To help the civil servants in both central and local governments in Taiwan operating administrative works smoothly under a new digitalized system launched in 1994, a series of courses related to information technology were offered free to them annually by the central governments. However, due to the budget deficit in recent years, the government is considering decreasing or completely canceling...

What determines the sustainability of sovereign debt? In this paper, we develop a model where myopic governments seek electoral popularity but can nevertheless commit credibly to service external debt. They do not default when they are poor even though default costs are low because they would lose access to debt markets and be forced to reduce spending; they do not default when they become rich...

This paper examines recent experience with insurance and other risk-financing instruments in developing countries, informed by experience in developed countries, to provide insights on the effectiveness of insurance for reducing economic insecurity. Insurance and other risk financing strategies are viewed in the overall context of risk management, including the prevention of losses as well as f...

Communities across the U.S. are radically changing their approach to garbage collection and disposal. Prompted by rising disposal costs and the emergence of state legislated recycling and reduction goals, over 3,000 local governments have adopted pay-as-youthrow systems-also known as variable rate, volume-based or unit pricing systems. Traditionally, the costs of garbage collection and disposal...

The incidence and prevalence of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome have escalated in recent years, with skyrocketing associated management costs. Insufficient mass education on importance of healthy diet, adequate physical activities, and the lack of preventative measures are the most common reasons for this. In most countries, departments of health carry the financial burden. How...

Governments around the world are taking advantage of the numerous benefits offered by the World Wide Web in order to provide client services to citizens. Australia has been a leader in this trend. The literature in this area focuses primarily on the pragmatic issues such as governmental accountability and transparency, interactivity, policy making, security and privacy, quality and costs. Along...

Today’s developed countries are networked societies, with strong specificities in the Health field. Health costs have strongly increased. Indeed, governments, local powers, public and private health or insurance organizations face difficult choices: they need the most specific and valuable data available. Data for Decision Making in Networked Health is necessary at 3 levels: between patients an...

State and local governments that wish to establish or improve preschool programs need cost estimates to evaluate the magnitude of appropriations required. Yet even a casual scrutiny of available expenditure data reveals an enormous variance between the most expensive and least expensive preschool provisions. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the root causes of differences in per-student...

An important theory of international cooperation asserts that governments comply with international law because of the reputational costs incurred by reneging on public agreements. Countries that sign binding international agreements in the realm of monetary relations signal their commitment to an open economic system, which should reassure international market actors that the government is com...

--Governments all around the world are heavily investing towards the implementation of e government to improve services to citizens and reduce costs. With the help of ICT, governments can increase efficiency of their operations and can carry out their administrative operations smoothly. Keeping this fact in mind we thought to carry out research identifying the models for international best prac...