Although achieving impressive economic growth during the economic reform period, China has been plagued by rampant corruption and a widening income gap. How can the coexistence these two phenomena be explained? In this paper, we argue that before 1994, the coexistence was induced by a series of...

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate fiscal decentralization focusing on the potential mis-targeting of intergovernmental fiscal equalization transfers. The approach builds on an explicit comparison and the summary measurement of different (horizontal) allocation distributions across...

Investment in most heavily indebted countries has been weak since 1982. Several papers (Krugman, 1988; Corden, 1988; Sachs, 1989) have subsequently established the debt overhang proposition: the existence of a heavy debt burden reduces the incentive to invest.1 This proposition has given an important...

Fashions and their revivals occur in a rather erratic manner. The paper shows that such fluctuations can be derived from the utility maximizing behaviour of rational individuals with stable preferences. It is assumed that the demand for the fashion good is determined, amongst other variables, by...

The long road from capitalism to capitalism the Eastern European economies have made has been paved with many economic problems, but the transition from a command economy into a market economy is likely to become a bumpy ride as well. Apart from the major real economic reforms that have to take...

Investment in most heavily indebted countries has been weak since 1982. The widely accepted debt overhang proposition interprets the investment drop as a moral hazard problem: a heavy debt burden raises the incentive to consume, because the marginal benefit of investment would go to the...

China's and Indonesia's development strategies have been compared with others, but rarely with each other. Radically different political contexts have produced both similar and distinctly different development patterns. Each using formal planning, Indonesia spurred radical reforms to promote...