What are a negotiator's ethical and moral obligations during a negotiation? Should a negotiator be dedicated to achieving the greatest value possible for his or her client even though that goal may appear to require some degree of deception? Does it make a difference whether a culture has a...

Socialism is popular in the UK – not just among students, but also among people in their 30s and 40s. This is confirmed by survey after survey. Surveys also show that support for socialism in general terms is matched by support for a broad range of individual policies that could reasonably be...

This Paper utilizes 188 countries' world panel data (i.e. Penn World Table, see Heston, Summers and Aten, 2006) available from 1950 to 2003 to inquire the dual side relationships between government size and economic development. On the one hand, the expanse of government activities promotes...

Articles have been published repeatedly in the pages of "Voprosy ekonomiki" in which attempts have been made to prove that the exchange rate of the ruble was artificially made too high, that a devaluation was not only desirable but essential to stimulate growth in exports and production, and...

This publication advances a public agency-specific framework for the analysis of the causes of public sector corruption in order to develop public-policy recommendations. This framework is applied to the judiciary due to its strategic importance in the fight against public and private sector...

Does accession to the WTO stimulate faster growth? The issue is not only of interest to the business and policy communities, but also a test case of several active lines of economics research on openness and growth. We conduct an event study of accessions to the WTO (GATT) of 74 economies. The...

The framing of ideas related to economic policy and implementation remains consequential. Failure to carefully examine economic plans can always cause the economy to slow down or contract. Kenya is entrapped in a debt cycle characterized by massive fiscal deficits, erratic tax changes, widening...

This paper develops a simple model that analyses the relationship between a country's oil endowment and the duration of its autocratic leader. The dictator uses the rents from oil extraction for both personal gain and to pay-off potential opposition and chooses an optimal level of oil...

This paper studies the factors driving changes in judicial independence (JI) as incorporated in constitutions. Two indicators of constitutionally safeguarded JI are constructed. Variations in these indicators are identified based on changes in the constitutions of as many as 100 countries that...

We estimate the impact of fiscal decentralization on different indicators of pollution for more than 80 countries from 1970 to 2000. Our cross country estimates show that fiscal decentralization increases pollution. However, higher quality of institutions can limit the destructive environmental...