This study explores the ‘affordability’ of development targets in six key sectors (health, education, water and sanitation, agriculture and infrastructure), by means of an empirical study examining sectoral expenditure in five low income case study countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia,...

The paper analyzes the problems of low growth, unemployment, especially youth unemployment, and high public debt afflicting the Italian economy even before the global financial crisis. These problems certainly have worsened as a result of the crisis itself. The aim of the present work is to...

Economic policy uncertainty is now widely accepted as one of the leading factors responsible for the global sluggish recovery. Measurement of these uncertainties is a crucial task for recent disccussions on the effects of policy uncertainty on the economic and financial variables. While indices...

Using the simple arithmetic of government budget constraint, we perform an analysis on the Italian case, investigating the consequences on the main public finance aggregates of the adoption of a fiscal policy rule responding to past real debt/GDP ratio. Such a rule, firmly grounded in the...

In this paper the euro crisis is viewed as the most recent episode of the crisis of finance-dominated capitalism. Therefore, two major features of finance-dominated capitalism, the increasing inequality of income distribution and the rising imbalances of current accounts, are analysed for a set...

We analyse the long-run imbalances of finance-dominated capitalism underlying the present crisis – which began in 2007 – with a focus on developments in the US and Germany. We argue that beyond inefficient regulation of the financial sector, the severeness of the present crisis has been...

The central question this paper seeks to answer is how monetary policy might affect the equilibrium behavior of default and sovereign risk premium. The paper is based on �one-interest-rate� model. Public debt becomes risky due to an active fiscal policy, as in Uribe (2006), reflecting the...

Most explanations for the necessity of an independent central bank rely on the time-inconsistency model and therefore assume that governments are weak, foolish, or untruthful and tend to cheat people. The model in this paper indicates, however, that an independent central bank is not necessary...

The aim of this note is to raise some doubts about the opportunity to abandon the economic policy strategies that support aggregate demand because it is a prerequisite to realize the credibility of the new currency- the Euro. Prevailing literature states that, in the choice between inflation and...

Following the recent developments of the literature on stabilization policies, this paper investigates the effect of tax distortions on equilibrium determinacy in a New Keynesian economy with rule-of-thumb consumers and capital accumulation. In particular, we focus on the inter-action between...