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 rationale for fiscal rules and institutions has been explained by the existence of deficit and spending biases that arise due to political fragmentation within government or between governments that alternate in office. In common pool models fiscal outcomes are determined by the...

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...

Improving the quality of public finances is a major challenge for European policy makers. The economic crisis has increased budgetary pressures and accentuated the tension between the need to sustain public spending aimed at raising the EU growth potential and the increased scarcity of public...

The international transportation Industry involves various sectors, shipping being one with particular characteristics which differentiates it from others. Within this scope, commercial banks are one of the main entities that may offer the required funding in a market that is characterized by...

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...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely applied nonparametric method for comparative evaluation of firms’ efficiency. A deficiency of DEA is that the efficiency scores assigned to each firm are sensitive to sampling variations, particularly when small samples are used. In addition, an...