Theory suggests that a close match between revenue and expenditure assignments at sub-national levels benefits allocative efficiency, and hence economic growth. That is, a convergence of revenue and expenditure assignments at sub-national levels of government should, according to the theory, be...

China's remarkable poverty alleviation is quite uneven across regions in the last quarter of the century. It is important to explore why China has such huge disparity in poverty distribution in spite of overall dramatic economic growth and the vast improvement in per capita income. The aim of...

The paper describes and assesses intergovernmental fiscal relations in Indonesia and outlines options for reform. The discussion encompasses issues in all major aspects of fiscal relations between the national and subnational governments: expenditure assignment; tax assignment; intergovernmental...

Since 1979, the Chinese authorities have made a sustained effort at introducing market-oriented reforms and the results have been impressive in terms of growth and poverty reduction. However, reform of fiscal system has lagged behind. In particular, the system of intergovernmental fiscal...

This paper investigates a equilibrium theory of capital asset pricing with the spirit of capitalism. It is an attempt to put together ideas from the modern finance literature and the literature on stochastic growth models. Using methods adopted in Brock (1982), an equivalent characterization of...

In a two-country, two-currency model, this paper examines the conditions of dollarization, analyzes the effect of government inflation finance and studies the strategic interdependence of different-currency inflation.

Beyond conducting the usual regression analysis of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and aggregate government size (national and subnational combined), this paper makes the first attempt to examine how different fiscal decentralization measures affect the sizes of national and...

In this paper, we will show that the capitalist-spirit approach to economic growth has been developed by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes and many others. It can be demonstrated that countries with different degree of the capitalist spirit will have different per capita...

How does competitive arms accumulation affect investment and capital accumulation? In a dynamic optimization framework including both investment and military spending, we find that, when the utility function is separable between consumption and the weapon stocks, an unanticipated rise in current...