We focus on the link between political instability due to uncertain electoral outcomes and economic growth, through the impact on a government's decisions on how to allocate government expenditure between public consumption and investment. Using an endogenous growth model with partisan electoral...

This report represents the first ever attempt to draw a comparative picture of the physical abuse of children in the 27 richest nations of the world. UNICEF research estimates that almost 3,500 children under the age of 15 die from physical abuse and neglect every year in the industrialized...

This contribution provides evidence for the hypothesis that trade increases growth through its curbing effect on capital taxes. The analysed mechanism includes two different steps and considers the critical points of both the theoretical and empirical studies in this field. In particular, the...

This paper investigates the impact of alternative financial and banking structures on banks' overall efficiency. The effect of size on the estimated banking efficiency is also examined. These issues are addressed by first measuring the cost efficiencies over 1998?2003 for a sample of commercial,...

This paper examines the information-related problems associated with the analysis of fiscal policies, an issue recently analyzed in connection with monetary policies but largely ignored in the literature on budgetary actions. The results indicate that reliance on the information actually...

Government healthcare expenditures have been growing much more rapidly than GDP in OECD countries. For example, between 1970 and 2002 these expenditures grew 2.3 times faster than GDP in the U.S., 2.0 times faster than GDP in Germany, and 1.4 times faster than GDP in Japan. How much of...

This paper shows that ination in industrialized countries is largely a global phenom- enon. First, inations of (22) OECD countries have a common factor that alone accounts for nearly 70% of their variance. This large variance share that is associated to Global Ination is not only due to the...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...