Besides creating a growing, prosperous, and peaceful Europe, we all have an interest in ensuring that the benefits of this extend to the most unfortunate of those amongst us. The UN Millennium Development Goals provide a yardstick for how well this objective is being addressed. This paper...

The modernization and privatization of the State’s real-estate assets are pivotal for the improvement of the French public sector’s global performance: they take part in the national policy for economic efficiency and public management. Multiple questions arise in the process. How to...

In this paper we develop a probabilistic voting model of inter-gov\-ern\-men\-tal transfers to explain the distribution and size of local public goods. We find that: i) The parties’ political competition for votes induces the central government to provide regional transfers that lead to Pareto...

Beginning with the recent reorganisation of the principal Italian public research bodies, which has led to the founding of larger labs, this paper evaluates the presence of statistically significant relationships between the dimensions of the research bodies and the performance of the same. The...

EMU and the euro have been existing for more than seven (almost eight) years. As it is known, EMU –and in particular the proper functioning of the single currency – requires the appropriate policy mix. But there is the significant macroeconomic and institutional imbalance within the euro...

This paper studies the role of governments and its link to trust. We argue that the public's trust strongly depends on governments delivering on their core tasks in a market economy. In some economies, a neglect of core tasks can be observed and there seems to be some erosion, notably in terms...

Medicare expenditures as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) are now six times larger than they were in 1967. Forecasts for the next 75 years show that almost $1 of every $5 of GDP could be spent on Medicare. That is unaffordable. Without intervention, Medicare's share of GDP will force some...

This paper uses a formal model to analyze the effects of political economic competition between states on economic performance and the size and composition of the public sector. Great economies of scale in warfare and even distributions of military capability among the contestants generate...

“A House of Cards Falls: Why ‘Too Big to Debar’ is All Slogan and Little Substance” is a critical response to the article, "FCPA Sanctions: Too Big to Debar" by Drury D. Stevenson and Nicholas J. Wagoner, which aptly demonstrates a common, yet fundamentally flawed understanding of the...