Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

There is scant analysis on the causal relationship between fiscal capacity and social protection expenditure in the developing world. We investigate the causal relationship between fiscal capacity of the state and social protection expenditure, hypothesizing that fiscal capacity is necessary but...

This paper investigates the role of economic structures as determinants of FDI inflows. We expand on the existing literature by focusing on advanced economies, using a newly available measure of FDI which cleans the data from statistical artefacts, such as financial round tripping, and by...

The EU's Lisbon strategy of 2000 (renewed in 2005) calls for substantial improvements in the quality and sustainability of public finance. In this context, the current study concentrates on the growth potential of public expenditures. National Reform Programs are analyzed in order to draw...

This paper analyses both the long and the short-run relation between government expenditure and potential output in EU countries by means of pooled mean group estimation (Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999)). Results show that, over a sample comprising EU-15 countries over the 1970-2003 period, it...