In this paper we apply two statistical models to the measurement of polarization to Israeli income data over the past decade in order to empirically detect income classes as sub-populations of incomes concentrated around an optimal number of poles. The statistical models compared are a...

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...

Governments may draft contracts with market agents for allocating subsidies and pursuing specific policy goals. Contract enforcement via binding commitments is difficult, however, when exogenous (environmental) and endogenous (behavioural) risks interact. Analyzing the old debt compromise in...

The European Unions's task of providing Trans-European Networks (TENs) in transportation, communications and energy transmission which has been enacted by the treaty of Maastricht, is not confined to internal networks in the EU. Since 1994 this task has been widened so as to give support to the...

The paper analyses the infrastructure provision in East Germany mainly by an examination of existing literature. At the time of German unification 1990, infrastructure in East Germany was in a very bad condition. After more than ten years of rebuilding, most of the remaining need for...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

A core result of the aid allocation literature is that the quality of governance in recipient countries does not affect the amounts of foreign aid received. Donor countries may still give aid to poorly-governed countries because of a dilemma they face: those countries most in need typically also...

Corruption has fierce impacts on economic and societal development and is subject to a vast range of institutional, jurisdictional, societal and economic conditions. Research indicates that corruption's predominantly negative effects have arisen to a massive trans-border threat while creating...

This overview of transaction cost economics is organized around the "Carnegie Triple" – be disciplined; be interdisciplinary; have an active mind. The first of these urges those who would open up the black box of economic organization to do so in a modest, slow, molecular, definitive way, with...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption...