Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are spreading all over the world. It may be quite plausible that they were initially started mainly as an attempt to evade expenditure controls and hide public budget deficits. But if they are properly designed and transparently reported, PPPs can play a useful...

Economists tend to favor the free ow of capital across national borders, because it allows capital to seek out the highest rate of return. Unrestricted capital ows may also o¤er several advantages, as noted by Feldstein (2000). First, international ows reduce the risk faced by owners of capital...

The aging of the population shakes the public finance of pay- as-you-go social security systems. We develop a political-economy framework in which this demographic change leads to the downsizing of the social security system, and, as a consequence, to the emergence of supplemental individual...

It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a ‘race to the bottom’. This result may indeed hold in the case of factor mobility (such as capital). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the’race to the bottom’ hypothesis. Labor...

In The Decline of the Welfare State, Assaf Razin and Efraim Sadka use a political economy framework to analyze the effects of aging populations, migration, and globalization on the deteriorating system of financing welfare state benefits as we know them. Their timely analysis, supported by a...

The effects of a government's budget on society and the political economy are of considerable concern to economists as well as to consumers and taxpayers. The original contributions in this book analyze all of the budget's components expenditures, revenues, the deficit - with a special emphasis...