This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This paper discusses how electoral politics shapes the regional allocation of public investment expenditures per capita in Greece. Using regional public investment data for 10 political periods (1975-2009), combined with electoral data by constituency, a model is proposed which captures the...

The OECD-ICOM Guide for Local Governments, Communities and Museums provides a framework for local and regional governments to assess and maximise the social and economic value of cultural heritage, and for museums to understand and strengthen their existing and potential linkages with the local...

This case study assesses the strategies of the Museum of Lisbon as well as the related policies of Lisbon City Council to support local development. Through its five branches located across the city and its diverse partnerships with local stakeholders, the Museum of Lisbon has cemented its role...

This article discusses the evaluation of social policies and programmes in the perspective of evaluation research. It tries to develop a methodology that has a participatory content. Thus, the evaluation of social policies and programmes is considered in its full potential for the construction...

Implementing incentive systems can sometimes backfire in practice: experimental evidence and folklore both suggest that offers of explicit rewards can expose surprising discontinuities in behaviour. This Paper models two such discontinuities that have been claimed by psychologists and...

This case study represents the first in a planned series of studies on the ‘The Role of Evidence Informed Policy Making in Delivering in Performance’. The case study is based on both interviews with key stakeholders and desk research. It focuses on the social investment approach in New...

This paper provides a factual baseline of the extent to which refugees and internally displaced persons are included in development planning, specifically in the national development plans and sector plans of low- and middle-income countries; in the international development co-operation...

Louis Kaplow proposes a two-step methodology for normative policy analysis and illustrates it using various policy reforms. The first step is to identify efficiency gains when hypothetical lump-sum taxes can undo redistributive consequences. The second step evaluates the redistributive effects...

This paper uses panel data from the 16 larger states in India during the period 1967–2000 to study the effects of female political representation in the State Legislatures on public goods, policy and expenditure. It finds that politicians' gender affects policy, but that their social position,...