Generational accounting is - given the future demographic developments in OECD countries - an established tool to quantify the fiscal situation of public coffers. However, as all economic methods dealing with future developments it has critical points. One in particular is the calibration on one...

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political...

In this paper we test whether a reallocation of government budget items can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of European countries. We apply modern panel data techniques to the period 1970-2006, and we use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total...

In this paper we examine the impact of public spending, education, and institutions on income distribution in advanced economies. We also assess the efficiency of public spending in redistributing income by using a DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) nonparametric approach. We find that public...

It has become common sense to argue that the reforms of social policies after the 1988 Constitution were somehow instrumental in explaining social progress, and that Lula’s policies mark a break with the 1988 Constitution. We suggest that both propositions are misleading. We argue that the...

Extending the neo-Schumpeterian trade model, we estimate a 'social-gap' model for a group of 17 OECD countries over the period 1975-1995. We find that government spending on social protection, employment protection regulations, union density, strike activity, and income security in the labor...

L'ouverture des frontieres nationales et plus particulierement la mobilite du travil sont censees affaiblir la capacite redistributive des etats membres d'une union economique et conduit a ce qu'on appelle le dumping social. Cet article presente les arguments qui soutiennent cette hypothese et...

British public investment has declined sharply both as a share of GDP and as a share of government spending since the 1970s. Only part of this decline is explained by privatisation, which transferred some public investment to the private sector. More important was the very large and permanent...

This paper extends previous work on the optimal size of government spend- ing by including nested functional decompositions of military spending into consumption and investment. Post World War II US data are then used to estimate nested non-linear growth models using semiparametric methods. As...

Total environmental expenditure in Bulgaria and the share of the public sector is analysed and compared with the necessary investments for compliance with the EU environmental standards. The main problems in the management of public financial resources for environmental management are identified...