In this paper the authors conduct a meta-analysis to examine the link between R&D spending and economic growth in the EU and other regions. The results suggest that the growth-enhancing effect of R&D in the EU15 countries does not differ from that in other countries in general, but it is less...

This paper studies the impact of financial openness on the size of government, and other key economic variables, such as the consumption-wealth ratio, the growth rate of wealth, and welfare, in a two-country world, based on a portfolio approach, assuming that public spending is...

Diversification into non-agricultural activities in rural areas can be broadly classified as either survival-led or opportunity-led. The existence of these two types of non-agricultural activities implies a U-shaped relationship between the share of income derived from non-agricultural...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. Applying inequality indices and FieldsÂ’ (2001) decomposition methodology to Bolivian household survey data of the years 1989 to 1997, we identify recent...

Abstract: The Renewable Energy Source Act (EEG) promotes German biogas production in order to substitute fossil fuels, protect the environment, and prevent climate change. As a consequence, green maize production has increased significantly over the last years, causing negative environmental...

Land use and land use change are determined as much by economic and institutional drivers as they depend on bio-physical conditions. Future pathways of socio-economic and environmental systems can only be assessed with scenarios which describe possible future paths of development. For this...

The Renewable-Energy-Source-Act (EEG) promotes German biogas production in order to substitute fossil fuels, protect the environment and prevent climate change. In this paper we quantitatively analyse the EEG-reform in 2008. Results imply that the reform contributes to an expansion of biogas...

We provide a systematic analysis of fiscal consolidation in a medium-scale dynamic general equilibrium model. Our results show that the choice of the consolidation instrument is very important, not only with respect to the short- and long-run output effects of the different consolidation...

We ask whether a PAYG-financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We argue that interactions between the two risks are important for this question. One is a direct interaction in the form of a countercyclical variance of idiosyncratic...

When markets are incomplete, social security can partially insure against idiosyncratic and aggregate risks. We incorporate both risks into an analytically tractable model with two overlapping generations and demonstrate that they interact over the life-cycle. The interactions appear even though...