The recent boom and bust in commodity prices has raised concerns about the impact of volatile commodity prices on Latin American countries’ fiscal positions. Using a novel quarterly dataset─ which includes unique country specific commodity price indices and a comprehensive measure of public...

Triggered by the phenomenon of globalisation, during recent years there has been a process of State policy rationalisation in the social expenditure domain; hence the debate over the present role and dimension of welfare state has intensified. Following on the extensive multidisciplinary...

Development of an economic situation last 20 years has passed in Latvia through various stages. Including - Post-Soviet re-structuring of demand and closing of industrial giants; development of the economy based on transit; development of craft manufacture, small enterprises and branch of...

Heavy indebtedness and debt service payments, indicated by debt magnitudes and shares to national budgets, revenues, or outputs, mean that spending for public infrastructure and basic services is crowded out, even as they entail more borrowings in order to timely meet debt obligations. The...

Improving the quality of public finances is a major challenge for European policy makers. The economic crisis has increased budgetary pressures and accentuated the tension between the need to sustain public spending aimed at raising the EU growth potential and the increased scarcity of public...

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 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 data have not been...

This paper examines the issues of institutional quality and central bank transparency through the interaction of monetary and fiscal policies. We have found that the effects of transparency and corruption on macroeconomic performance and volatility depend on the relative importance of the...

Previous studies on the effect of government size on corruption have produced mixed results. For the purpose of explaining these ambiguous results, our study investigates the effect of government size on corruption by taking into account the role of democracy level in each country. Using annual...

National policies and public marketing of destinations should cover measures on broadening the supply of travel agencies, on intensifying promotion actions for the offered touristic product. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to choose modern means of promotion so that tourists remain...