George M. Guess - International Public Policy Analysis

International Public Policy Analysis offers a thoughtful examination of the transferability of best policy practices across countries. The authors reflect on the complexity of public policy and the need for a nuanced, culture-specific approach to policy design.

Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl, Virginia Military Institute, USA

Guess and Husted combine their substantial research backgrounds and consulting experiences to produce this unique book that offers an extremely detailed evaluation of a wide variety of modern public policy problems. Their global analytical framework promises scholars, students, and practitioners insight into the often overwhelming complexity of these problems, analyzes how such problems might be better examined, and explores the possibilities for solving them.

Katherine Willoughby, Georgia State University, USA

International Public Policy Analysis is the first textbook to take a truly comparative and crosscultural approach, organized around policy issues, to examine important policy lessons that affect the everyday lives of citizens. Authors George M. Guess and Thomas Husted demonstrate that incremental, marginal changes in sectoral policy systems using cross-national lessons can lead to larger changes in country policies, democracy, and better governance.

Jargon-free and using a cross-cultural approach, the individual chapters in this book utilize a three-level analysis to review the policy issue areas, present analytic tools and frameworks, and provide cases/exercises for practice in applying the methods and frameworks. International Public Policy Analysis is an essential upper-level undergraduate textbook for courses on comparative public policy, policy process, political economy, and international policy analysis, and may also be used as required reading in introductory policy and public affairs courses at the graduate level.

George M. Guess is Adjunct Professor in the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, USA.

Thomas Husted is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at American University, USA.

By George M. Guess and Thomas Husted

First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2017 Taylor & Francis

The right of George M. Guess and Thomas Husted to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Guess, George M., author. | Husted, Thomas, author.
Title: International public policy analysis / by George M. Guess and Thomas Husted.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000888| ISBN 9781138673946 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138673960 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315561585 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Policy sciences.
Classification: LCC H97 .G843 2016 | DDC 320.6dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000888

ISBN: (hbk) 978-1-138-67394-6
ISBN: (pbk) 978-1-138-67396-0
ISBN: (ebk) 978-1-315-56158-5

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

The authors would like to thank Suzanne Flinchbaugh for her initial editorial support of this book and her continuing advice on how to proceed. We also thank Rob Grosse, Dean of the School of Business at American University, Sharjah, in the UAE, for his insights as initial reader for the book and excellent suggestions for its improvement. We hope we satisfied his concerns as well as those of the manuscript reviewers. Of course, the book in its present form could not have been completed without the energy, foresight, and enthusiasm of the Routledge publisher, Laura Stearns, and editorial assistant Brianna Ascher.

George M. Guess would like to thank his former students at American University in Washington, DC, during the initial offerings of his comparative public policy course (20112012). Their incisive questions and critical comments led directly to the development of our book. Since then, he wishes also to acknowledge the ideas gained from his graduate MPA/MPP students at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, to focus its final drafts. As for its content, his former colleagues at IMF, World Bank (especially Mike Smith and Malcolm Holmes), and Development Alternatives, Incorporated (DAI in Bethesda, Maryland) can decide whether he learned and applied international public finance and policy lessons from them properly. He would like to thank his mentors for demonstrating the importance of sector policy analysis in international political economy during his graduate work: David Porter, Ron Chilcote, and the late Mike Reagan at the University of California, Riverside.

As always, George M. Guess wants to thank his wife, Regula, and their two sons, Andy and Marty, for their encouragement, patience, and understanding. Their continued support has made all things happen.

Thomas Husted thanks his wife, Ines, and their two sons, Lucas and Tomas, for their help and support throughout the writing process.

The intent of this book is to generate valid policy lessons that can improve results in important non-defense sectors that affect the quality of life. For most people, this means life in the cities. Most people live in metropolitan areas of the world, which include suburbs, or are headed to them from rural areas. Governments spend most of their budgeted funds for social security, social assistance, health care, education, energy, environmental protection, and transport infrastructure. Most of the beneficiaries of these sectoral or functional policy expenditures live in urban areas. Two supporting sectors that attempt to generate growth via increased jobs, investments, incomes, and revenues are the financial sector and the fiscal sector. The banking and financial sectors are key in providing capital for economic growth that translates into profits, investments, and tax revenues that finance public budgets. The fiscal sector focuses on public budgets that should be the result of sound expenditure and revenue policies and forward macroeconomic planning. The capital budget is part of the fiscal sector and provides the infrastructure that is needed to stimulate the economy. Because of their importance to growth and quality of life, we focus on these sectors in this book. Our target audiences are advanced English-speaking students around the world in internationally focused public policy, political economy, management, and administration programs.

An aim of this book is to devise best practices in each sector and encourage their transfer to other locales that must adapt them to improve policy performance in contexts that will differ. The best practice approach has been derided for being cookie cutter, providing the same prescriptions for widely different contexts. For instance, the good governance approach to international assistance advocated such Western values as rule of law, democratic policy-making, capable bureaucracies, property rights, official public accountability to citizens and minimal corruption. The major defect of this approach is the assumption that all policies and institutions are potentially movable and can be aligned to fit some pre-specified blueprint (Levy, 2014: 8). Thus, as we shall see later in , balanced budget and tight fiscal policies, or austerity, were part of the Washington Consensus of the 1980s and were presumed to apply everywhere under all circumstances. But tight fiscal policies evidently fail under recessionary conditions and do not restart growth or increase employment. Often, due to public resistance, they actually cause political instability and weaken growth further. Often the policy contexts are not so different and what is different can be modified by incentive packages that reward conflicting stakeholdersthat is, Washington Consensus fiscal policies can be made to fit. But the opposite mistake from the hubris of one-size-fits-all best practices is to assume that every country is unique and there is nothing to be learned from one setting that is helpful in another (Levy, 2014: 8), or that there are no best practices that can be transferred elsewhere.