The personal experience of events such as financial crises and natural disasters can alter economic preferences. We administered a repeated cross-sectional preference survey during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, collecting three bi-weekly samples from participants recruited through...

Policymakers must do something to slow the growing debt burden or else face a major fiscal meltdown. Proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal would only make the looming fiscal crisis worse

The Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) should be restructured in order to carry out its main role of mobilizing private funds for infrastructure finance. It should become more private sector-driven and market responsive. Combined with an effective government framework for public investment,...

The New World Screwworm (NWS) fly causes a parasitic disease that produces large losses in Uruguayan livestock farming - mainly due to the working hours devoted to its prevention and treatment and the death of sheep. In this paper, we apply a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to...

In 2019, SNC-Lavalin made global headlines after it was revealed that the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, had interfered in the prosecution of the company for the bribery of Libyan officials. Although the scandal was primarily viewed as political, it also highlighted flaws in Canada’s...

The trend of tax collection in Malaysia is inconsistent, changing upward and downward depending upon economic conditions. However, over a 30 year period, most years show an increasing increment in total collection. The exceptions are when there is an abnormal economic condition such as financial...

This occasional paper explores proposals made by some stakeholders to shift India's bid comparison systems prevalent in public contracts from the traditional "least price technically acceptable" to "quality and cost based selection". The paper has been especially written as background reading...

The qui tam provision of the Civil False Claims Act effectively serves to expand the government's capacity to combat fraud, but also invites abusive prosecution against blameless public contractors. Although the public disclosure jurisdictional bar is designed permit worthy claimants to proceed...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....