In the past two years, the world has experienced how unsound economic practices can disrupt global economic and social order. Today’s volatile global financial situation highlights the importance of managing risk and the consequences of poor decision making. The Doom Loop in the Financial Sector reveals an underlying paradox of risk management: the better we become at assessing risks, the more we feel comfortable taking them. Using the current financial crisis as a case study, renowned risk expert William Leiss engages with the new concept of “black hole risk” — risk so great that estimating the potential downsides is impossible. His risk-centred analysis of the lead-up to the crisis reveals the practices that brought it about and how it became common practice to use limited risk assessments as a justification to gamble huge sums of money on unsound economic policies. In order to limit future catastrophes, Leiss recommends international cooperation to manage black hole risks. He believes that, failing this, humanity could be susceptible to a dangerous nexus of global disasters that would threaten human civilization as we know it.

N/A

The rapid expansion of the Internet has fueled the emergence of electronic government at all levels in Canada. E-government's first decade featured online service underpinned by a technically secure infrastructure. This service-security nexus entails internal governance reforms aimed at realizing more customer-centric delivery via integration and coordination across departments and agencies. Yet, as online networking has become more pervasive and public demands for participation rise, pressures for greater openness and accountability intensify. The result is widening experimentation with online democracy. The e-governance focus is thus shifting toward issues of transparency and trust - and new possibilities for re-conceptualizing how power is organized and deployed. In sum, the prospects for digital transformation involve the interplay of these four dimensions: service, security, transparency and trust. This book identifies the main drivers of e-government, assesses the responses of Canada's public sector to date, and sketches out the major challenges and choices that lie ahead. The findings will be of interest to those studying or working in the world of public sector management and e-governance.

In the space of a few days, one of the world’s richest and most egalitarian nations, Iceland, toppled into financial chaos and sunk into an economic, ethical, moral and identity crisis. The vast empire built by Iceland’s young entrepreneurs, the “new Vikings”—who had propelled the country to the top of wealth, equality and happiness charts—collapsed under the combined effect of the failure of its banks and astronomical debt (more than ten times the country’s gross domestic product). Iceland became, in the midst of the global economic crisis, an icon of disaster that troubles all Western countries seeking to understand how the Scandinavian model could collapse so suddenly. In this book, Daniel Chartier traces, through thousands of articles appearing in the foreign press, the fascinating reversal of Iceland’s image during the crisis. Citizens of a country now humiliated, Icelanders must deal with a number of significant issues including the quest for wealth, sovereignty, ethics, responsibility, gender and the limits of neoliberalism.