Following the extra ordinary decision to bail in the unsecured depositors and restructure the two main banks and the near complete destruction of the country’s economic business model as an International Financial Centre, the author considers the changes necessary to rebuild the economy of...

Through this paper the author discusses the phenomenon of excessive Government borrowing and the factors that lead Governments to be so dependent on financial markets. It is argued that the combined effect of unregulated financial intermediaries, hedge funds and Credit Rating Agencies in...

As a project appraisal tool, the preliminary feasibility study (PFS) has contributed to enhancing the efficiency of public investment decisionmaking in the Republic of Korea over the last two decades. To overcome the limitations of the efficiency-oriented cost-benefit analysis, the PFS...

The Ramsey (1928) equation decomposes the real discount rate into the pure rate of time preference plus a term that accounts for the changing marginal utility of consumption. Discussions about the appropriate discount rate to apply in Cost Benefit Analysis sometimes refer to variations induced...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the innovation promotion programs carried by the National Research and Innovation Agency (ANII). A combination of non-experimental methods was used to quantify the effects of public support to innovation in three dimensions of the firms’...

This study assesses the impact of children’s health insurance programs on health care utilization and health care expenditures of children from 6 to 14 years old in Vietnam using four rounds of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys from 2006 to 2012. We find a positive effect of both...

Using survey data on Bulgarian and Macedonian firms that participated in USAID programs providing technical and financial assistance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and on firms that did not, we estimate the effectiveness of such assistance in increasing the growth of employment in...

This reference paper describes the sampling and contents of the IZA Evaluation Dataset Survey and outlines its vast potential for research in labor economics. The data have been part of a unique IZA project to connect administrative data from the German Federal Employment Agency with innovative...

We propose a method to capture the effect of tax reforms on consumer’s readiness to buy using Google searches as a proxy. We use the Spanish 2010 and 2012 VAT reforms as a case of study. We use a regression discontinuity design taking advantage of the fact that the Spanish 2010 and 2012 VAT...

Effective sharing mechanisms of joint costs among beneficiaries of a project are a fundamental requirement for the sustainability of the project. Projects that are heterogeneous both in terms of the landscape of the area under development or the participants (users) lead to a more complicated...