Seit der Gründung des GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 1947 wird auf multilateraler Ebene versucht, durch graduellen Zollabbau und Reduzierung nicht-tarifärer Handelshemmnisse ein freies Welthandelssystem zu schaffen. Die Liberalisierung landwirtschaftlicher Märkte ist...

The 'big trade-off', described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again. Equality or efficiency, or to put it differently again: modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality or the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it...

In “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate,“ Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor analyze the causal effects of terrorist attacks on the political preferences of the Israeli electorate. In this comment, I discuss Berrebi and Klor's empirical approach -...

In “Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World, 1960-1999“ Benjamin Smith examines the effects of oil wealth, as well as of sudden changes in oil prices, on regime failure, political protest and civil war. He finds that oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes,...

This paper argues that legislative malapportionment, denoting a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population held by electoral districts, serves as a tool for pre-democratic elites to preserve their political power and economic interests after a transition to...

In this paper, I examine high-income country motives for restricting immigration. Abundant evidence suggests that allowing labor to move from low-income to high-income countries would yield substantial gains in global income. Yet, most high-income countries impose strict limits on labor inflows...

This paper uses Polanyi's 1944 analysis of policy change—in which there are long-term swings from state regulation to markets and back again, as the consequences of one regime lead to political reactions that in turn reverse the policies. It shows how the Polanyi analysis continued to apply...

The establishment of a successful stock market in a developing economy can provide a major source of development finance, both channelling domestic savings and attracting foreign investment. But small markets generally fail. Two micro-markets, Mozambique and Swaziland, provide an interesting...

We study the impact of political knowledge on the attitudes of European citizens towards the possible distribution of responsibilities between European level institutions and national governments in three policy areas: foreign policy, defence and immigration policy. The hypothesis tested is that...

One view is that concessions demanded by and granted to interests groups are responsible for steady fiscal decline, and delay in reforms. We argue that negative supply shocks combined with the political objective of protecting the poor can build in incentives leading to these results. Pricing...