Brazil is frequently portrayed as exhibiting persistent and structural economic inequality that is rooted in the early colonial experience, and is believed to undermine development in the long run. I construct original measures of agricultural inequality for 1905 in what is today Brazil’s...

The paper deals with the issue in how far the fiscal policy of the German Laender can be considered as sustainable. Comparing the fiscal policy stance and budgets of the 16 German states, only Bavaria and Saxony are pursuing a fiscal policy which may be labelled as sustainable. The other states...

Examines various ways of mobilizing resources for social and economic development. Considers the feasibility of resources mobilized by internationally coordinated action, through national and local governments, through community mobilization, from private charity and commercial enterprises and...

The past two decades have witnessed many episodes of economic reform across the developing world. Although initiated with popular enthusiasm, sustaining and completing these reform packages has turned out to be much more difficult, with policymakers having to `walk the line' between success and...

In the wake of the recent crisis many countries face problems caused by budget deficits. To be able to lower their budget deficits these governments should conduct their expenditures at the lowest possible prices. To achieve this objective many countries use auctions to administer government...

The Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al., 2009) published in September 2009 has brought back to the attention of policy makers and researchers that measuring a country’s development solely on the basis of GDP or GDP per capita...

Countries vary widely with respect to the share of government spending on health, a metric that can serve as a proxy for the extent to which health is prioritized by governments. World Health Organization (WHO) data estimate that, in 2011, health's share of aggregate government expenditure in...

This paper presents estimates of the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing, transition, and OECD countries, which are derived by combining figures from different estimation methods. We describe and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different estimation methods. We find that the...

We examine the short- and long-term movements of government spending relative to output in 51 countries. We find that in the short term, the main components of government spending increase with output in about half of the sample countries, with some variation across spending categories and...