The Public Policy Primer Xun Wu

This global encyclopedic work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration, public policy, governance, and management. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the above fields and their numerous subfields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields and subfields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge.

This volume features a variety of research projects at the intersection of mathematics and public policy. The topics included here fall in the areas of cybersecurity and climate change, two broad and impactful issues that benefit greatly from mathematical techniques. Each chapter in the book is a mathematical look into a specific research question related to one of these issues, an approach that offers the reader insight into the application of mathematics to important public policy questions.

Stress tests highlight a system’s weak spots. This second edition provides a stress testing of the United States by exploring in detail the background to the disasters of the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill and the COVID-19 epidemic. These major stresses—the country’s longest war, its biggest natural disaster, its biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression, its biggest oil spill and its worst pandemic since the influenza pandemic of 1918—tell us much about structural flaws in the United States.