close enough for government work

government | American Dictionary

government
noun[ C/U ]
us/ˈɡʌv·ərn·mənt, -ər·mənt/
politics & government
the offices, departments, and groups of people that control a country, state, city, or other political unit:
[ U ]She works for the government.
[ C ]The new tax law affects the budgets of both state and local governments.
Government is also a particular system of managing a country, state, city, etc.:
[ U ]democratic government

governmental

adjectiveus/ˌɡʌv·ərnˈment·əl, -ərˈment·əl/
The country has weak governmental institutions and no experience of democracy.

government | Business English

government
noun
 GOVERNMENTuk /ˈɡʌvənmənt/us(written abbreviationgovt)
[ C ]
an organization that officially manages and controls a country or region, creating laws, collecting taxes, providing public services, etc.:
The two governments have signed an agreement.
This fiscal year would mark the third government surplus in a row for the first time in over 50 years.
a federal/central/local/government
government official/regulator/employeeGlobal business leaders and government officials gathered in Spain Friday for a meeting aimed at breaking down remaining trade barriers.
government agency/departmentSome government agencies have worked well together to combat terrorist financing.
government policy/program/services
the Chinese/Italian/British governmentThe Chinese government has implemented economic reforms.
[ U ]
the people, systems, etc. that manage or control a country or region:
The goal is to identify opportunities to reduce the cost of government.
a democratic form of government.
The President spoke of restoring confidence in government.
 form a government
to bring political parties together to make a government when none of them has received a large enough number of votes in an election to control the government:
The former prime minister was seeking support from smaller parties to help form a government.
 the government[ S ]
the government of a particular country, especially the country you are in or the one you have already referred to:
The government is proposing changes to subsidies for renewable energy sources.
The figures are based on the government's survey of the labor force.

Examples of government

government
State and local governments also have considerable regulatory authority over granting siting permits necessary for the operation of many types of facilities.
As a supplementary policy, the government permitted pricing based on costs for new health services, mainly high-technology services.
If there is a government policy that allows the decentralized economy to achieve the constrained planner's allocation, then it is the optimal policy choice.
In theory, village development plans flow up through district and regional development committees to the central government.
The government needed professional and politically-minded staff to take on the planned political development of the country over the long haul.
Efforts to calculate the level of price support for rice required the government to elicit cost of production data from the agricultural associations.
Considered here is the simplest case, where government spending is purely dissipative and does not affect private utility.
In this early period, the government did not intervene in such activities as long as they retained a purely philanthropic goal.
Researchers could be misled by the publications of the first category because they were usually censored by the government to fit its propaganda purposes.
In the 1920s, the school was eager to distinguish itself from the government schools as a means of attracting more pupils.
It was first returned because it had been drafted by counsel; government could only be addressed by principals, not their agents.
The government's objective function depends on whether it recognizes returns to all land, both cultivated and common, or returns only to common land.
The government has been reducing home-help services and experimenting with privatisation.
However, from the mid 1980s the government further reduced the municipal elbowroom.
This tendency was reinforced in 1939 when the government declared the gas supply a state-owned public monopoly.
See all examples of government
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withgovernment

government

These are words often used in combination with government.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

authoritarian government
The percentage of those that would accept an authoritariangovernment ' under certain circumstances ' has decreased.
autocratic government
He argues that, in the early times an autocratic government committed to economic development had a 'minimalist' approach to social policy.
centralized government
Nor can a centralized government do all of the above by itself!
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
See all collocations with government