The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated macro data have not...

The assessment on the relevance of public spending on economic growth has deserved an important attention in the economic literature. However its empirical approach by testing the effects by an aggregate production function may mislead the results since the composition of public expenditure,...

I construct a model of public policy development, and use the model to explain why the United States has a comparatively small public sector, but instead a large "private welfare state" with employment-based benefits. The key factors are politically organized firms and labor unions. These...

In a growing number of countries, the delivery of social welfare services is contracted out to private providers, and increasingly, using performance-based contracts. Critics of performance-based incentive contracts stress their potential unintended effects, including cream-skimming and other...

In 1994, South Africa adopted the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and emphasised the delivery of services to meet basic needs. Since then, great strides have been made to redress past social inequalities. However, analysis of these successes have been limited to national or...

To what extent differences across developing countries in their domestic tax mobilization can be explained, in addition to the traditional determinants, by political economy factors and particularly by the political regime? Using a panel of 78 developing countries over the period 1990-2005, this...

This paper is based on first-hand experience from Customs reforms in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and presents unpublished data on the impact of Customs reforms on revenues, trade facilitation, private sector operators and frontline Customs officials behaviors in Africa. Customs agencies are usually...

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the...

This study aims to analyze the effects of volatility and trading volume on secondary market liquidity of government securities. Liquidity of government securities was measured by using the end-day bid and ask prices in the ISE. Zero coupon benchmark government security was chosen for this...

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from...