"Vito Tanzi offers a truly comprehensive treatment of the economic role of the state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a historical and world perspective. The book addresses the fundamental question of what governments should do, or have attempted to do, in economic activities in...

The regulatory state faces a set of paradoxes, in the form of strategies that achieve an end precisely opposite to the one intended. These include: (2) overregulation can produce underregulation; (2) stringent regulation of new risks can increase aggregate risk levels; (3) requiring the best...