The political feasibility study presented in this working paper has been undertaken in the course of the PHARE-project "Evaluation of consequences of an accession of the Slovak Republic into the EU on the competitiveness of the Slovak food processing industry". The main objective of the...

The present paper explores why farmers are taxed in poor countries and subsidized in rich countries. Using the economic theory of contests to come to an understanding of the incentives for agricultural protectionism, we first sketch a framework for an excludable and rivalrous rent. We then apply...

What determines the size and form of redistributive programs, the extent and type of public goods provision, the burden of taxation across alternative tax bases, the size of government deficits, and the stance of monetary policy during the course of business and electoral cycles? A large and...

Command-and-control measures, despite their inefficiencies, are still the standard in environmental policy. This might be due to the fact that command-and-control instruments prevent monetary redistribution between sectors and households and leave property rights on remaining pollution with the...

We normally take it for granted: a government or state has its corresponding territory. This paper shows that government need not have a territorial monopoly. The paper advances a practical, constitutional proposal, based on the notion that there are meaningful government units, whose major...

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US...

In this paper we present a two stage game of political lobbying for policies designed to enhance environmental quality. Unlike previous work which has tended to assume perfect monitoring of environmental quality in lobbying games we allow for imperfect monitoring of environmental quality. We...

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US...

The approaches and opinions of economists often dominate public policy discussion. Economists have gained this privileged position partly (or perhaps mainly) because of the obvious relevance of their subject matter, but also because of the unified methodology (neo-classical economics) that the...

The paper describes three novel regularities in public choice games, tied to a Darwinian argument about rules that could be expected to govern social choice. Note: This is a revised version of this paper, originally titled "Two Tests For ‘NSNX’ Effects In Cooperation Experiments," and...