The book takes stock of how public finance has changed in response to the challenges--exigencies and opportunities--presented by globalization.

The book examines a wide gamut of new and innovative policies and financing instruments that governments can--and increasingly, do--use to manage cross-border risks and respond in a more affordable and sustainable way to global challenges such as avian flu, climate change, excessive financial volatility, commodity price fluctuations, or international terrorism.

A more widespread adoption of these policy approaches and tools could allow governments to better combine openness and competitiveness with stability and fairness and foster a new, less crisis-prone world.

The book's analyses, to which more than 20 eminent scholars and experts contributed, demonstrate that moving the type of policy approaches and instruments from innovation to adoption promises significant cost-savings and welfare gains. Such a modernization of public finance might, in fact, keep at bay the fiscal storms that analysts today see brewing on the horizon.

At the national level, a major new role that characterizes the modernization of public finance is the blending by the state of external and domestic policy demands. Governments are undertaking new tasks, including fostering policy harmonization behind national borders, preventing negative externalities from spilling over or external shocks from spilling in and undermining the country's stability or the security of its people. Through these new tasks, public and private resources are channeled towards making international cooperation behind national borders happen.

But to be resolved effectively and efficiently, many global issues also require some form of cooperation abroad, beyond borders. The instruments that are being introduced into the international realm to deal with issues like global climate stability, terrorism, communicable diseases, or economic and financial crises, are increasingly those that reflect new balancing roles for markets and states. As a result, the nature of international cooperation is changing fundamentally--from being a predominantly intergovernmental process and concerned with "foreign" affairs to a multi-actor process, based on public-private partnering and concerned with common issues, that is issues, which straddle across the domestic/foreign divide and bind nations and their people together.

Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz called the volume "a landmark text [that] provides the important beginnings of a field that will be tilled for years to come".

Trevor Manuel, Minister of Finance for South Africa said: "this is a bold and penetrating compilations of papers on the most profound challenges of modern public finance--how to construct better partnerships between governments and private sector players and how to strengthen cooperation between nations in pursuit of common interests."

The UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, a primary proponent of public-private partnerships who was behind the innovative International Financing Facility (IFF), noted: "The New Public Finance shows how we can equip people and countries for the future--for a new global economy that combines greater prosperity and fairness both within and across nations... [It] is important reading for today's policymakers".