When purchasing goods and services, governments often discriminate in favor of domestic suppliers. It is widely assumed that such behavior is motivated by protectionism. Although this interpretation is sometimes valid, it is also puzzling. After reviewing some of the puzzles, the paper proposes...

This paper argues that to associate intergovernmental grants with the objectives of equity and efficiency implies that governments are irrational. The authors find long-term systematic irrationality in the behavior of any institution difficult to accept. The authors, therefore, propose that the...

[eng] Representative governments and the formation of national-and international policies. Albert Breton. The paper presents and uses a simple model of government in representative democracies to model the properties of equilibrium agreements reached in international organizations, such as the...