Cross-national studies on happiness have focused on differences in level of happiness. The focus of this paper is on spread in happiness in the nation, also called ‘inequality in happiness’. Inequality in happiness in nations can be measured by the size of the standard deviation of responses...

The FOI model developed by the authors measures the future, outside and inside potential of a country. With the help of the model the OECD countries are evaluated, and four typical clusters are found which can represent four typical development models within the club of developed economies.

The formal comparison of similarities and differences of Chinese and Western economic models misses the most important point. The uniqueness of China is that it looks very much like a developed country today in terms of institutional capacity of the state, even though it is a developing country...

This paper uses a formal model to analyze the effects of military competition between states on the size and composition of the economy and the government. Great economies of scale in warfare and even distributions of military capability among the contestants generate intense interstate rivalry,...

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal...

The Mindanao conflict in Southern Philippines is a long-standing controversy that has eluded comprehensive solutions. Despite efforts of the Government of the Philippines (GRP) and the representatives from the peoples of Mindanao in undertaking peace initiatives, “the war:” continues. The...

This paper describes institutions of direct democracy between 1997 and 2003 in 26 Swiss cantons (states), specifically the statutory initiative and referendum, the constitutional initiative, and the fiscal referendum. In particular, it discusses their applications, but also the legal...

This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant review institution in the US patent system by comparing the “opposition careers†of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO patents. We demonstrate several novel methods...

The objective of the paper is to define the trajectory of economic institutional reforms in Russia as a framework of S&T policies. The methodology of this research is based upon the institutional matrices theory (Кирдина, 2001; Kirdina, 2003). The hypothesis claims that the “institutional...

Beginning with ’90 years in Romania have been created more and more private enterprises, which today form a consistent sector of so called “small and mid-sized enterprises” (SMEs). Focusing on profit and being in favorable conditions with a high market require, the SMEs not always pay...