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...

Empirical studies on the effects of fiscal adjustments apply different approaches to identify discretionary changes in fiscal policy. While the results of one strand of literature suggest that the effects of fiscal adjustments on GDP are small or even positive, particularly for spending cuts...

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...

This paper synthesises some of the (New) Public Expenditures Theories. It also focuses on the Fiscal Adjustments theme. We analysed public expenditures evolution in a sample composed by seventeen OCDE countries observed between 1870 and 1990. Our conclusion recognizes the heterogeneity of the...

The recent boom and bust in commodity prices has raised concerns about the impact of volatile commodity prices on Latin American countries’ fiscal positions. Using a novel quarterly dataset─ which includes unique country specific commodity price indices and a comprehensive measure of public...

When Kazakhstan was trying to go out from economic, social and political transition, suddenly faced well-known problems of the oil-rich countries. It is absolutely vital that Kazakhstan evaluate its oil-income for going out from transition and developing itself in accordance with the conditions...

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 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...