Although information on variations in health service performance is now more widely available, relatively little is known about how healthcare payers use this information to improve resource allocation. We explore to what extent and how Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in England have used the NHS...

According to the well-being measure known as the U.N. Human Development Index, Australia now ranks 3rd in the world and higher than all other English-speaking nations. This paper questions that assessment. It reviews work on the economics of happiness, considers implications for policymakers,...

The Federal Planning Bureau has been publishing medium-term macroeconomic projections for the Belgian economy since the beginning of the eighties. In this working paper past projection errors are scrutinised to give users a broad idea of the uncertainties surrounding these projections. The...

Canada has now almost eliminated inflation, but it is still struggling with a slow productivity growth, high and persistent unemployment, and large fiscal and external deficits. This essay reviews the identifiables causes and consequences of this evolution, and draws a number of lessons for the...

This comparative study of money, coinages, prices, and wages in southern England and the southern Low Countries had its origins in a series of appendices and footnotes for the first twelve volumes of the Correspondence of Erasmus (1484-1527), part of the Collected Works of Erasmus, which the...

We analyze the political support for employment protection legislation. Unlike my previous work on the same topic, this paper pays a lot of attention to the role of obsolescence in the growth process. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living...

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of...

Macromodel of the Romanian Market Economy***** In this article we present only the economic forecast of the variable of interest. For a description of the model see RJEF, No. 1/2007 of the [4]. The macromodel estimates the short and medium-term economic implications for internal policies and of...

Macromodel of the Romanian Market Economy***** In this article we present only the economic forecast of the variable of interest; for a description of the model see the previous number of the Journal [4]. The macromodel estimates the short and medium-term economic implications for internal...

In the late 1970s, many economists argued that the deleterious effects of inflation on the user cost of capital for U.S. firms were large. Since that time, the tax code has changed, the level of inflation has dropped significantly, and the of investment has evolved considerably. In this paper,...