Walter Korpi argues in a previous issue of Challenge (March/April 2000) that Swedish economists' claim that Sweden's growth performance has been inferior to that of other industrialized countries is at odds with the facts. Since Sweden has not grown slowly relative to other countries, there is...

Iranian government budget on military over the last decade has been higher than the average of the world. The current increasing international sanctions aim to reduce the military capabilities and capacities of the Iranian government. In this study, we analyze the response of the Iranian economy...

In the growth literature, there is a nonlinear relationship between economic growth and government size, which is similar to an inverted U-shaped curve. This curve can be used to determine the optimum share of government expenditures. This paper, using threshold panel approach, attempts to...

The theoretical and policy literature on decentralization has long asserted since Oates (1972) that decentralized governance increases allocative efficiency in the public sector. But, despite the colossal growth in the literature on decentralization and fiscally decentralized systems in the real...

The notion that more government expenditures can stimulate growth is controversial. The causation between government expenditures and economic growth in Thailand is examined using the Granger causality test. There is no cointegration between government expenditures and economic growth. A...

This paper uses a sample of 36 countries for the time period 1990-2011 in order to examine the relationship between countries’ electricity consumption from renewable sources and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) levels. Several nonparametric techniques are applied to investigate the effect of...

By applying conditional and unconditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models along side with statistical inference using bootstrap techniques; this paper investigates the link between China’s carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) environmental efficiency and its economic growth (measured in GNI...

This paper proposes a fully nonparametric framework to estimate relative efficiency of entities while accounting for a mixed set of continuous and discrete (both ordered and unordered) exogenous variables. Using robust partial frontier techniques, the probabilistic and conditional...

In this paper using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) we evaluate the influence of national culture on education policy efficiency for 20 OECD countries. For that reason bootstrap techniques have been employed in order to produce biased corrected efficiency scores and confidence intervals are been...