Turbulent times may be conducive to take significant steps forward for Europe. The starting point of this paper is an objective assessment of the fiscal vulnerability of the major European countries. Using the PWC composite indicator and a ranking for the sustainability of the public finances,...

Turbulent times may be conducive to take significant steps forward for Europe. The starting point of this paper is an objective assessment of the fiscal vulnerability of the major European countries. Using the PWC composite indicator and a ranking for the sustainability of the public finances,...

This article develops and presents a “Composite Indicator of the Creative Economy” (CICE). The CICE is a summary measure of an entity’s (e.g., a region’s) creative capacity or capability in three key dimensions: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Openness. To develop the CICE we use an...

This article examines whether the efficiency and effectiveness of the government linearly depends on the size of the public spending. We show that countries with a larger government do not systematically achieve better results than countries with a smaller government. Therefore, by the use of a...

In this paper we mimic an engineeriilg approach to the "production" of tax offices. Essentially one dominant physical input (labour) is converted into heterogeneous non-monetary outputs such as theNumber of audited returns with a different degree of complexity. Productive efficiency is evaluated...

Turbulent times may be conducive to take significant steps forward for Europe. The starting point of this paper is an objective assessment of the fiscal vulnerability of the major European countries. Using the PWC composite indicator and a ranking for the sustainability of the public finances,...

The present paper explores sources of technical (in)efficiency of Flemish municipalities in their production of local public goods (in the year 2000). In assessing inefficiency derivation, we focus on socio-economic and political characteristics of the municipalities as potential source. Our...

Economic efficiency – understood in terms of jurisdictions providing a maximum amount of output for a given level of inputs – is one potential means to evaluate public policies. Various approaches, however, co-exist to measure the (technical) efficiency of organizations. Given that these...

The sharp widening of yield spreads among EMU sovereign bonds in the course of the economic crisis and concerns that some EMU member countries would encounter difficulties in rolling their existing debt and funding new budget deficits have revived proposals for a common bond issuance by EMU...