It is common practice to summarise the economic performance of countries in terms of four dimensions (real growth, inflation, unemployment and the external account), which are visually captured by the magic diamond of the OECD. In this paper we present a synthetic performance measure which...

We develop a model along the lines of Niskanen, articulating that under a soft government budget constraint the full production cost of the public good is not reflected in the tax price as perceived by the consumer-taxpayer-voter. Various proportions of non-tax financing and different degrees of...

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...