for emergency management in a jurisdiction's capital budget, (2) the perceived inadequacy of federal and/or state homeland security funding, and (3) greater faith in horizontal (local-to-local) than vertical (federal-state-local) intergovernmental agreements. The research also highlights the importance of asking fiscal condition survey questions in a more functionally specific manner rather than as an “overall fiscal condition” question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors examine the question of citizen involvement in the process of establishing county budgets in the U.S. state of Georgia. By extension the paper discusses the degree to which individuals participate in larger areas of state government and the impact on government of that participation. Information contained in the report is derived from a survey of county finance directors, officials most qualified to gauge the impact of the citizenry on the budget process, according to the authors.

The article reports on the issues concerning the national politics in Denmark in 1999. According to the author, the main issues surrounding politics in the country is the shift of leadership from the Progressive Party to the Conservative People's Party resulting to the return of their founder, Mogens Glistrup as de facto leader of the party. Another issue during that year was the European Parliament elections as well as the passing of the annual state budget which attracted a storm of protest from its party members, trade unions and voters.

A purchaser/provider split together with output-based reimbursement were recently introduced by several Swedish county councils. These changes have been motivated by arguments of efficiency and consumer choice. This paper tests the null hypothesis that hospital services are provided as efficiently by county councils with internal markets and output-based reimbursement as by county councils with budget reimbursement. We first estimate technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis and then we regress the efficiency scores as the dependent variable on new internal organizations in a multiple regression by use of pooled cross-section data for the 26 county councils for two years (1993 and 1994). The results reject our null hypothesis and we conclude that the organizational changes in the county councils improve health care efficiency. Our results further indicate that the potential savings in costs due to a hypothetical switch from budget based allocation to an output based allocation is about 13%. We also found some evidence indicating that county councils with a nonsocialist political majority are relatively more efficient than those with a socialist regime and that large county councils are more efficient than small county councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses district-level electoral returns to estimate the size of the incumbency advantage in 24 U.S. states over the period from 1970 to 1986. Our major findings are two: first, the incumbency advantage in the median state roughly doubled over the time period investigated; second, this increase can be explained in terms of the growth of legislative operating budgets and, by inference, in casework and other particularistic services provided by state legislators to their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about effectiveness of county budgeting in Texas. The Uniform Budget Law applying to Texas counties was passed in 1931 and became effective on August 21 of the same year. The law requires that budgets be prepared approximately six months in advance of the calendar year to which they apply. Although the law has been subjected to considerable criticism, officials are generally agreed that it permits effective budgeting if and when a conscientious effort is made to secure good administration. In order to avoid placing too much reliance on the results of one year, schedules have been obtained on 26 of the 60 counties for the year 1939. In the case of these 26 counties the results of a five-year period are therefore revealed. In making this analysis it is desirable to use the fund accounts instead of the county-wide accounts for the use of county totals might conceal the amount available to finance expenditures during the year. In some instances funds which lived within resources already had a deficit which had been created in prior years.

As pressure on the dairy industry to reduce its environmental impact increases, efficient recycling of manure nutrients through local cropping systems becomes crucial. The aim of this study was to calculate annual nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) budgets in six counties located in the Magic Valley, Idaho and estimate what distance manure would need to be transported to be in balance with crop nutrient demand given current dairy cattle populations and cropping systems. Our analysis suggests that crop N needs will not be met solely by manure, and synthetic fertilizer will need to be applied. However, to balance P with crop production, manure would need to be transported a minimum of 12.9 km from dairies and would have to replace synthetic fertilizer P on 91% of regional cropland. Education of producers and technical specialists would be necessary to improve the management of manure use in regional cropping systems. Technical solutions such as alternative diets for cattle and nutrient capture from manure streams will also likely be necessary to bring regional P into balance to protect environmental quality and improve the sustainability of the regional dairy industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented on the fiscal sustainability of San Bernardino County, California from 2007 through 2013. The role that the San Bernardino County manager and de facto chief administrative executive (CEO) Greg Devereaux played in restructuring the county's budget, including his a ten-year forecast of expenditures and revenues, is discussed.