Today efficient states can be represented as sovereign authorities governing successful economies that provide high, stable and rising standards of welfare for their citizens. Such states emerged slowly and painfully over centuries of geopolitical rivalry and conflict among aristocracies for...

At the start of the long wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the taxes available to the British state fell mainly on outlays made by its citizens, upon domestically produced commodities and services. Smaller proportions came from import duties and direct taxes upon their incomes...

The Rise Of Britain’s Fiscal Naval StateIn outline (if not in the chronological detail required for a complete and satisfactory historical narrative) the reasons why the United Kingdom evolved between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Congress of Vienna of 1815, into the most powerful...

In recent decades the new institutional economics has redrawn attention to the significance of state sponsored and regulated institutions, organisations, laws, rules, customs and culturally conditioned behaviour for the promotion of long term economic development (Menard and Shirley, 2005)....

This study examines a problem of fiscal deficits based on the Ottoman budget of 1275 A.H. (March 1859–February 1860).1 In this period, state debt amassed rapidly due to increased market loans abroad. In order to evaluate the credibility of the Ottoman government for a new loan, Lord Hobart and...

Historical narratives which place the Glorious Revolution at the beginning and Parliament near the centre of explanations for the rise and success of Britain’s fiscal military state begin to seem truncated in chronology, narrow in conception and insular in focus. Nevertheless, their stories...

As part of an endeavour to explain the divergence in incomes per capita between North and South America new institutional economics (NIE) and economic history have attempted in recent years to realize the potential effort for illumination derivable from comparisons of the heritage of their...

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical inmost industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop adynamic political economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expendituresprovide insurance...

Utilizing a new database of tax rates, tax revenues and tax income-elasticities we contribute to the debate on the effects of …fiscal policyon economic activity in a number of ways. First, using both panelGMM and panel VAR methods, we …find that the effects of tax cuts onGDP growth are...

We contribute to the intense debate on the real effects of …fiscal stimuli by showingthat the impact of government expenditure shocks depends crucially on key countrycharacteristics, such as the level of development, exchange rate regime, openness totrade, and public indebtedness. Based on a...