Much public discussion about foreign aid has focused on whether and how to increase its quantity. But recently aid quality has come to the fore, by which is meant the efficiency of the aid delivery process. This paper focuses on one process problem, the proliferation of aid projects and the...

Use of migration tax as an instrument for financing development expenditure in poorer countries has received renewed attention recently and is evolving as an important subject of research in development economics. This paper discusses a related issue where the revenue collected by taxing skilled...

This paper relates Amartya Sen’s capability approach to the literature on equivalence scales. Synthetic indicators of well-being are constructed by adjusting individual incomes for differences in functionings. An exploratory comparative application to Italian and Belgian data illustrates the...

In this paper we study a horizontally differentiated market for financial in-termediation and develop a simple explanation for concentration in the financial intermediation industry. We show that under asymmetric information, if the demand for funds is not perfectly elastic, the heterogeneity of...

The importance of customer relationships as a source of suppliers’ innovative activity and competence accumulation has been widely recognised. The more a relationship involves collaboration and creative, non-standardised customer solutions, the more there is potential for the development of...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

The paper considers economic reforms in the EU using an economic-political model which captures the possible myopia in economic policies, and analyses reforms in taxation, the welfare state, and in the labour and product markets. We show that high taxes and an extensive welfare state are likely...