Search results for " Public Economics"

L'Esperienza del Teatro Massimo di Palermo

2010

Decentralization and growth: what if the cross-jurisdiction approach had met a dead end?

2013

International audience; The relationship between decentralization and economic growth is generally studied from a perspective stressing universal or quasi-universal regularities across jurisdictions. That approach has generated many insights but seems to reach its limits. The paper explains why it allows contrasting positions with regard to the benefits of decentralization even among proponents of free and competitive markets. And it seems from the empirical literature that no robust and economically significant cross-jurisdiction relation between decentralization and economic performance or growth, except perhaps their independence, has been found. The absence of a relation valid across ju…

Does one size fit all? The impact of cognitive skills on economic growth

2016

Les Documents de Travail de l'IREDU, n°2016-1; This paper tests for heterogeneous effects of cognitive skills on economic growth across countries. Using a new extended dataset on cognitive skills and controlling for potential endogeneity, we find that the magnitude of the effect is about 60 per cent higher for low-income countries compared to high-income countries, and it more than doubles when low TFP countries are compared to high TFP countries. There are also marked differences across geographic regions. Using data on the share of the population with advanced and minimum skill levels, our results also indicate that high-income countries should focus on increasing the number of high skill…

Environmental expenditure interactions among OECD countries, 1995-2017

2021

International audience; How do countries respond to other countries when setting the level of their environmental expenditures? Using data from 1995-2017 on a sample of 28 OECD countries, we examine the nature and extent of strategic interactions in environmental expenditures among OECD countries using a spatial Durbin model including economic and political control variables and both economic and spatial weight matrices reflecting several interaction mechanisms. The results show the existence of significant positive spatial dependence in environmental spending suggesting that OECD countries consider their neighbors' behavior when making policy choices related to environmental expenditures. …

Promoting self-employment: Does it create more employment and business activity?

2021

International audience; We assess the economic impact of reforms promoting self-employment in the three countries that have implemented such reforms since the early 2000s: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France. To that end, we use an unbalanced cross country-industry dataset of 4,226 observations, including 12 OECD countries and 20 market industries, over the 1995-2016 period. We first observe, using country-level data, that the share of self-employed workers in total employment is quite stable or declines over the period in all countries in our dataset, except in the three countries where large reforms promoting self-employment have been implemented, and only after these reforms. …

The assignment of powers in an open-ended European Union

2003

Presented at CESIFO Conference “A Constitution for the EU”, February 2003; International audience; A major characteristic of the European Union is its transitional or evolving nature, in particular with regard to the assignment of powers between the two main levels of government. More precisely, under current constitutional arrangements, this evolving nature takes the form of an integration process which tends to be monotonous, that is, which can only with great difficulty be reversed. The paper is mainly devoted to the explanation of how this comes about and what effects this has on other features of the process. As a concluding remark, however, it suggests that an additional criterion for…

Horizontal competition in multilevel governmental settings

2013

28 pages; Governments situated on the same level of a multi-level governmental system compete with each other as well as with governments placed higher or lower. This paper is concerned with horizontal competition only. It discusses both competition based on the mobility of agents and competition based on comparisons of performance across jurisdictions - i.e., yardstick competition. With regard to the first kind, the focus is on the capacity of governments and voters to decide policies in spite of the mobility of agents. Some attention is also given to non-standard mechanisms in which mobility is manipulated so as to change the structure of the electorate. The paper considers two forms of h…

How significant is yardstick competition among governments? Three reasons to dig deeper

2013

22 pages; The significance of yardstick competition among governments is now confirmed with regard to fiscal variables. This is an important result but the significance of the mechanism must also be sought in a context broader than that of fiscal federalism and without limitation to relations and processes fully observable. Three points are made. Even in the case of governments trying to mimic each other over a single variable, additional variables are involved in an important way. Yardstick competition can be latent without being ineffective. Its major effect, then, is to set bounds to the choices that office-holders could think of making. Finally, the mechanism is a hidden albeit essentia…

Justice et inégalités: un amendement à la théorie de John Rawls

1992

National audience; On se demande si les principes de justice de Rawls ne sont pas exagérément inégalitaires, malgré leur côté "juste". On examine donc ce qu'il advient de l'optimum de Rawls, le maximin, quand de l'aversion pour l'inégalité" apparaît. Le maximin consiste à se placer sur un certain point de la courbe d'efficience, en admettant une certaine dose d'inégalité, pourvu que l'on donne le maximum possible aux plus défavorisés. On tient compte d'externalités en reprenant la notion d'envie sous la forme d'une aversion pour l'inégalité, essentiellement de la part des plus défavorisés. On ne peut plus raisonner sur la courbe frontière des rémunérations possibles et on démontre la validi…

L'impact des grands équipements sur la Bourgogne : le cas du T.G.V.

1978

National audience