Using these four benchmarks, one can determine which governments are achieving or have achieved a specific target. Governments that demonstrate a consistent upward trend to‐ ward the target are more serious than those who display a stag‐ nant or divergent trend away from the target. The objective of this brief is to analyze available data on public agriculture expenditure in Africa—with a parti...

The State of the Art in Electronic Government is the delivering of public services to the Citizen by means of integrated web portals, comprising the public agencies in the different levels of government, aiming to hide from the final user the complexity of the State bureaucracy. Ideally, these portals should be designed according to the mental patterns of the individuals, with their navigation ...

Spatially enabled government requires the development of effective SDIs that will support the vast majority of society, who are not spatially aware, in a transparent manner. This paper addresses three strategic challenges arising out of the need of creating this new environment. The first of these is the challenge for more inclusive models of governance given that SDI formulation and implementa...

Governments can choose among various tools to leverage business research and development (R&D). They can offer direct support via grants or procurement or they can use fiscal incentives, such as R&D tax incentives. More countries are now using tax incentives than a decade ago and the schemes are more generous than ever. As of today more than 20 OECD governments provide fiscal incentives to sust...

I welcome the Comment by Didier Raoult (Jan 9, p 104), which proposes the post-Darwinist concept of the evolutionary pathway as a rhizome instead of a tree, with inheritance occurring not only vertically but also laterally. He rightly addresses how the genomic revolution has forced us to reconsider the way we describe evolution. Perhaps one of the most important unresolved issues in the study o...

We analyze the determinants of government debt under the twin assumptions that governments have limited horizons and default only when government income falls short of debt service requirements. We derive a government’s maximum sustainable debt ratio, that is, the debt ratio chosen by a myopic government whose horizon does not extend beyond its current term in office. Maximum sustainable debt v...

Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................... 2 Recent Experiences with Consolidation ...................................................................................................................... 4 Consolidation and the Costs of Delivering Government Ser...

In the scope and vision of using and expanding the types of services e-government portals can offer to citizens, one of the major challenges and possible barriers is the security concern. Unlike typical websites that include largely data to browse and download, such portals are expected to have sensitive private personal data about country citizens. The threat of possible intrusion or identity ...

Abstract Governments are inherently responsible for citizens' well-being. Given that achieving sustainable development ["Development meets the needs of present without compromising ability future generations to meet their own needs"—(WCED in Our common future, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987)] is core attainment and maintenance well-being, increasingly understood require major transform...