This note discusses the medical/therapeutical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their “political economy” context. First, the very quick development of several vaccines highlights the richness of the basic knowledge waiting for therapeutical exploitation. Such knowledge has largely...

The challenge of achieving socially optimal incentives for innovation in public goods faces twin market failures: a market failure to adequately promote public goods invention and a market failure to implement innovative public goods once developed. Though innovation in private goods sometimes...

This paper extends Boadway and Keen (1993)'s work in several ways, in particular by considering two public goods, a pure public good and a good with redistributive characteristics. Under this new characterisation, it shows that is still possible to join an allocation of goods which corresponds...

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India...

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India...

International environmental agreements (IEAs) address cross-border public goods, therefore they are faced with free-riding problems. Generally, the incentives of states to comply with such treaties are low as the benefits of compliance do not always outweigh the cost. Previous literature has...

Following an overview on the fast changing global context of agriculture, and food and nutrition security, this paper provides a framework for identifying the set of essential international public goods for a well-functioning world agriculture and food system: natural resource management related...

International environmental agreements (IEAs) address cross-border public goods, therefore they are faced with free-riding problems. Generally, the incentives of states to comply with such treaties are low as the benefits of compliance do not always outweigh the cost. Previous literature has...

Decentralizing the allocation of public goods by giving funds directly to communities takes advantage of local information concerning needs, but decreases the accountability over how funds are used; leaving funds open to misuse or capture by local elites. In Indonesia, the World Bank attempts to...

A standard justification for state intervention and regulation is the market failure known as public goods. Assuming the private market cannot appropriately react to the true demand for public goods, the regulator must decide which goods to supply and in what quantity. A regulator wishing to...