Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short-run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply side impact of aid—financed public expenditure. We develop a simple model of aid and public expenditure in which public infrastructure capital generates...

Recent evidence on the impact of fiscal policy – taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits – on long-run growth in OECD countries has adopted the Barro (1990) framework to distinguish between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ expenditures, and ‘distortionary’ and...

In the last decade, Italy has experienced a considerable decentralization of functions to the regions. This transformation has been especially relevant for the National Health System that has de facto assumed a federal system design. The federal reform aimed at disciplining public health...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of natural resource rent on public expenditure composition. Our hypothesis is that, when institutional quality is low, politicians have more discretionary power on the allocation of public resources. Then public expenditure composition tends to be...

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature shows that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical but similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and...

This paper elaborates on Baldwin’s (1999) New Economic Geography model allowing for capital accumulation and capital mobility between a “rich” and a “poor” region. A central government decides upon the level and the regional and sectoral allocation of productivity enhancing public...

Many African countries have experienced unprecedented rates of economic growth in recent years, yet their economic transformations display features that could constrain their future growth prospects. Patterns of urbanization without industrialization, rapid growth of low productivity jobs in the...

Despite the widespread debate about crime in Brazil and the alarming increase in homicides in recent years, few studies have analyzed or exposed evidence of the impact of public security spending on deterring violence in the country. This may be due to issues of endogeneity when estimating the...

On the possibility of reducing public expenditures on medicine through deregulation. The market for medicine is special in three essential respects: (a) The role of the buyer is divided by three agents: the (informed) doctor, who prescribes the medicine, the public health insurance, which pays...

This paper revisits the conundrum surrounding the measurement of the impact of public infrastructure spending in the light of the aggregation literature (Fisher, 1969; 1993). It shows why estimations of aggregate production functions (APFs) augmented with a proxy for public expenditures do not yield...