While there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts ignore the fact that competitiveness can change not only because of market processes such as wage negotiation but also because of political decision making. Governments that compete with others for...

Indicators of government activity must be carefully designed to be relevant, credible and accountable. Frustration with reform pressures suggests that measures of policy activity are not providing accurate information. In fact, indicators of product or labour market regulation fail to measure...

This paper explores the determinants of deviations of ex-post budget outcomes from first-release outcomes published towards the end of the year of budget implementation. The predictive content of the first-release outcomes is important, because these figures are an input for the next budget and...

News-based indicators are in vogue in economics. But they tend to be applied with little consideration for the properties of news itself. In this paper, we try to shed light on the nature of this type of data. Drawing from established findings in communication science and journalism studies we...