Since 1986, Vietnam has been reforming its economic system, moving from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented economy connected to the rest of the world. This process has been shaped by the tensions and power relationship between moderate and radical reformers and the interaction of...

This paper analyzes the long term sustainability of budgetary policies in a general equilibrium framework. The analysis is based on an overlapping generations model where the government fixes a tax rate on factor incomes, conducts unproductive and productive public spendings and determines the...

The budget is being more and more criticized. Its abandonment is even suggested. This would be the failure of a management tool that was born in the 1930s and that had since a great success. It seems too early to tell whether this criticism will lead to its disappearance. However, we can...

This article provides an overview of the literature on the psychological value of time. It discusses various determinants of the discount rate and the possibility of hyperbolic discounting. The historical approach helps us to trace the origins of the concept of psychological value of time. This...

This paper derives the properties of the discount rate that should be applied to a public-sector project when the affected population has heterogeneous degrees of impatience. We show that, for any distribution of discount rates, the social discount rate has the following properties: it decreases...

The objective of this paper is to adopt a general equilibrium model and determine the socially efficient discount factor and discount rate when there are heterogeneous anticipations about the future of the economy as well as heterogeneous time preference rates. Among others we tackle the...

We address the problem of a social planner who, as in Weitzman (2001), gathers data on discount rates and wants to infer the socially efficient consumption discount rate. We propose an equilibrium approach and we analyse the expression and the properties of the resulting equilibrium discount...