Search results for "Public economics"
showing 10 items of 304 documents
Corporate tax cuts and business-friendly policies in the UK - A review of electoral arguments during the 2015 legislative campaign
2016
The stance toward big business was a heated topic during Britain’s 2015 legislative campaign that led to the triumphal, albeit slightly unexpected, reelection of David Cameron, as Prime Minister. More profoundly, it raises the issue of the economic impact of corporate tax cuts and the nature of business-friendly policies in the UK. Firstly, we investigate the electoral arguments on both sides of the political spectrum. These discussions are framed within the overarching approach known as supply-side economics, which has been prevalent in English-speaking countries since the neoliberal revolution in the late 1970s. Secondly, we put forward the idea that widening inequalities, as suggested re…
Banks’ unfairness and the vulnerability of low-income unbanked consumers
2018
This paper’s objective was to explore low-income unbanked consumers’ perceptions of bank fairness and the way these perceptions were linked to consumer experiences of vulnerability. Qualitative data were used to analyse low-income consumers’ perceptions about banks’ services and communications. The study finds that although consumers’ financial inclusion is partially hindered by their personal circumstances, the perceived unfair treatment by banks has an even more negative impact on their financial inclusion. Low-income unbanked individuals report banks avoiding them, discriminating against them and impeding their financial inclusion. Banks’ perceived unfairness towards low-income consumers…
Searching for Threshold Effects in the Evolution of Budget Deficits: An Application to the Spanish Case
2004
Abstract In this paper, we use recent developments on threshold autoregressive (TAR) models that allow us to derive endogenously threshold effects in the evolution of the Spanish budget deficit. Specifically, a mean-reverting dynamic behaviour of the budget deficit should be expected once such threshold is reached.
Evolution of the Global Distribution of Carbon Dioxide: A Finite Mixture Analysis
2015
Economists and environmental policymakers have recently begun advocating a bottom-up approach to climate change mitigation, focusing on reduction targets for groups of nations, rather than large scale global policies. We advance this discussion by taking a quantitative perspective, focusing on econometric identification of groups of countries that have statistically similar distributions of carbon emissions using a broad range of finite mixture models. Nearly all of our results yield a consistent pattern: after 1980, there are two distinct emissions distributions, and that these distributions continue to evolve over time. We provide a rigorous analysis of these distributional differences al…
On distributing quarterly national growth among regions
2008
In many countries a very important fraction of public expenditure is managed by regional authorities. However, in a world where economic life has quickened and become more turbulent, subnational institutions rarely have a timely regional macroeconomic picture at their disposal. The authors propose a guide to a method for estimating quarterly accounts of regions from the national quarterly and annual regional accounts, by the use of a temporal structure which eliminates possible spurious jumps. The robustness of the process and suggested practicalities are tested, and the proposal is also shown to produce better estimates than other uniregional methods often used in this framework.
Perceived effectiveness, restrictiveness and compliance with containment measures against the Covid-19 pandemic: an international comparative study i…
2021
National governments took action to delay the transmission of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) by implementing different containment measures. We developed an online survey that included 44 different containment measures. We aimed to assess how effective citizens perceive these measures, which measures are perceived as violation of citizens’ personal freedoms, which opinions and demographic factors have an effect on compliance with the measures, and what governments can do to most effectively improve citizens’ compliance. The survey was disseminated in 11 countries: UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, India, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and Sweden. We acquired 9543 unique r…
Intra-party heterogeneity in policy preferences and its effect on issue salience: Developing and applying a measure based on elite survey data
2017
Quantitative research on party politics often has to assume that parties are unitary actors with homogeneous policy preferences simply because intra-party heterogeneity is difficult to measure. This article proposes a measure of preference heterogeneity based on surveys of party elites. We draw on Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) data from 28 elections in 21 developed democracies to quantify intra-party heterogeneity and validate this measure. The usefulness of the measure is demonstrated by studying the effects of intra-party heterogeneity on issue salience. We find support for the hypothesis that heterogeneity regarding a policy issue tends to be negatively associated with the emphasi…
A Growing Sector After the Impact of the Great Recession in Spain
2020
In Spain, fitness has developed into a sector that offers a series of services associated with an active and healthy lifestyle for the body transformation, recreation and physical exercise of its users. This chapter examines the evolution of fitness in Spain parallel to the changes in the population’s sports habits. The study examines the popularity of fitness and its position in the Spanish sports system and the organisational and economic characteristics of the sector (main operators, types of gyms, activities offered, infrastructures, employment, membership fees, revenues), as well as the sociodemographic profile of the practitioners. To do so, a large number of studies and reports carri…
Disregarding Wind Power: Introduction to Finnish Feed-in Tariff Policy
2011
In 2001, the Third Assessment Report (TAR) presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified some major barriers inhibiting the deployment of technology that has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The TAR classifies such barriers into categories including prices; financing; trade and environment; market structure; institutional frameworks; information provision; and social, cultural, and behavioral norms and aspirations (IPCC 2001, 355). Similar categorizations have been made prior to and following the TAR (see e.g., Reiche and Bechberger 2004; Painuly 2001; Roos et al. 1999). This chapter examines the institutional framework of Finnish energy…
Work–life balance and firms: A matter of women?
2016
Abstract The work–life balance (WLB) literature reports a positive relationship between the presence of female workers in firms and the implementation of WLB measures. Examining these findings from an alternative methodological perspective, this study adopts a fuzzy-set approach to analyze empirical data from 87 Spanish SMEs. The study's main finding is that the presence of women does not determine the level of implementation of WLB policies. Conversely, the absence of women does seem to determine the absence of such policies. Likewise, the absence of organizational commitment to WLB leads to the absence of WLB policies.