Wagner's Law would imply an exponential growth process of the ratio between public expenditures and national income (G/Y). However the law may be rejected both on theoretical and empirical reasons, because it disregards the role of ever increasing distortionary taxation. But, under...

The research question addressed by this paper is a simple one: are European consumers happy with the services provided by the utilities after two decades of reforms? We focus on electricity, gas, water, telephone in the EU 15 Member States. The variables we analyse are consumers’ satisfaction...

While most economists usually believe that privatization policy is socially beneficial, it faces increasing opposition in several countries. In this paper we wish to discover the ingredients in a recipe for privatization discontent. To do so we focus on Latin America, where there is wide...

The paper shows that privatisation can contribute to the decrease of net public debt, but at the same time can decrease the Public Sector Net Worth. This is defined as the difference between public sector assets and liabilities. The UK in the 1980s and 1990s is an example of parallelism between...

The King-Fullerton (1984) approach to the measurement of effective marginal rates of taxation on capital income has been applied extensively. The empirical literature confirms that the dispersion of effective tax rates, both within each country and among countries, is wide. However no test has...

The purpose of the paper is to analyse some results of cost-benefit analysis in a sample of ISPA (Structural Instrument for pre-accession countries) projects. The focus is particularly on the variability of financial and economic rates of return and how to integrate this information in the EU...

In this paper I propose a definition of 'Citizenship goods'. Standard microeconomics distinguishes between purely private, purely public and mixed goods, based on the degree of non-rivalry and excludability. This is however a definition based on technical features of the goods that fails to...

The paper considers price trends as signals for the evaluation of reforms leading to ownership or market structure changes in public services. In order to do so, we focus on a specific example: electricity prices in four countries, namely UK, France, Germany and Italy.We consider that these...