The main purposes of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, to determine if there are significant differences of regime on public expenditures, total revenues and tax revenues between the so-called PIGS and the remaining Eurozone member states and, on the other hand, to uncover possible...

The eurozone faces a profound sovereign debt crisis threatening the very existence of the euro. As a result, the recovery of the world economy has become more uncertain. Therefore, the study of the foundations of this crisis is of the utmost importance. Three of the countries involved, Portugal,...

The idea that the present euro-zone sovereign debt crisis was caused by structural weaknesses degenerating into fundamental macroeconomic imbalances in the peripheral countries prevails among economists and politicians alike. We use quarterly data from 2000 to 2011 from the 27 European Union...

Many developing countries are searching positive impacts on the efficiency, equity and quality provision of the public services through increasing competition and active participation of the private sector, considering public-private partnerships (PPPs) as the appropriate instrument to attain...

We evaluate the influence of political and institutional features in public spending and its functional composition, by focussing on political actors’ preferences, both opportunistic and partisan, as well as on institutional arrangements as political fragmentation, the electoral system and the...

Over the last two decades there has been a growing interest in determining the impact of inequality on growth. The empirical literature has, however, produced controversial results regarding both the signal and the magnitude of such impact. This paper develops a meta-analysis on this literature...

A number of studies in the literature have recently explored the causes behind the European productivity slowdown from the mid-1990s onwards and the correlative increase in the productivity gap between Europe and the United States (e.g., van Ark et al, 2008; Maudos et al, 2008; van Ark and Inklaar,...

Setting targets to increase the levels of R&D, a component that is present in the political and economic agendas of the European Member States with the promotion of active tax policies, suggests that it is possible for R&D to cause an impact on economic growth. This research work aims at...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) influences the host country’s economic growth through the transfer of new technologies and know-how, formation of human resources, integration in global markets, increase of competition, and firms’ development and reorganization. Empirically, a variety of...

We propose a framework to solve dynamic nonlinear infinite-horizon models like those found in the standard economic growth literature. We employ a direct method to solve the underlying optimal control problem, something novel in the economic literature. Instead of deriving the necessary...