Helisse Levine

Jonathan B. Justice

Eric Anthony Scorsone

Fiscal health of local governments and municipalities has remained an important issue since the crises of the 1970s in places like New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland. More recently, the bankruptcy of Orange County California raised the possibility of a different type of financial failure than earlier ones. The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed two major economic bubbles including the dotcom and housing bubbles. These economic cycles combined with increasing health care, pension and other structural costs continue to challenge the fiscal viability of many jurisdictions. In particular, the economic and financial crisis of 2007-2008 is likely to result in potentially serious fiscal challenges for local jurisdictions.

Handbook of Local Government Fiscal Health

David B. Audretsch

Muhammad Naveed Iftikhar

This book attempts to advance critical knowledge and practices for fostering a variety of entrepreneurship at a city level. The book aims to connect scholarship and policy practice in two disciplines: Urban Studies and Entrepreneurship. The book has included contributions from developed, emerging, and developing countries. The chapters are clubbed under five main sections; I. Startups and Entrepreneurial Opportunities, II. Knowledge Spillover, III. Social and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurialism, IV. Demography and Informal Entrepreneurs V. Perspectives from Emerging and Developing Economies. In this regard, the book explores a number of questions, such as: what are the important varieties of entrepreneurship, how can they be observed and measured, and how does each variety emerge and operate under various conditions of infrastructure and opportunity? Which type(s) of entrepreneurship should a city prefer? What can cities do to stimulate desirable forms of entrepreneurship or is it more of a spontaneous phenomenon? Why do policies that enhance entrepreneurship in some contexts seem instead to promote crony capitalism and rent-seeking in other contexts? Should cities focus on growing their own entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial enterprises or on luring them from other cities and countries? How can a collective action in a city promote (or hinder) entrepreneurship? The contributions in the present volume address head-on these questions at the intersection of urban studies, economic theory, and the practicalities of economic development and urban governance, in a genuinely global range of places and applications.

Jonathan B. Justice

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