Governments' net assets balances are viewed as a measure of fiscal health and have been linked to municipal credit ratings. This study explores the extent to which ambient socioeconomic factors are captured in aggregated restricted and unrestricted net assets balances (termed "liquid net...

Some recent studies have shown that specialisation of countries has tended to increase, while regional concentration of countries has tended to decrease. This seems to be counterintuitive at first glance. In this paper, we use the entropy index - as the indicator of structural change with the...

The FSA announced in January 2000 that, as part of the new regulatory approach, it would carry out a number of pilot theme projects on major issues that cut across different industry sectors and have wide-ranging implications for consumers. This paper forms part of one such project. It considers...

This work addresses the widespread concern that the forces of competition are weakening worldwide. Much of the evidence for this comes from traditional concentration indices which are notoriously flawed: conceptually they derive from static theory and cannot discriminate between efficiency and...