This study contains further evidence on the economic effects of direct democratic institutions. A first study found that countries with national initiatives have higher government expenditure and are characterized by more rent-seeking activity, that the effects of direct democratic institutions...

This study identifies the main problems that Colombia faces and the medium and long term policies that it should follows in order to become a developed country. We concentrate on five relevant elements of development: Education, health and demography, poverty and income distribution, labor...

Though decentralization for past one and half decade or so has become the most favoured policy priority among the policy makers yet the countries around the world differ dramatically in the degree of decentralization that is accommodated. While diversity in degree of decentralization across the...

This is a survey of the literature linking economics and politics. In the introduction, I explain why it is necessary to study these issues as a separate course in economics. I then proceed to analyze voting models, the political business cycle, international and foreign policy issues. The...

In this paper, we develop and explore the implications of an economic model that links the incidence of terrorism in a country to the economic circumstances facing that country. We briefly sketch out a theory, in the spirit of Tornell (1998), that describes terrorist activities as being...

Using data from the Failed State Task Force data set, this paper argues entering onto positive growth paths for income and infrastructure per capita depend upon a nation’s political stability and its geography. A nation’s achieving sustained long-run growth in both variables is essential to...

The economic effects of federalism are unclear: some papers find that federalism has strong positive effects on a number of economically relevant variables, others find negative effects. The results often crucially hinge upon the proxies for federalism used. In this paper, we critically survey...

This paper investigates the implications of how states with initiative systems of legislation can use this more direct form of democracy to improve productive resource allocation by their goverments. We construct a simple growth model whereby we can identify this channel through which...

The prupose of this paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct blocs as suggested by the US political system and whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Reime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three...

Hace un año, un grupo heterogéneo de investigadores del Centro de Investigación de la Universidad del Pacífico (CIUP) inició un esfuerzo colectivo para pensar en el futuro de nuestra economía y sociedad más allá del corto plazo. El trabajo que presentamos a continuación resume algunas...