“Wagner’s Law” is the first model of public expenditure in the history of public finance. The aim of this article is to assess its empirical evidence in Italy for the period 1960-2008. After a brief introduction, an essential survey of the economic literature on this issue is offered,...

Governments in low-income countries have the difficult task of making wide-ranging decisions about public spending, taxation, and borrowing with the aim of helping their countries maintain long-term debt sustainability, achieve higher economic growth, and ultimately reduce poverty. Making such...

The subject of public finance and taxation marked the beginning of systematic and rather exclusive writing on economic issues in Islamic tradition in its earliest period. Within a few centuries a large number of works came out on the subject. This trend continued in the later centuries but with...

Poverty and inequality around the world has been rising over the last three decades and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seems a far fetched goal. In explaining underdevelopment, Classical Economics has offered many theories and models including but not limited to...

Which are the determinants of the choice of ownership structure for a firm providing local public services? What are the consequences of this choice on the performance of these firms? To answer these questions we will use a unique database providing economic and financial data on 321 Italian...

The demographic database of Istat (www.istat.it)is explored and the main facts are extracted and described, both at the aggregate national level as well as at the regional one. This paper is completely self-standing but, at the same time, poses the basis for a more general analysis that will be...

The present paper studies and evaluates Dr. Ambedkar's pioneering contribution to the origin and development of provincial finance during the British period. It also discusses his opinion regarding different stages of decentralization, and compares it with that of M.G. Ranade, one of the...

Brazil is frequently portrayed as exhibiting persistent and structural economic inequality that is rooted in the early colonial experience, and is believed to undermine development in the long run. I construct original measures of agricultural inequality for 1905 in what is today Brazil’s...

The demographic structure of Egypt has the form of a pyramid, indicating that labour supply will grow at a relatively high rate for many years to come. Unless emigration flows will rise, Egypt needs to create jobs at a much higher pace than most other countries around the globe to absorb the new...