Non-perturbative Expansion, Renormalons, and $\tau$ Decay

We analyze inclusive $\tau$ decay using a modified version of the $a$ expansion, a non-perturbative technique in which the effective coupling is analytic in the infrared region. The modification involves renormalization group improvement of the integrand in a spectral representation for the D-function prior to implementing the $a$ expansion. The advantage of this approach is that it enables us to monitor the structure of the induced power corrections and to ensure that these are consistent with the operator product expansion. Numerically the method agrees well with experiment: the comparison is made with the physical quantity $R_Z$ using $R_{\tau }$ as input.