This paper addresses the issues of whether and how the degree of economic integration may affect central government tax revenues and the intensity of decentralisation. To this purpose, we empirically test the direct impact of economic integration on central tax revenues using the concept of...

This paper illustrates how Lorenz Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. After highlighting some drawbacks of using specific functional forms of the Social...

In this paper we present a simple model of university-industry collaborations with heterogeneous agents, which is the standard case of technology transfer. We study the characteristics of the matching process, that makes this exchange in technology transfer either efficient or unfeasible. We...

This paper provides additional insights on the relationship between government size and trade openness using a panel of countries drawn from the World Development Indicators and the Penn World Tables 7.0 from 1962 to 2009. It is shown that the compensation hypothesis proposed by Rodrik (1998)...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relation between trade openness, capital openness and government expenditures in a cross sectional time-series context. It is shown that capital openness is significantly and negatively related to government expenditures in line with the conventional...

This paper introduces social considerations into the calculation of the price index. To this purpose, recourse is made to the concept of distributional characteristic. It is shown how an aggregate price index can be expressed as a weighted average of commodity-specific prices, with weights that...

This paper deals with the contribution of Sergio Steve to the development of an accountable structure of local public finance, with particular attention to the positive application of the benefit theory of taxation.

This module describes two of the most commonly used poverty measures in applied policy works, i.e., the headcount ratio (HR) and the poverty gap (PG) ratio. These are basic poverty indicators used to investigate impacts of public policies on poverty. After providing a conceptual background to HR...

An appropriate structure of tobacco taxation should balance only apparently contrasting health, industrial and fiscal aims. In this paper, it will be discussed the main critical issues of the present system of tobacco taxation in Italy and some hypotheses of reform. In particular, it will be...