The notion of "social capital" was first introduced by the sociologist James Coleman in 1988. He defined it as "the ability of people to work togather for common purposes in groups and organizations". It is argued that a group with members that trust each other can accomplish more economic groth...

In a world of roving bandits a sub-optimal provision of collective gods exists, most notably security and economic growth. This creates an opportunity for roving bandits to act as political entrepreneurs by becoming stationary bandits and as strong rulers monopolize vilence and provide...

Two main results in traditional tax theory states the following. First, general taxes minimize the welfare loss from changed relative prices. Second, because the total public budget tends to exceed the optimal size, a leader (here named "troop leader") is needed in the budget process to prevent...

The Kyoto Protocol of December 1997 allows emission trade between countries that have committed themselves to an emission ceiling. This paper considers two schemes of emission trading: trade between goverments and trade between emision sources. The two schemes are analyzed and the strengths and...

The transistion of the "Old Communist" countries of East and Central Europe has been disappointingly slow given the amount of physical and human capital available at the start of the transition. We argue that this slowness is caused by the lack of social capital, which is an important factor of...

The paper presents empirical findings on CO2 taxation within the OECD countries. Taxes are not uniform, a nd households pay a tax rate which is five times higher than that paid by industry on average.

The US ahs been criticized for wanting to earn a fortune on a global CO2 market. However, compared to the situation without trade and provided that such a market is designed so that it does not pay to cheat, a global CO2 market may provide the world with an epoch-making means of cost-effective...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a standard method of measurement for social capital. Various authors have investigated the influence of social capital on economic growth but still social capital has not been measured in any satisfactory way. So far, each survey has used its own ad hoc...

The contribution is to analyze why harmful lobbyism against the transition to market economy takes place and to recommand how this important barrier to economic growth can be eliminated.

An annual discriminative and revenue-neutral auction is linked to the new Acid Rain Program which allows electric utilities all over the US to trade SO2 emission permits. This innovative SO2 auction distributes 2% of the permits in circulation and takes place at the Chicago Board of Trade.