Given high government spending, debt and the new challenges on the horizon, the themes of this work are more relevant than ever: the essential tool of spending by the state, its 'value for money', likely risks in the future, and the remedies to create lean, efficient and sustainable government....

"Public expenditure is an essential tool for governments to underpin prosperity, opportunities and freedom in our advanced countries. But discontent is spreading at a time when high spending, debt and new challenges risk overwhelming many governments. This book's four themes are, therefore, as...

The potential interactions among fiscal policies, investments and economicgrowth are complex and manifold.In this paper, we will perform a systematic comparative analysis of the variouseconomic insights that arecurrently available on these complex relationships, both theoretically (by aselective...

A volatile pattern of government spending and its financing triggers uncertainty about the timing and the costs of assets sale in financial markets, thereby leading to higher interest rates. This, in turn, hampers the extension of credit to businesses and individuals. The empirical results...

This paper surveys some recent literature on fiscal policy and comparative politics. Economic policy is viewed as the outcome of a game with multiple-principals and multiple-agents. Opportunistic politicians bargain over policy. Rational voters hold them accountable through retrospective voting....

This paper reassesses the predictions of the standard Barro-type endogenous growth models drawing on recent developments in the panel time series literature. In particular, we employ the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) estimator developed in Pesaran (2006) and estimate the effects of fiscal...