Professor David Heald
Current Research Projects |
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- David Heald's interests in transparency started with the specific case of fiscal transparency (much trumpeted internationally in the late 1990s and in the 2000s), later broadening to the more general relevance of transparency to public policy. On that topic, he published in 2006 an edited book (Transparency: The Key to Better
Governance?) with Christopher Hood (Gladstone Professor of
Government, All Souls College, Oxford), differentiating varieties of transparency and arguing that it is an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. The relevance and limitations of transparency constitute a central theme of his work, whether that is on fiscal transparency, government accounting, international fiscal surveillance, Public-Private Partnerships or the public sector performance measurement systems which are a central feature of New Public Management. His 2012-15 Leverhulme project on 'The architecture, governance and substance of UK public audit' reflects his interpretation of the role of public audit as being transparency-generating. This culminated in the 2018 article on the tensions in public audit between trust and transparency. A synthesis of his ideas on transparency has been published as 'Uses and abuses of transparency' in a book titled This Obscure Thing Called Transparency
Politics and Aesthetics of a Contemporary Metaphor (2022), edited by Emmanuel Alloa and published by Leuven University Press.
- David Heald has a longstanding research interest in public expenditure policy and mechanisms, going back to his 1983 book
Public Expenditure: Its Defence and Reform (Oxford, Blackwell). He has published many articles on public expenditure planning, government accounting, Private Finance Initiative (Public-Private Partnerships is the international terminology) and fiscal transparency. Current research focuses on substantive policy choices (deriving from his 2011-12 Royal Society of Edinburgh project on public expenditure quality and from his 2012-15 Leverhulme project on public audit). Two book chapters from this research were published in 2013, one on public expenditure priorities and one on strengthening fiscal transparency internationally. Together with Christopher Hood (Oxford) and Rozana Himaz (Oxford Brookes), David Heald was the co-organiser of a British Academy conference on 'fiscal squeeze', held on 9-10 July 2013 at the British Academy. The edited book, consisting of three analytical chapters and nine historical country case studies by national experts, was published in October 2014 as When the Party's Over: The Politics of Fiscal Squeeze in Perspective (Proceedings of the British Academy 197, Oxford University Press.
- Together with Ron Hodges (Birmingham Business School), David Heald is continuing to work on public sector accounting reform. They have published an analysis of the EPSAS project, European Public Sector Accounting Standards being an ambitious EU-wide harmonisation project led by Eurostat on behalf of the European Commission. They have also published on accounting for government guarantees, which they interpret as an alternative off-balance sheet mechanism to Public-Private Partnerships, on which both have written separately. Together with Lynn Bradley they published in 2023 an article examining what is shown about the fiscal sustainability of UK public finances by a decade of Whole of Government Accounts.
- David Heald has a longstanding interest in financing UK devolution, having proposed in 1976 what later became the 'tartan tax', and having in 1980 named the 'Barnett formula', which determines a substantial part of the annual changes in expenditure of the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. He has written extensively on these topics, including his 1994 exposition and 2005 numerical analysis of the Barnett formula, and 2002 proposals for its modification in the light of post-devolution experience. If more attention had been paid to these issues in the 2000s, the future of the United Kingdom would not presently seem so fragile. He has submitted evidence to the Scottish Parliament on the misalignment of UK and Scottish budgetary timetables (2016) and on the new Scottish fiscal framework (2016). His chapter on 'The politics of Scotland's public finances' was published in 2020 in The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Politics. A partial update is provided in his 17 May 2023 presentation to the Celtic Academies conference at the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in his written and oral evidence to the Finance and Public Administration Committee of the Scottish Parliament.
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