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Governance & Institutions
How public bodies are run, what they buy, and how they are held to account.
32 articles
Articles
- ÉclairageIndustrial Policy
New orders for durable goods fell once in five years, then jumped
Orders dipped by 4.9 billion dollars a month in 2024 and rose by 23.4 billion in 2025, the largest single-year gain in the window. The series counts dollars, not machines.
- DécryptageRegional Development
How a balanced-budget rule shapes what a state can offer
Almost every state has to close its books inside a single fiscal year. By the end you will know why that rule pushes economic development toward tax credits and away from cash, and what that swap costs.
- CommentaireWorkforce & Skills
Defence capacity is a tooling and workforce problem procurement reform does not reach
Construction spending on manufacturing plant ran at an annual rate of 125 billion dollars in 2022 and 244 billion in 2024, while core capital-goods orders held at a monthly average of 77 billion in 2022 and 77 again in 2025. This site holds no defence series at all, so the argument runs through the civilian base defence buys from.
- CommentaireRural Economies
Rural broadband went wrong at handover, not at appropriation, and the agency that signed the award should carry the account
The money bought construction, and construction is not a connection: a rural household needs a line that works, at a price it will pay, kept working after the crews have gone. No series in this brief measures a broadband award, so the case rests on mechanism and on what the wage and price data show about the interval between the money and the work.
- CommentaireInfrastructure
Local infrastructure is limited by the people who can run a project, not by the price of money
The ten-year Treasury rose from 0.89 percent in 2020 to 4.29 in 2025 and nonresidential construction spending rose alongside it, from 856 billion dollars a year to 1,309. What complicates the argument is that the only capacity measure held here counts business and financial operations workers across every industry, not the staff of any city hall.
- DécryptageIndustrial Policy
What a domestic content rule actually requires
A Buy American clause is an origin test written into a contract, not a ban on foreign goods. By the end you will know how the test is computed, who has to prove it, and what a waiver reveals.
- DécryptageRegional Development
How state gross domestic product is measured and why the largest states dominate
State GDP counts what is produced inside a state's borders in a single year, valued at that year's prices. By the end you will know what the ranking does and does not tell you about the people who live there.
- ÉclairageMacroeconomics & Markets
Producer prices fell in two straight years and are still below the 2022 peak
The all-commodities producer price index reached 264.5 in 2022, fell twice, and at 260.3 in 2025 has not regained it. It also sits 65.9 points above 2020.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What contingency in a capital budget is for
Contingency is neither padding nor a slush fund. By the end you will know what it is sized against, who is allowed to release it, and why a budget with none in it is not a cheaper budget.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What a cost overrun is measured against
An overrun is a comparison, and the figure it is compared with usually goes unstated. By the end you will know which baselines are in use, and why the same project can be on budget and over budget at once.
- DécryptageInfrastructure
What an availability payment is and what it buys
In an availability-payment concession a government pays a private partner a fixed sum for keeping an asset open and working, whether or not anybody uses it. By the end you will know who carries demand risk, what the payment covers in the decades after construction ends, and the one clause that gives the public any leverage.
- CommentaireRegional Development
Six states raise no income tax and no two replace it the same way
Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming levy no individual income tax. The FY2025 collections file shows what each one leans on instead, and the answer is narrower and less uniform than the shorthand suggests.