Search results for "Public economics"
showing 10 items of 304 documents
Private Pre-University Education in Romania
2014
This paper approaches private provision of pre-university education in Romania, exploring available data on the sector's size and main characteristics and evaluating the extent to which the current regulatory framework enables positive effects in terms of freedom of choice, quality, equity, and social cohesion. The paper argues that the lack of a clear strategy mixed with strict control in key areas and lax implementation of support instruments has led to private providers not being a legitimate alternative to public education.
How Electoral Institutions Change the Influence of World Trade Integration on Trade Policies
2014
World integration levels influence opportunity costs of maintaining restrictive national trade policies. In an integrated world, restrictive trade policies are more costly than in a context of low overall levels of world market integration. We argue that policy makers can be expected to react to these varying incentives to liberalize the trade regimes of their countries, yet do so not in a uniform fashion across countries. Rather, the responsiveness to changes in levels of world trade integration is conditional upon the electoral system the country in question employs. This is due to the fact that opportunity cost considerations increase in importance with a) the degree to which policy make…
Public Support for TTIP in EU Countries: What Determines Trade Policy Preferences in a Salient Real-World Case?
2016
Attitudes towards international economic integration are usually measured via survey questions on preferences for free trade in general, arguably in contexts of low salience of international economic integration in the public mind. Drawing on three recent rounds of Eurobarometer surveys that contain information on citizens’ attitudes towards a free trade and investment agreement between the EU and the USA, this paper seizes the opportunity to re-examine individual-level preferences towards international economic integration with regard to a specific real-world case of relatively high political salience, i.e. TTIP. While past research has explained preferences towards trade primarily via mod…
Regulation and efficiency: the case of European railways
2001
Abstract During the long period of regulation of the railway system in Europe (1950s–1990s) the companies notably improved their levels of productivity. However, parallel to this, the state of their financial accounts also significantly worsened. In order to explain this fact we have estimated both cost and revenue frontier functions, calculating the losses associated with both cost and revenue inefficiencies as well as inefficiencies on the cost side. The results obtained show the existence of significant potential losses of revenue, which can be explained above all by the strong policy of regulation and intervention reigning in this period. A better commercial policy and a supply adapted …
Goals are Not Enough: Building Public Sector Capacity for Chronic Disease Prevention
2013
The rising burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) challenges the public health sector to develop, support and implement effective interventions to reduce this global epidemic. The United Nations has responded with a global action plan that includes goals and voluntary targets for the prevention and control of NCDs. However, setting goals is not enough. To achieve meaningful outcomes, governments must act and invest to improve key enabling capacities. Political and other public sector leadership at every jurisdictional level is needed to implement health-in-all-policies initiatives and to measure progress against set objectives, while technological and human resources for health should b…
R&D Competition, Cooperation, and Microeconomic Policies
2016
This chapter aims to contribute to the better understanding of R&D by scholars and practitioners. It includes a first section where the concept of innovation is defined and its public good nature and cumulative dimension are analysed. Next, the incentives that firms have to undertake R&D to attain a competitive edge upon rivals are considered. This entails the consideration of both ex ante and ex post incentives to undertake R&D. Since innovation is costly and derives important external effects, cooperation in R&D activities is prominent in several industries where firms enter into research joint ventures, or form research networks. The effect of cooperation is that, under s…
Costly punishment prevails in intergroup conflict.
2011
Understanding how societies resolve conflicts between individual and common interests remains one of the most fundamental issues across disciplines. The observation that humans readily incur costs to sanction uncooperative individuals without tangible individual benefits has attracted considerable attention as a proximate cause as to why cooperative behaviours might evolve. However, the proliferation of individually costly punishment has been difficult to explain. Several studies over the last decade employing experimental designs with isolated groups have found clear evidence that the costs of punishment often nullify the benefits of increased cooperation, rendering the strong human tenden…
It’s a matter of confidence. Institutions, government stability and economic outcomes
2021
In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that poss…
Crisis communication, anticipated food scarcity, and food preferences: Preregistered evidence of the insurance hypothesis
2021
Abstract Whereas large-scale consumption of energy-dense foods contributes to climate change, we investigated whether exposure to climate change-induced food scarcity affects preferences toward these foods. Humans’ current psychological mechanisms have developed in their ancestral evolutionary past to respond to immediate threats and opportunities. Consequently, these mechanisms may not distinguish between cues to actual food scarcity and cues to food scarcity distant in time and space. Drawing on the insurance hypothesis, which postulates that humans should respond to environmental cues to food scarcity through increased energy consumption, we predicted that exposing participants to climat…
The Economic Impact of Water Taxes: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis with an International Data Set
2006
Water is scarce in many countries. One instrument to improve the allocation of a scarce resource is (efficient) pricing or taxation. However, water is implicitly traded on international markets, particularly through food and textiles, so that impacts of water taxes cannot be studied in isolation, but require an analysis of international trade implications. We include water as a production factor in a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model (GTAP), to assess a series of water tax policies. We find that water taxes reduce water use, and lead to shifts in production, consumption, and international trade patterns. Countries that do not levy water taxes are nonetheless af…