The governments of the European Union are facing important challenges that may impact both their need and their capacity to collect taxes. First, ageing will increase some social spending while reducing the potential of some tax bases such as labour. Second, globalisation has the potential to...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated macro data have not...

The paper outlines the main current issues concerning Public Finance in Italy. It is divided in three parts. The first part discusses the overall budget policy. Italy is in need to support the recovery from economic crisis, however budget action is limited by European constraints. Different way...

This paper is dedicated to study the impact of economic freedom on economic growth. We use the methodology of panel data for the case of six Mediterranean developing countries. Our results show that the index of economic freedom in the process of development is not necessarily efficient in these...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the...

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the...

A survey of community attitudes to income contingent loans was conducted in May 2008. The predominant focus of the survey was to ascertain the level of support, or otherwise, for the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) and for the hypothetical application of income contingent loans (ICL)...

The theme of public expenditure has been of great interest in the latest years.Focusing on government size, role of government and the efficiency of the public sector becomes aneven more important issue nowadays when the financial crisis has covered severly almost alleconomies worlwide. The...

This paper develops an analytical framework for the systematic comparative analysis of equity approaches in long-term care policies. Equity is at the core of welfare state objectives, but there is a lack of systematic conceptualisation in many areas of social policy. This is particularly true...