This paper sheds light on the heavy financial burden on peasants in China's fiscal decentralization system. Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China's fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial...

We examine the US state-level pattern of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending. We relate spending to (1) Keynesian determinants of countercyclical policy, (2) congressional power and dominance, and (3) presidential electoral vote importance. We find that the ARRA is, in...

The paper addresses the welfare implications of conditional grants in the presence of inefficiencies in regional production. While conditional grants may set incentives for regions to reduce inefficiencies, resources are wasted in the process of grant-seeking. We provide a theoretical model to...

The early contributions to the economic literature on this sub- ject assume that only market goods yield utility, and that the only way adults can secure the consumption of these goods in old age is by saving. More recent contributions recognize that the elderly derive utility also from the care...

Background: The Malawi government in 2002 embarked on an innovative health care financing mechanism called Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Christian Health Association of Malawi (CHAM) institutions that are located in areas where people with low incomes reside. The rationale of SLA was to...

The article is about the features of the socio-economic control as a form of social control. The author reveals specific methods of socio-economic control, which applicable to different control objects. Particular attention is paid to methods of solving problems arising in the implementation of...

Notably, the 20th century was dominated by the legacy of devastating global wars, colonial struggles, and ideological conflicts as well as effort s to establish international systems that would foster global peace and prosperity. Yet, insecurity and corruption not only remain, they have become...

This article develops a theoretic analysis of the delicate relationship between wealth, economic confidence and preferences for redistribution. In our model, citizens are concerned with the risk of unemployment, but are also concerned about current income. A first result shows that this...

This note is about the possibility of a stalemate in a continuing conflict. Following the prevailing economic literature on the topic, under some assumptions, the outcome of a conflict can be described in two ways: (i) a predetermined split of the contested output (ii) a winner-take-all contest...

Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections generate incentives for the potential recipients of performance-based funds to use up resources in socially wasteful influence activities. We develop a...