At the turn of the century, the role of culture in society is changing. One facet of this change is the relation between culture and finance. Globalisation has led to an increasing competition between financial centres worldwide and culture has become one determinant of competitiveness. But,...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of local governments' technical efficiency in road maintenance for a panel of German counties using a broad variety of estimation approaches. More specifically, we calculate efficiency indices using non-parametric (DEA) and parametric (stochastic...

This paper investigates poverty alleviation efforts in China and the nature of governmententerprise partnerships there. We argue that firms partnering central and local governments can be an effective strategy to overcome resource-based obstacles in low-income markets. In China, local and...

Germany like many other European countries subsidize commuting by granting the right to deduct commuting expenses from the income tax base. This regulation has often been changed and has regularly been under debate during the last decades. The pros (e.g. causing efficiency gains with respect to...

The objective of this paper is to examine efficiency, distributional, environmental (CO2 emissions) and spatial effects of increasing different kinds of transport subsidies discriminating between household types, travel purposes and travel modes. The effects are calculated by applying a...

Deregulation and progress in information and communication technologies have increased the geographical expansion of banking structures and instruments. This makes banks operationally close to the borrowers. At the same time, banking industry consolidation have induced a geographical...

Greek governments have supported investments to rural areas financially either by covering part of the investment and/or offering advantages with respect to interest rate loans or tax advantages. This support had been tendered either by nationally financed programs, called Development Laws, or...

When estimating a specification combining different influences on local public choice, three public issues of different ideological attributes were compared for two periods of Portuguese local government intervention: the beginning and the ending of one electoral cycle. The most exciting results...

There have been numerous studies of the "impact" of HEIs on their host regions. These have typically focused on the demand for goods and services in the host region. The best of these studies employ regional input-output analyses. However, there has developed a "policy scepticism" about the...

This paper discusses the use of urban policy instruments in Brazil, brought by the City Statute (CS) a federal law passed in 2001 ("Estatuto da Cidade" in Portuguese), as a tool of analysis of municipal master plans (MP). The main argument of this research is that the municipal urban policy...