We employ the “social conditions of innovative enterprise” framework to analyze the key determinants of China’s development path from the economic reforms of 1978 to the present. First, we focus on how government investments in human capabilities and physical infrastructure provided...

This working paper explores avenues to improve public sector efficiency in Latvia, a catching-up and ageing economy where spending needs are large. Ensuring that spending allocated to core services (e.g. education, healthcare) is adequate to achieve convergence of policy outcomes to OECD upper...

Previous literature generally finds that greater fiscal decentralization is associated with faster economic growth, improved government performance, and stronger constraints on the Leviathan behavior of governments. Because economic growth critically depends on the presence of good government...

Using firm-level data covering 709 cities in 128 countries, we examine the role of a comprehensive list of business and institutional environment variables at the sub-national level in explaining firm employment and productivity growth. We find basic protection (with corruption as an element),...

After a brief introduction dealing with critical opinions of some economists on the European austerity policy, the authors point out that austerity as a means of achieving fiscal consolidation and financial stability is applied when the fiscal domain is weak. After analyzing the effects of the...

Previous literature generally finds greater fiscal decentralization associated with faster economic growth. A separate, but related, literature finds greater fiscal decentralization associated with improved government performance, and stronger constraints on the Leviathan behavior of...

Income inequality and relative poverty in the United States are among the highest in the OECD and have substantially increased over the past decades. These developments have been associated with a number of other worrying statistics, including low intergenerational social mobility and weak real...