The paper revisits the policy debate on institutional reform approaches to property rights protection and empirically examines it in the context of FDI flows to the MENA region. Using panel data on 11 MENA countries for the period 1991-2007 and adopting FGLS methodology,the paper finds a...

The paper assesses the performances of the urban local bodies in the state of Karnataka in India.We use non parametric Data Envelopment Analysis as a tool to measure technical efficiencies of the ULBs. If we compare the services in a particular size class of city with the norms we find that in...

Using various methods estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 110 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 1999-2000 in developing countries is 41%, in transition countries 38% and in OECD...

As a public sector project carried out by the tax administering agency, pursuit of the hard-to-tax is subject to a cost-benefit analysis. However, considerable intrinsic uncertainty of this project and endogenous dynamic relationship between costs and benefits make the standard model of...

India will face great problems in finding a way to finance public services in its large cities in the next two decades. Backlogs in service levels and infrastructure are already great, and migration to urban areas will put even more pressure on state and local government budgets. Metropolitan...

Around the world state and local governments have an important and growing role in the provision of public infrastructure services. Subnational governments presently account for an average of 63 percent of public fixed capital formation in OECD countries and approximately for 40 percent in...

Despite the extensive international experience with the assignments of revenue sources to different levels of government, the public finance literature still lacks a general theory of revenue assignments. Two sets of arguments have been separately developed in the literature to explain and guide...

Canada is not a country with a reputation for bold experimentation. However, Canadian experience demonstrates conclusively that an invoice-credit, destination-based value-added tax (VAT) is workable at the subnational level, with both federal and provincial governments retaining full control...

This study develops a dynamic general equilibrium model, applied to Pakistani data, in which optimizing agents evade taxes by operating in the underground economy. The cost to firms of evading taxes is that they find themselves subject to credit rationing from banks. Our model simulations show...

This paper examines the Stackelberg equilibrium for public input competition and compares it with the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. Given two asymmetric regions, we show that under the Nash equilibrium, the more productive region tends to spend more on public input, which results in this...