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This paper aims to describe cooperation between public and private market players from different legal and religious orders. The author argues that such public–private partnerships (PPPs) enable the development of a possible convergence between selected areas of mainstream public finance and the Islamic moral economy (IME).

This paper explores the theory of both mainstream finance and the IME, and using deductive reasoning from axioms, develops the assumptions of a theoretical approach to heterodox PPP. The proposed method affects the ability to find common platforms between mainstream public finance and the IME, through the example of public–private investment projects.

This endeavour is subject to trade-offs between profit maximisation and social justice values on the basis of long-term PPP contracts. The author shows the assumptions under which this compromise would be beneficial to public entities, multicultural societies and conventional and Islamic investors. It is proposed to distribute profit to the owners up to a predetermined value, above which the PPPs would finance public services for persons otherwise excluded from them.

The success of this approach must depend on a compromise between profit maximisation as the sole investment objective and investment guided by social justice values. Private investors can achieve a capped level of profit on a long-term contract basis, and public partners can obtain long-term contracts for providing public goods. Both would undertake a project with a strong emphasis on corporate social responsibility, with particularly large opportunities in developing Islamic countries.

Since the early modern age, the debt of the State was a constant source for concern to the Spanish governments. Episodes of defaults caused by enormous expenditure to keep the Empire slowly faded out until a certain reorganization of public finance was attained in the central decades of the nineteenth century. The core idea that finance ministers and economists, in general, had at that time was to balance the public budget controlling expenses, in order to handle the problem of public debt. However, alternative views on government finance existed. Focusing on a crucial period for the consolidation of Spanish liberal regime and its public finance, this chapter shows that, among a predominant concern for reducing public expenditure as the best way to stabilize the economy and promote economic growth, the character of Luis María Pastor emerges to support government expansionary policies financed with credit. Far from fearing deficit, Pastor, one of the leaders of the Spanish liberal school of economic thought, believed that investment in infrastructures financed through debt was the key to economic growth. Through a multiplicative effect, a program of public investment would enhance economic growth, eventually solving the long-term insufficiency of Spanish finance. This gives evidence that ideas on public finance of classical liberal economists were far from uniform, contributing to a more precise view on the body of doctrines of this school.

This article highlights key aspects of capital management, including capital planning, capital budgeting, capital financing, decision making and capital spending outcomes. We provide a background discussion of public sector capital management, followed by a summary of the articles that comprise this symposium. Combined, these articles illustrate the complexity of and challenges to capital management at the state and local government levels. We discuss common themes that emerge from reading these articles as a collective symposium, including: (1) modest progress in applying and empirically testing theoretical frameworks; (2) the variety of actors and institutions; and (3) the deteriorating condition and poor performance of public infrastructure. We use the articles to illustrate gaps in the research and offer suggestions for future research on capital management theory and practice.

There is a growing support for the view that the private sector is at least as efficient as the public sector in managing investment risks of large projects. Governments forget that it is the taxpayer who bears all the risks in a public finance scenario of investments. So, it seems unfounded that governments should neglect the cost of investment risk in obtaining finance as the taxpayer might be seen as a shareholder in (public) investments, which by definition are risky. It is this taxpayer-is-shareholder perspective that will be criticized in this paper. This taxpayer approach neglects the variety of funding and financing positions that might be taken by the various actors in investment projects. The paper concludes that some prudence is recommended in supporting private finance initiatives

There have been many innovations in public finance in the 21st century to address increasing budget constraints and increasing demands from government. One innovation has been civic crowd-funding which began in 2009. This is predicated on the voluntary commitment of funds by individual and institutional donors and investors for specific projects. This paper explores this new approach to funding capital projects and grounds it within a discussion of the Voluntary Theory of Public Finance. There is a lack of research on civic crowd-funding and a lack of theoretical approaches to it. This paper draws these connections and develops future directions of research that includes the continuing application of this approach, the increasing engagement of citizens in the administrative process of government and increasing budget constraints.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

Because of the 2008 global financial crisis aftermaths, economic downturn and prolonged recession, several OECD countries have adopted an austerity compound by significantly reducing public health expenditure (PHE) for dealing with their fiscal pressure and sovereign-debt challenges. Against this backdrop, this study aims to examine the responsiveness of PHE to macro-fiscal determinants, demography, as well to private health insurance (PHI) financing.

The authors gather annual panel data from four international organizations databases for the total of OECD countries from a period lasting from 2000 to 2017. The authors apply static and dynamic econometric methodology to deal with panel data and assess the impact of several parameters on PHE.

The authors’ findings indicate that gross domestic product, fiscal capacity, tax revenues and population aging have a positive effect on PHE. Further, the authors find that both unemployment rate and voluntary private health insurance financing present a negative statistically significant impact on our estimated outcome variable. Different specifications and sample periods applied in the regression models reveal how inseparably associated are PHE and OECD's economies compliance on macro-fiscal policies for offsetting public finances derailment.

Providing more evidence on the responsiveness of PHE to several macro-fiscal drivers, it can be a helpful tool for governments to reconsider their persistence on fiscal adjustments measures and rank public health financing to the top of their political agenda. Health systems policies for meeting Universal Health Coverage (UHC) objectives, they should also take into consideration the voluntary PHI institution, especially for economies with insufficient fiscal capacity to raise public health financing.

To the best of knowledge, the impact of unemployment and voluntary PHI funding on public health financing, apart from other macro-fiscal and demographical parameters effect, remains unnoticed in the existing published studies on the topic.