Limits getting good reviews: not quite the RedSox, but...

 

My friend Matt Crowley took the book all over New England this year. Here it makes a cameo appearance with a Red Sox cap. Great year it was for the Sox. It was a good year for the book too. Here are some academic review highlights:

Marco Cangiano from the IMF said the following in Public Budgeting and Finance:

"The record of institutional reforms undertaken by countries, developing or not, over the last 40 years is mixed at best. ProfessorAndrews’s insightful and timely book provides a systematic analysis of why many such reforms fail or deliver far less than initial expectations. Those who have been working in this field, either as academic, public official, or practitioners, will recognize much of their own experience and perhaps frustrations. By building on the work of many authors, multilateral institutions, and national governments, Andrews himself admits that in this area “very few ideas are new ideas.” But his book provides an analytical and interdisciplinary framework that for the first time brings together these old ideas in a new light while proposing a few new and thought provoking ones. In this respect, a better title would have been Beyond the limits of institutional reforms because this is really what this book is about. Incorporating Matt Andrews’ thinking and extensive hands-on experience in this area from both a practitioner’s as well as an academic’s point of view, the book distills and bridges the vast amount of literature that has emerged over the last two decades in the related—although not always mutually consistent—areas of institutional economics, public administration, and public financial management."

Comments

[Jane Gao]

Dear Prof. Andrews, I have read your insightful book of "the limits of instituional reform in development", and your analysis of isomorph legitmacy is really helpful to understand the institutional reform in developing countries. Also, the agile development methodology you introduced recently is interesting. But I have a question about this methodolgy that whether the feature of extreme programming can be actually realized in a world of more uncertainty and variablity? Thanks a lot!