This paper focuses on the role of "institutions" in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

This paper focuses on the role of institutions in poverty alleviation, where both poverty and institutions are interpreted broadly. The broadening of the poverty notion is important at least from the policy perspective. Even if one were convinced that higher growth would reduce income poverty to...

na

Does public expenditure growth stimulate income or is it the increase in provincial income which causes government spending to rise? Recent studies have shown that, at the national level, total public spending and national income are mutually dependent on each other in the causal sense. This...

The importance of capital loss offset provisions in a world of risk is well documented in the tax literature. However, the potential deadweight losses owing to imperfect offset has not been fully explored. This paper develops a framework whereby that investigation can be carried out and utilizes...

This paper re-examines the issues involved in the design of a direct tax on consumption, an idea that has received a fair degree of acceptance in the transition countries over the past decade (e.g., tax reforms in Croatia and Moldova). First we argue that on the subject of equivalence among a...

This paper focuses on the design of a consumption tax in a world of capital risk. The certainty literature discusses two standard options, namely the cash flow method and the pre-payment method (ie, the wage tax), and finds the two approaches to be equivalent. Models that consider capital risk...