This paper is intended to provide an assessment of the impact of the silent revolution (decentralization reforms) of the last three decades on moving governments closer to people to establish fair, accountable, incorruptible and responsive governance. To accomplish this, a unique data set is...

A fiscal rule imposed when the budget is not transparent yields more creative accounting to circumvent it and less fiscal adjustment, generating hidden deficits/debts in public sector. This study focuses on creative accounting practices of governments and adds to the literature by measuring...

The proposal involves the establishment of ?welfare accounts? for every person in a country. There are to be four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

This study examines 147 banking crises in the period of 1976-2011 documented by the International Monetary Fund. The countries affected by crises are analysed in respect of publicly available World Bank indicators in the periods of three years before the crises. Machine learning methodology for...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

German technology policy has undergone a remarkable change during the last years. The first thing to mention is that technology policy in Germany takes a broader view now, focussing not only on knowledge creation (i.e. the invention process per se) but also on knowledge diffusion and faster...

This paper deals with fluctuations over time in the extent of the state-owned firm sector? nationalization-privatization cycles (NPCs). Anecdotal observations of NPCs are supported threefold by systematic empirical evidence: first, for different regions and economic systems, second, for...

With this theoretical survey the thesis is put forward that the method of privatization as well as the structure of the privatization agency is choosen by the politicians for politico-economic reasons, and not for reasons of saving transaction costs or for reasons of ideological preferences. The...

Regressions and tests performed on data from Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer 2004 survey show that personal or household experience of bribery is not a good predictor of perceptions held about corruption among the general population. In contrast, perceptions about the...

Estimations of the shadow economies for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing countries is 38.7%, in 28 transition...