In the 1970s and early 1980s Paul Samuelson reformulated the conditional prediction made by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by replacing socialism with populism. According to Samuelson, "populist democracy" had attained its fullest development in the Southern Cone. He...

After the Quebec Presidential Summit of The Americas Meeting, countries like Colombia will have to reshape its political structure to meet Hemispheric requirements. We will have to encourage universal education, preserve democracy, deepen economic integration and eradicate poverty. This is a...

The post-war experience of developing countries leads to two depressing conclusions: only a small number of countries have successfully developed; and development theory has not produced development. In this article we examine one critical fact that might provide insights into the development...

The widening of fiscal deficits during democratic elections is well established. We examine a broader set of fiscal outcomes around elections for a large set of emerging and developing economies (EMDEs), probe for differences between democracies and non-democracies, and estimate the degree to...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Science is epistemology and economics is too -- Chapter 3. Economics of electoral democracy -- Chapter 4. Labor market Singularities -- Chapter 5. Biological and social factors of income inequality -- Chapter 6. Fiscal policy and income inequality -- Chapter...