German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

Mobility of high income individuals across borders puts pressure on governments to lower taxes. A central tenet of the underlying theoretical and empirical models is that mobile individuals react to tax differentials through migration, and in turn immobile households vote for lower taxes in the...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using an extensive data set on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and...

Information technology has become a very important issue in citizens' relations. It started with e-commerce followed by e-business and ended by e-government. Firms and consumers use internet to provide information and perform many of their business actions. During the last years Governments also...

All European Union (EU) member states have to comply with the demanding recycling rates targets that were set for the recovery of packaging waste in the Directive 94/62/EC. Nevertheless, each country has its own system for accomplishing these targets. Some already had national legislation when...

The recycling of packaging waste is an objective of the Community with very ambitious recycling rate targets laid down in the European law. Research on the operations and on the financial and economic costs that resulted from this environmental policy is an ongoing effort. Currently, there is...

This paper analyses whether the different powers and resources at the disposal of local and regional governments across Europe deliver greater satisfaction with political institutions and lead to greater personal happiness. The analysis uses microdata from the four available waves of the...

Brazil has constitutionally adopted a Unified Health System (SUS) since 1988. SUS is designed so that central government, states and municipalities together offer public, free for all full health coverage. The complexity and territorial arrangement of SUS have been developed in such a way that...

The aim of this study is to examine the regional policy and the governance model of Lombardy and to highlight the most important factors of its success and to address the relevant risks. The main source of success of Lombardy was the implementation of the subsidiarity principle in the area of...

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the change. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at the creating of municipalities of...