This paper explores the effect of political accountability on the size of the public sector in a principal-agent model of democratic government. Political accountability is the degree to which the electorate can control politicians through elections, and emphasis is put on the roles of...

Empirical evidence seems to indicate that economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with natural resource abundance across countries. This paper proposes a linkage between abundant natural resources and economic growth, through saving and investment. When the share of output that accrues...

Two stylised facts of the German labour market are that first, the demand for (high-)skilled labour has been growing rapidly for a number of years and second, the country is facing a particularly strong demographic change with the expected size of the population decreasing rapidly and the...

There is a growing concern in advanced countries that the position of less skilled workers has deteriorated, either through their ability to secure jobs and/or their ability to earn a decent wage. Some have linked this decline to modern computing technologies. This paper surveys the evidence on...

This work attempts to examine how the global financial crisis has affected the education sector and more specifically, universities. So our paper examines the universities public funding especially in Europe, the mobility of teaching staff, students etc. Also the impact of the financial crisis...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the...

In the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in remittances of international migrants, as their strong recent increase shed more light on the effects at both micro and macro level. The remittances not only contribute to the well-being of the receiving households, but are also a large...

We analyze the influence of newly constructed globalization measures on regional growth for the EU-27 countries between 2001 and 2006. The spatial Chow-Lin procedure, a method constructed by the authors, was used to construct on a NUTS-2 level a complete regional data for exports, imports and...

There is a recent renewal of interest in the relation between shifts in age structures of populations and various economic outcomes. These shifts are triggered by changes in fertility and mortality that take place some years before becoming apparent in the standard age structure and that may...