Dubravko Mihaljek, Head of Operations at the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, held a lecture on the topic of Global Economic Downturn and the Dollar Exchange Rate on 17 April 2019 in the Institute of Public Finance.

The lecturer emphasized that in April 2018 indicators began to point to the slowdown in industrial production growth worldwide, which in the first three months of 2019 further deepened. However, service activities and employment continue to generate significant growth. Large and relatively closed economies continue to grow well, while small and open are beginning to slow down. The slowdown in industrial production coincides with the strengthening of the effective exchange rate of the dollar. Thus, he clarified the interaction between the trade and financial spheres of globalization and questioned the possibility of their separate development as it has been assumed in the last half century.

The new issue of Public Sector Economics contains contributions to the Institute of Public Finance conference held in Zagreb in October 2018. It starts with the Editors’ introduction to the Public Sector Economics 2018 Conference – Introduction to the Public Sector Economics 2018 Conference – Fiscal Openness: Transparency, Participation and Accountability in Fiscal Policies.

In keynote speeches James E. Alt traces the evolution of the concept of fiscal transparency in academic and policy agendas over the past three decades; and Francisco Bastida highlights the quality rather than quantity aspects of transparency as the key to the strengthening of public trust in government. Sandra Švaljek, Ivana Rašić Bakarić and Marijana Sumpor in the article Citizens and the city: the case for participatory budgeting in the City of Zagreb test some conclusions from the transparency literature in a case study of participatory budgeting in the city of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital. Lobna M. Abdellatif, Mohamed Zaky, Mohamed Ramadan, Jad Mazahreh and Ibrahim Elghandour in the article Transparency of law making and fiscal democracy in the Middle East use the Open Budget Index dataset to measure the quality of the law-making process for government budgets in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. Ana Ostrovidov Jakšić and Ivan Jakšić in the article How to prolong labour market participation in the Republic of Croatia? analyse the labour market for older workers from the point of view of prolonging their participation in the labour market in the Republic of Croatia. This issue ends with a review of Louis Meuleman’s book Metagovernance for Sustainability: A Framework for Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.