This paper addresses the determinants of public expenditure policies, by reviewing theories and empirical investigations of what features explain the budget process and how the various attributes of actors—including politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, and donors—and of...

This paper describes financial systemic risk as a pollution issue. Free riding leads to excess risk production. This problem may be solved, at least partially, either by financial regulation or by taxation. From a normative viewpoint, taxation is superior in many respects. However, reality shows...

Among policy-makers and governments, there is a broad consensus that artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) needs to be ‘formalized’ – embodied in a standardized legal framework that is registered in and governed by a central state system-, the basic condition being that artisanal miners...

We develop a stochastic political economy model to explain the trade-off between growth and inequality during the process of technology adoption. In the model endogenous growth occurs through physical and human capital deepening. Agents can adopt either of the two risky high-return technologies,...

In this paper we study the effect of optimistic income expectations on life satisfaction amongst the Chinese population. Using a large scale household survey conducted in 2002 we find that the level of optimism about the future is particularly strong in the countryside and amongst rural-to-urban...

In this paper, a new approach to disclose the impact of politics on economic growth is presented: data derived from content analysis of party manifestos is used as measures of party preferences. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, a positive impact of party support for various market-liberal...

Possibly as a prelude to a mini series of critical review essays, this short paper is intended to revisit and clarify Tullock's contributions to the concept of rent-seeking. Some subsequent contributions are highlighted, so are its implications on social costs and wealth transfers.

Interventions to fix market failures in infrastructure have often resulted in some form of governance failure and this contributes importantly to explain shortcomings in the supply of infrastructure services in developing countries and increasingly in developed countries in crisis. The...