The present paper first describes the European Union’s structural policy framework for the 2000-2006 period, setting out the objectives and instruments and highlighting the funding granted by the European Council in 1999. In this context, the second part of the paper aims to describe the...

This paper addresses the recent European Social Fund (ESF) reform and the possible consequences for Social Economy. The reform was adopted in 1999 and applies to the period from 2000 to 2006. After a brief overview of the European Social Fund since it was created in 1957, the main features to...

The most important aspect of American federalism embodied in the Constitution is the constitutional facilitation of a national free trade zone known as the United States wherein each independent unit is disabled from erecting barriers to trade under what is popularly termed the Interstate...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

We discuss two essential problems of the political economy of public finances: The principal agent problem between voters and elected politicians and the common pool problem arising from the fact that money drawn from a general tax fund is used to pay for policies targeting more or less narrow...

This paper uses a new data set on budgetary institutions in Europe to examine the impact of fiscal rules and budget procedures in EU countries on public finances. It briefly describes the main pattern of budgetary institutions and their determinants across the EU 15 member states. Empirical...

Fiscal rules specify quantitative targets for key budgetary aggregates. In this paper, we review the experience with such rules in Japan and in the EU. Comparing the performance of fiscal policy in the 1980s and 1990s until 2003, we find that the fiscal rule of the 1980s exerted some but not...

This paper studies the impact of national fiscal rules on government size as measured by the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product. We develop a model of the budgetary process and show that a common pool problem may arise which can be mitigated through fiscal rules. We test...

Do budget institutions play a role in explaining why government effectiveness is higher in some advanced countries than in others? Employing an original panel dataset that spans four different years (1991, 2003, 2007 and 2012) we find that budget centralization has a negative and significant...