Large estimates of the benefits of microeconomic reform have been put forward in official studies. By contrast, Quiggin (1997) concludes that benefits of microeconomic reforms have been modest. A key area of disagreement relates to the claim that increased competition leads to increases in...

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal decentralisation, focusing in particular on the impact of the level of income on the level of fiscal decentralisation. Various measures of fiscal decentralisation, several of them novel in this context, are employed in a cross-country...

Happiness research is a new, rapidly growing and provocative aspect of economic science. In fact, there are now over 1,800 published papers on the subject, and it might be said that the ‘dismal science’ has come to be obsessed with happiness. This research provides a number of interesting...