improving productivity opening the black box hourly productivity levels in the uk still remain behind those in some competitor countries the government devotes much policy attention to enhancing productivity and continues to emphasise its five drivers investment innovation skills enterprise and competition this article argues that it is investment broadly defined that is the key to sustained productivity improvement the emphasis should be on improving productivity simultaneously with improving the quality of production only thus will the gains be widely shared in achieving these aims there are two prerequisites for policy makers the first is to ensure better coordination of policy than appears to be currently achieved by the present departmental structures in whitehall the second is to recognize fully the long and complex chain of causation that can be triggered by pulling on one policy lever such complexity can only be fully understood by more research on what actually goes on inside the black box of the organization 2006 oxford university press

conceptual framework for regional competitiveness budd l and hirmis a k 2004 conceptual framework for regional competitiveness regional studies38 1007 1020 the concept of territorial competitiveness has gained ground in academic policy and practitioner circles in particular urban competitiveness has generated a large literature however there is a danger that competitiveness at a territorial level becomes a conceptual chimera the essential problem is that territorially based actors and agencies seek to position and maintain the utility of their regions and subregions by reference to a set of measures and indicators that are conceptually suspect and often empirically weak the degree to which regions compete depends on a manifold set of factors the paper proposes a conceptual framework for regional competitiveness based on combining the competitive advantage of firms and the comparative advantage of a regional economy the conceptual transmission mechanism to regional competitiveness combines liebenstein s theory of x inefficiency and aggl

a comment on baron and ferejohn 1989 the open rule equilibrium and coalition formation i present a more general characterization of the symmetric stationary subgame perfect equilibrium to the baron and ferejohn 1989 open rule divide the dollar game specifically i show that an amender can follow several different randomization strategies when deciding whom to make offers to and each can be sustained as a distinct equilibrium with slightly different payoffs the result demonstrates that when building coalitions in bargaining settings where an offer is already on the table those with the worst offers need not be the ones bought up first

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

on the efficiency of equilibria in a legislative bargaining model with particularistic and collective goods this study analyzes the efficiency of equilibria in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides its budget among collective and particularistic goods in order to disentangle the causes of inefficiency we extend the model of volden and wiseman am polit sci rev 101 79 92 2007 by considering quasi linear utility functions and consensus requirements ranging from simple majority to unanimity although unanimous agreements can be reached under weaker consensus requirements we show that pareto inefficiency is associated with non unanimous consent we also study how i the endogenous selection of the legislature s size or ii a sequential choice of collective and particularistic spending eliminates or attenuates the inefficiency problem

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

senate representation and coalition building in distributive politics p7 vhe senate s equal representation of states shapes coalition building in distributive politics the great variation in state population means that some states have far greater need for federal fttnds than others but all senators have equal voting weight as a result even though all senators votes are of equal value to the coalition builder they are not of equal prwice coalition builders can include benefits for small states at considerably less expense to program budgets than comparable benefits for more populous states building on formal models of coalition building two hypotheses are developed and tested first coalition builders will seek out less costly members to build supportive coalitions efficiently second the final outcomes of distributive policy will more closely reflect the preferences of small state senators than large state senators the hypotheses are tested by examining the 1991 and 1997 98 reauthorizations of federal surface transportation programs the findings support both hypotheses

competitiveness indices and developing countries an economic evaluation of the global competitiveness report developing countries policy makers worry about national competitiveness and closely watch indices ranking international competitive performance this paper analyzes from a development economics perspective if competitiveness is a legitimate concern and if the leading indices deserve the attention they get it assesses the best known index the global competitiveness report of the world economic forum and finds deficiencies at several levels its definitions are too broad the approach biased and the methodology flawed many qualitative measures are vague redundant or wrong these weak theoretical and empirical foundations reduce the value of the indices for analytical or policy purposes

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

elections governments and parliaments in proportional representation systems this paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral system a formateur selected based on party representation in parliament and parties that cannot commit to the policies they will implement once in government government formation involves efficient proto coalition bargaining and elections yield unique strong nash equilibrium outcomes depending on the status quo minimal majority surplus or consensus governments can form if parties and voters are myopic and the status quo is subject to shocks consensus governments and centrist policies occur only in a crisis otherwise governments are minimal winning and policies reflect only the preferences of the government parties

foreign direct investment and factor demand elasticities abstract this paper argues that the liberalisation of foreign direct investment fdi has made labour costs more important to domestic investment and long run labour demand it provides evidence from british and german data that is consistent with this view first high unit labour costs increase fdi outflows and lower fdi inflows second the effect of unit labour costs on domestic manufacturing investment was more negative in the high fdi 1980s than in the low fdi 1970s and this change was concentrated in high fdi industries the estimates suggest that the long run labour demand elasticity may have risen substantially

the provision of public goods under alternative electoral incentives politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending we compare a winner take all system where all the spoils go to the winner to a proportional system where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote in a winner take all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable we then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

recognition without replacement in legislative bargaining abstract this paper studies infinite horizon sequential bargaining among n 3 players in which a proposer is randomly selected from the pool of potential proposers if the proposal is rejected the current and previous proposers are excluded from the pool of potential proposers and the game moves on to the next round until every player has had the same number of opportunities to be the proposer to analyze the model with a particular time dependency within each sequence of n rounds a cycle i characterize the stationary equilibrium of a stochastic game which i call cycle stationary subgame perfect cssp equilibrium the cssp equilibrium is unique in payoffs and analogous to the subgame perfect equilibrium of some forms of finite horizon bargaining even when every player is entirely patient the proposer s share in the cssp equilibrium is smaller than that predicted by the stationary equilibrium of the baron ferejohn legislative bargaining model

is polarization bad abstract the adverse effects of political and social polarization on government policies are empirically well documented yet some democracies seem to cope well or even benefit from diversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to show how elections in polarized societies contribute to improve quality of government we consider both polarization among citizens and political actors political polarization where the second is endogenously determined by parties competing to win the support of the majority of voters we find that more heterogeneous societies are more likely to be politically polarized but that the divergence of positions in the political arena helps the electorate control government corruption by raising electoral stakes our results which are consistent with the findings of a substantial empirical literature suggest that when funneled into political competition polarization may help improving quality of government and policies

bureaucrats voters and public investment abstract this paper explores the provision of a durable public good in romer and rosenthal s agenda setter model it identifies a type of equilibrium called a romer rosenthal equilibrium in which in every period the bureaucrat proposes the maximum level of public investment the voter will support the paper establishes that such an equilibrium exists for a variety of public good benefit functions equilibrium public good levels converge or almost converge to a steady state these steady states can involve a unique public good level being provided each period or may exhibit a two period cycle steady state public good levels exceed the voter s optimal level more surprisingly steady state equilibrium reversion levels can exceed the voter s optimal steady state level meaning that reversion levels cannot be used to bound the optimal level reflecting the inability of the agents to commit to their future proposing and voting behavior equilibrium paths are pareto inefficient

redistribution pork and elections why might citizens vote against redistributive policies from which they would seem to benefit many scholars focus on wedge issues such as religion or race but another explanation might be geographically based patronage or pork we examine the tension between redistribution and patronage with a model that combines partisan elections across multiple districts with legislation in spatial and divide the dollar environments the model yields a unique equilibrium that describes the circumstances under which poor voters support right wing parties that favor low taxes and redistribution and under which rich voters support left wing parties that favor high taxes and redistribution the model suggests that one reason standard tax and transfer models of redistribution often do not capture empirical reality is that redistributive transfers are a less efficient tool for attracting votes than are more targeted policy programs the model also underlines the central importance of party discipline during legislative bargaining in shaping the importance of redistribution in voter behavior and it describes why right wing parties should have an advantage over left wing ones in majoritarian systems

measuring the national competitiveness of southeast asian countries national competitiveness is a measure of the relative ability of a nation to create and maintain an environment in which enterprises can compete so that the level of prosperity can be improved this paper proposes a methodology for measuring the national competitiveness and uses the 10 southeast asian countries for illustration the basic idea is to deconstruct the complicated concept of national competitiveness to measurable criteria the observations data on the criteria are then aggregated according to their importance to obtain an index of national competitiveness for data collected from questionnaire surveys a calibration technique has been devised to alleviate bias due to personal prejudice in data aggregation the importance is expressed by both a priori weights and a posteriori weights these two types of weights consistently show that singapore malaysia and thailand have the highest national competitiveness while myanmar cambodia and laos are the least competitive countries the performance of each country in every criteria measured also provides directions for these countries to make improvements and for investors to allocate resources

static and dynamic underinvestment an experimental investigation in this paper we design a stylized version of an environment with public goods dynamic linkages and legislative bargaining our theoretical framework studies the provision of a durable public good as a modified version of battaglini et al 2012 we develop an experimental design that allows us to disentangle inefficiencies that would result in a one shot world static inefficiencies from extra inefficiencies that emerge in an environment in which decisions in the present affect the future dynamic inefficiencies we solve for efficiency and also characterize the bargaining equilibrium a symmetric stationary subgame perfect equilibrium which is the most common concept used in applied work the experimental results indicate that subjects do react to dynamic linkages and as such we find evidence of both static and dynamic inefficiencies in fact the quantitative predictions of the model with respect to the share of dynamic inefficiencies are closest to the data when dynamic linkages are high to the extent that behavior is different from what is predicted by the model a systematic pattern emerges namely the use of strategic cooperation whereby subjects increase the efficiency of period one proposals by selectively punishing in period two subjects who did not propose efficient allocations

broad bills or particularistic policy historical patterns in american state legislatures when do lawmakers craft broad policies and when do they focus on narrow legislation tailored to a local interest we investigate this question by exploring historical variation in the types of bills produced by american state legislatures drawing on a new database of 165 000 bills covering sessions over 120 years in thirteen different states we demonstrate the surprising prominence of particularistic bills affecting a specific legislator s district we then develop and test a theory linking the goals of legislators to their propensity to introduce district bills rather than broad legislation we find that consistent with our predictions politicians are more likely to craft policies targeted to a particular local interest when a legislature is dominated by one party or when it pays its members relatively high salaries these findings provide empirical support for key s 1949 thesis that one party politics descends into factionalism and undermines the making of broad public policy w hen lawmakers consider their legislative agendas they face a choice between introducing broad bills addressing major public policy needs and pushing for particularistic policies to meet the electoral demands of their districts or coreconstituencies thisdecisionoftensetstheirpolicy goals against their political ambitions forcing them to trade off among the competing priorities that fenno 1973 1978 and mayhew 1974 outline in making this decision legislators must consider the structure of their house the incentives provided by that structure and their own place in the chamber s power struggles how they resolve the tension between common policy considerations and personal electoral needs is at the root of legislative action the aggregation of individual decisions about the mix of legislation that each will pursue has important consequences for the balance of public and particularistic goods that the political system as a whole will produce analyzed theoretically

the effects on competitiveness of coordinated versus unilateral fiscal policies reducing ghg emissions in the eu an assessment of a 10 reduction by 2010 using the e3me model abstract international competitiveness effects from coordinated and uncoordinated multilateral policies to reduce co 2 emissions from 11 member states of the eu by 2010 are compared with those from unilateral policies to achieve a 10 cut in each member state alone the paper presents the results from four projections using a large scale integrated regionalised e3 model of the eu estimated on time series cross section data 1968 93 with international trade treated as between each member state and a european transport and distribution network the 10 reduction is achieved by additional excise duties incremented every year 1999 to 2010 according to the carbon contents of fuels with special with special treatment of electricity taxed on outputs not inputs with revenues recycled via reductions in employers social security contributions multilateral coordinated policies require a common tax rate of 156 ecu per tonne carbon 1999 prices which rises to an average of 165 ecu per tonne with a wide range between regions when policies are uncoordinated all the tax shift projections show double dividends for emission reduction and employment gain for all member states unilateral policies do not show much carbon leakage but they show smaller gains for output and employment effects for price competitiveness appear to be small and mixed with serious losses appearing only for the netherlands and for metals and chemicals especially for unilateral action

microeconomic implications of exchange rate variations this paper investigates the effect of exchange rate variations on the equilibrium of an industry in which domestic firms are competing with foreign suppliers the paper is designed as an expository survey it discusses the perfectly competitive industry exchange rate pass through under imperfect competition entry exit and hysteresis with fixed costs and exchange rate uncertainty copyright 1990 by oxford university press

legislative bargaining with heterogeneous disagreement values theory and experiments we study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations in that case each player receives an exogenous disagreement value we characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q majority rules under unanimity rule equilibrium payoffs are strictly increasing in disagreement values under all less than unanimity rules expected payoffs are either decreasing or first increasing and then decreasing in disagreement values we conduct experiments involving three players using majority and unanimity rule finding qualitative support for several but not all of our main predictions having a high disagreement value is indeed an advantage under unanimity under majority the player with the highest disagreement value is more likely to be excluded but this does not consistently result in a lower average payoff

the arsenal of democracy production and politics during wwii abstract we study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during world war ii this is a unique case where 3 trillion current day dollars was spent we find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts and that political factors or at least winning the 1944 presidential election were at best of secondary importance general industrial capacity in 1939 as well as specialized industrial capacity for aircraft production are strong predictors of contract spending across states electoral college pivot probabilities are weak predictors of contract and new facilities spending and under the most plausible assumptions they are essentially unrelated to spending this is true over the entire period 1940 1944 and also for shorter periods leading up to the election in november 1944 that is we find no evidence of an electoral cycle in the distribution of funds

addressing global environmental externalities transaction costs considerations is there a way to understand why some global environmental externalities are addressed effectively whereas others are not the transaction costs of defining the property rights to mitigation benefits and costs is a useful framework for such analysis this approach views international cooperation as a contractual process among country leaders to assign those property rights leaders cooperate when it serves domestic interests to do so the demand for property rights comes from those who value and stand to gain from multilateral action property rights are supplied by international agreements that specify resource access and use assign costs and benefits including outlining the size and duration of compensating transfer payments and determining who will pay and who will receive them four factors raise the transaction costs of assigning property rights i scientific uncertainty regarding mitigation benefits and costs ii varying preferences and perceptions across heterogeneous populations iii asymmetric information and iv the extent of compliance and new entry these factors are used to examine the role of transaction costs in the establishment and allocation of property rights to provide globally valued national parks implement the convention on the international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora execute the montreal protocol to manage emissions that damage the stratospheric ozone layer set limits on harvest of highly migratory ocean fish stocks and control greenhouse gas emissions jel d23 p14 q22 q51 q54 q58

a dynamic theory of public spending taxation and debt this paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending taxation and debt policy choices are made by a legislature consisting of representatives elected by geographically defined districts the legislature can raise revenues via a distortionary income tax and by borrowing these revenues can be used tofinance a national public good and district specific transfers interpreted as pork barrel spending the value of the public good is stochastic reflecting shocks such as wars or natural disasters in equilibrium policy making cycles between two distinct regimes business as usual in which legislators bargain over the allocation of pork and responsible policy making in which policies maximize the collective good transitions between the two regimes are brought about by shocks in the value of the public good in the long run equilibrium tax rates are too high and too volatile public good provision is too low and debt levels are too high in some environments a balanced budget requirement can improve citizen welfare

majority rule bargaining and the under provision of public investment goods abstract despite evidence that modern democracies systematically shortchange public investment goods relatively little theoretical work exists to explain this phenomenon we build on baron and ferejohn s american political science review 83 4 1989 1181 1206 bargaining model to describe public investments in a setting of budgetary politics specifically we show that underinvestment inherently arises from distributive politics within a majoritarian institution the inability of current majorities to contract with future ones drives a wedge between spending on consumption today and investing for future consumption extensions to the model demonstrate that earmarking future returns to specific players and or detaching consumption from investment decisions yields more efficient levels of public investment

investments and bargaining in a model with positive consumption externalities abstract this paper analyzes the investment decisions of the members of a committee when a subsequent bargaining process determines the distribution of a divisible good among them the shares allocated to investing agents generate positive consumption externalities we show that agents investments improve their bargaining position this induces rent seeking behavior that generates a negative external effect on other investing agents in this setting the effects of rent seeking counterbalance the effects of positive consumption externalities so that equilibria may be efficient or display either over or under investment

the assessment international competitiveness the concept of international competitiveness as applied to national economies is a popular one politicians businessmen and economists alike re fer to it in day to day discussion when looking at the external export import market share or trade balance performance of different countries indi cators are produced showing changes in or levels of various countries competitiveness e g the relative price or cost indices regularly published by the imf and the oecd or the absolute measures produced by organizations such as the geneva world economic forum and the lausanne institute for management development governments of ten instigate research on the matter as for instance in the case of the 1993 us competitiveness policy council orthe 1995 eu competitiveness advisory group yet it has recently been argued by paul krugman that competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies and the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous krugman 1994 p 44 apositionkrugman forcefully reaffirms in his contribution to this issue of the oxford review of economic policy

the right type of legislator a theory of taxation and representation abstract we develop a theory of taxation and the distribution of government spending in a citizen candidate model of legislatures individuals are heterogeneous in two dimensions productive ability in the private sector and negotiating ability in politics when these are positively correlated rich voters always prefer a rich legislator but poor voters face a trade off a rich legislator will secure more pork for the district but will also prefer lower taxation than the poor voter our theory organizes a number of stylized facts across countries about taxation and redistribution parties and class representation in legislatures we demonstrate that spending does not necessarily increase when the number of legislators increases as the standard common pool intuition suggests and that many policies aimed at increasing descriptive representation may have the opposite effect

how do flexible labour markets really work the role of profitability in influencing unemployment this paper assesses the theoretical justifications available for policies of flexible labour markets flms in reducing the level of unemployment in developed economies it empirically assesses the oecd s rationalisation of policy linking profitability to investment and job creation in four country cases new capital investment is found to be significant for unemployment in all cases but it is not found to be a consequence of the mechanistic achievement of normal profits without an empirically supported mechanism for how flms reduce unemployment the policy is open to the accusation of being no more than a political tool for altering distribution without concern for the wider socio economic consequences copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

local favoritism in at large proportional representation systems abstract pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system we estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown using data from norwegian regional governments we still find a hometown bias we document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the regional governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments citizens also tend to vote more often for parties whose gubernatorial candidate is from their own hometown consistent with expectations of particularistic benefits a possible explanation is that regional council members are often recruited from local politics and remain loyal to their roots we find no evidence that regional council experience affects politicians future career prospects at the local level

greasing the wheels pork and public goods contributions in a legislative bargaining experiment abstract when a legislature bargains over funds for pork and public goods and the funds come from a common budget increased spending on the public good means greater payoff equality since it comes at the expense of pork this paper explores whether inequity aversion then leads to greater public goods spending using both theory and a laboratory experiment we show inequity aversion generally decreases inequity within a coalition by limiting proposer power however this does not always mean greater public goods contributions because the types of proposals passed change in equilibrium in addition the experiment investigates the theoretical prediction that increasing players relative preference for pork can increase public goods contributions we show that while average public goods contributions remain unchanged there is evidence at the individual level that subjects hold out for higher public goods contributions as predicted

voting weights and formateur advantages in the formation of coalition governments over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions to test key predictions of these models we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001 these predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties minimal integer voting weights we calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties in addition we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts we find that for parties that join but did not form the government there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts the party that forms the government the formateur receives a substantial bonus relative to its voting weight the latter finding is more consistent with proposal based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power

impacts of climate policy on the competitiveness of canadian industry how big and how to mitigate competitiveness concerns have been at the forefront of climate policy debates in canada particularly as a result of its high energy intensity and significant exposure to international markets this paper uses a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to assess the likely impacts on sectoral competitiveness that would accompany efforts to meet greenhouse gas mitigation targets that have been set by the canadian government additionally it evaluates several design mechanisms that could be used to reduce the negative competiveness impacts associated with adoption of domestic climate policies the analysis suggests that several sectors would likely face significant competiveness challenges under a reference scenario in which permits are given to emitters in lump sum however it finds that competiveness impacts can be minimized by using output based recycling of permits or by using border tax adjustments

productivity growth and environmental regulations accounting for undesirable outputs analysis of china s thirty provincial regions using the malmquist luenberger index this paper employs the malmquist luenberger ml productivity index to evaluate china s growth in total factor productivity tfp incorporating undesirable outputs during the period from 1989 to 2008 the ml productivity index and its components technical and efficiency changes are derived from the directional distance function which gives credit for an increase in good outputs and for reductions in undesirable outputs the average annual ml productivity growth accounting for undesirable outputs is 2 46 whereas the value of the traditional malmquist productivity index is 4 84 showing that the true tfp growth in china is overestimated if undesirable outputs are ignored we explore the strictness in enforcing environmental regulations and its impact on improvements in ml productivity the results show that the enforcement of environmental regulations in china is in general far below the levels achieved in the best performing regions and that the more stringent enforcement of environmental regulations would help to improve ml productivity growth in china

the industrial policy of competitiveness a review of recent developments in the uk the article reviews the recent developments in uk competitiveness policy and explores its relationship with industrial policy including regional industrial policy it argues that competitiveness is virtually synonymous with productivity growth but that while four competitiveness white papers of the 1990s potentially broadened the scope of uk industrial policy the shift from sectoral to horizontal measures has in fact helped much reduce the content of this policy the article reviews current industrial policy and expenditure distinguishing between the areas of science and technology small firms and regional policy it argues that industrial policy is now a part of competitiveness policy being closely aligned to the efficiency role of government it finds that while policy has converged on a narrower set of measures the traditional boundaries between the science and technology small firm and regional policy components have become much less clear cut

monetary policy by committee consensus chairman dominance or simple majority this paper studies the theoretical and empirical implications of monetary policy making by committee under four different voting protocols the protocols are a consensus model where a supermajority is required for a policy change an agenda setting model where the chairman controls the agenda a dictator model where the chairman has absolute power over the committee and a simple majority model where policy is determined by the median member these protocols give preeminence to different aspects of the actual decision making process and capture the observed heterogeneity in formal procedures across central banks the models are estimated by maximum likelihood using interest rate decisions by the committees of five central banks namely the bank of canada the bank of england the european central bank the swedish riksbank and the u s federal reserve for all central banks results indicate that the consensus model fits actual policy decisions better than the alternative models this suggests that despite institutional differences committees share unwritten rules and informal procedures that deliver observationally equivalent policy decisions

mandatory versus discretionary spending the status quo eect do mandatory spending programs such as medicare improve eciency we analyze a model with two parties allocating a xed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an innite horizon we compare two institutions that dier in whether public good spending is discretionary or mandatory we model mandatory spending as an endogenous status quo since it is enacted by law and remains in eect until changed mandatory programs result in higher public good spending furthermore they ex ante pareto dominate discretionary programs when parties are patient persistence of power is low and polarization is low

legislative bargaining with reconsideration we present a dynamic model of legislative bargaining with an endogenously evolving default policy and a persistent agenda setter policy making proceeds until the agenda setter can no longer pass a new policy to replace an approved bill we prove existence and necessary conditions of pure strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space any number of players and any preference profile in equilibrium the value of proposal power is limited compared to the case that disallows reconsideration as voters are induced to protect each other s benefits to maintain their future bargaining positions the agenda setter in turn would prefer to limit his ability to reconsider the lack of commitment due to the possibility of reconsideration however enhances policy efficiency

ends in view the capabilities approach in ecological sustainability economics while traditional scientific endeavor seeks to avoid the problem ecological economics and the broader emergent field of sustainability economics e se are explicitly grounded in a particular ethico moral assertion one that defines sustainability as a normative notion about the way how humans should act towards nature and how they are responsible towards one another and future generations baumgartner and quaas 2010 p 445 thus e se is neither a purely positive science nor is it a purely normative endeavor but it is what has been called relevant science baumgartner and quaas 2010 p 447 a key objective of e se is therefore said to be to study how ecosystems and human activity interrelate in terms that extend beyond functional and descriptive analysis of this interrelationship and towards explicitly incorporating this normative vision the result that is aimed for is a discipline that is constituted as the best possible approach to the science and management of sustainability

bargaining in legislatures over particularistic and collective goods we develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods by incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods put simply policy proposers can exploit coalition partners strong preferences for public goods to actually provide fewer public goods in equilibrium while directing more private goods to themselves these results explain why policy reforms to limit special interest spending often fail this unified model also sheds new light on when legislatures prefer open or closed amendment rules and when coalitions take different sizes and shapes

strategic delegation in a legislative bargaining model with pork and public goods abstract this paper examines the incentives of voters to appoint legislators with different preferences from their own the paper adopts an underlying legislative bargaining model proposed by volden and wiseman 2007 in which legislators with heterogeneous preferences divide a fixed budget between a public good and pork projects local public goods we show that voters have an incentive to strategically delegate to affect how the budget is divided at the legislative level when voters preferences for pork are not too strong the incentives for strategic delegation exist to appoint representatives who will direct more money to the public good and not to pork projects this generally results in at least as many representatives as districts that favor the public good the comparative statics predict that when strategic delegation occurs increasing the size of the legislature increases the fraction of the budget spent on the public good