The aim of this paper is to investigate the implications of increased student mobility on the level of education provided after opening the borders between two similar countries. As a preliminary result, it will be shown that some public provision of mandatory education can be welfare improving...

The work constructs projections till 2030 for health care expenditures of Italian Regional Health Care Systems. Three different schemes of financing are hypothesised, with three different levels of solidarity between Regions. Financing is always supposed to cover the entire exigency of...

Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the 'generalised Ramsey rule' for...

An "incentive subsidy" policy for subsidizing private R & D is proposed that can be more efficient, from a social point of view, than subsidy policies in common use such as a "normal" subsidy policy (fixed amount granted at project start), and conditional loans (loan is repaid only if project is...

For several decades public enterprises have been criticised for their poor economic performance. Many economists take it as “conventional wisdom” that publicly owned enterprises are inefficient by their very nature. This seemed to be proved by what is probably the most cited survey...

For at least fifty years economists have argued that vertically-aggregated marginal willingness to pay, when set equal to marginal provision cost, will result in optimal public good provision levels. This methodological approach would be expected to yield an exact analog, in terms of optimal...

This paper proposes, by way of a theoretical model, that public subsidies for the arts act as a spur to the consumption of the arts which, in turn, increases the level of human capital, leading to increased economic growth. It points out that some recent studies in brain research deliver...

Much attention has been paid to the influence of the institutional form of waste collection on costs. We extend this literature in three directions by including the unit-based pricing system. First, we show that unit-based pricing systems are more important from a cost-minimizing point of view...

This paper studies the optimal factor tax incidence in a neoclassical growth model with a given share of government expenditure in output. In the Ramsey planner’s optimization, the effect of next period’s capital on government expenditure equals the given share of the marginal product of...

This study reviews, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, the links between composition and quality of public finances, on the one hand, and long-term economic growth, on the other, focusing on the EU-15 countries. Specifically, for a given level of the general government balance,...