The approach of this article is a critical analysis of different theories on how that can be perceived “quality of governance” or “good governance”. One such type of analysis derives from the need to formulate quality of public policy that can be achieved, not only through regulatory...

The appearance in the 60s - 70s of information technologies has helped to automate the processing of large amounts of data in the productive companies having a positive impact on management. The appearance of the Internet in the 90s has eliminated from the companies’ business model the...

There are two points of view on the performance of the public administration: an internal one, governed by the principle of the three “E”’s and an external one, a measure of the public accessibility to the civil service. The problem with these two points of view in that, although they show...

Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections generate incentives for the potential recipients of performance-based funds to use up resources in socially wasteful influence activities. We develop a...

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22...

We analyze to which extent social inequality aversion differs across nations when control ling for actual country differences in labor supply responses. Towards this aim, we estimate labor supply elasticities at both extensive and intensive margins for 17 EU countries and the US. Using the same...

We propose an occupational choice model in which the quality of the state bureaucracy influences aggregate output and the level of entrepreneurial activity through its participation in the labour market. Skilled agents differ in terms of their public service motivation: if agents with low public...

The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) adopted in 1997 originally set budget balance as the medium-term objective (MTO) for all EU Member States, to create a safety margin under the 3% of GDP deficit ceiling. In a reform in 2005, MTOs were made country-specific and dependent on initial debt and the...

The current debt crisis in many OECD countries calls for adequate strategies in budget consolidation. To regain fiscal solvency many governments base their fiscal adjustments at least partly on spending cuts. A common political claim is that spending cuts rely too much on investment thereby...

In their book The Power to Tax, Brennan and Buchanan have pointed to a central weakness of the traditional theory of public finance and especially of the theory of optimal taxation: This approach overlooked the problem of governmental power and the tendency of this power to be abused. It was...