Purpose: Small state studies has emerged as a discipline, and this discipline has been initially dominated mainly by the issues of vulnerability and a lack of capacities of small states, although these issues have been gradually replaced by the discussions on the potential opportunities of small...

We discuss and provide an overview of the size and role of the government, notably in terms of what the government “should” do, how the government could spend and intervene in the economy, how much governments spend and what they spend their money on. This is done from a historical...

I revisit the relationship between trade and government expenditures in an attempt to extend the work of Rodrik (J Polit Econ 106(5):997-1032, 1998). Several different tests are conducted. The first is a simple replication of Rodrik's benchmark model on an extended dataset. The results here are...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size were incorrectly specified, not accounting for cross-sectional dependence,...

We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption, and on 'market freedom' defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property...