SURVEY: This article shows that applied econometric is not a way of selecting, from among a plethora of possible explanations of public spending evolution. It lists 19 explanations and 73 explanatory variables and provides evidence of the great confusion in this field and the relative emptiness...

Wagner’s Law is the first model of public spending in the history of public finance. The aim of this article is to assess its empirical evidence in Italy for the period 1960-2008 at a disaggregated level, using a time-series approach. After a brief introduction, a survey of the economic...

Wagner's Law is the first model of public spending in the history of public finance. The aim of this study is to assess its empirical evidence in Italy for the period 1960–2008 at a disaggregated level, using a time series approach. After a brief introduction, a survey of the economic...

Improving the quality of public finances (QPF) has become a new focus for European policy makers. This focus is largely a response to preparing the European economies for the dual challenge of ageing populations and increased exposure to global competition. At the EU level, the Stability and...

Israel’s monetary policy framework is broadly sound. Inflation targeting was introduced in the early 1990s, and low single-digit inflation was established by the end of the decade. However, fast transmission from the exchange rate to inflation means the operational challenges differ somewhat...

This paper examines various aspects of fiscal policy in Slovenia, in particular fiscal consolidation, pension reform, efficiency of government spending and the tax system. It finds that Slovenia belongs to the group of new EU member countries, which have given in the past a high priority to...

The causal relationship between government revenue and government expenditure is an important subject in public economics especially to the control of budget deficit. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government revenue and government expenditure in Iran by...

The relationship between government size and the unemployment rate is investigated using a panel error-correction model that describes both the short-run dynamics and long-run determination of the unemployment rate. Using data from twenty OECD countries from 1970 to 1999 and after correcting for...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relation- ship by using rms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggreg- ated macro data have...

Beginning with the recent reorganisation of the principal Italian public research bodies, which has led to the founding of larger labs, this paper evaluates the presence of statistically significant relationships between the dimensions of the research bodies and the performance of the same. The...