artisanal gold and transformational exchange toward a public private partnership in tanzania abstract human rights abuses environmental predations and governance failures plague artisanal gold mining in tanzania gold s exchange value and the illegality of most artisanal gold product challenge the traditional fair trade model a potential solution additionally memories of the government s earlier failed effort to serve as a sole purchaser of artisanal gold undercut enthusiasm for statist interventions this paper presents an alternative a public private partnership ppp that would engage one or more private banks an agency within the ministry of energy and minerals and ngos or international initiatives specifically aimed at improving conditions for artisanal mine operators the concept of transformational exchange wherein a set of business transactions substantially affects societal expectations modifies behavior and promotes sustainable mechanisms frames the proposal

democracy and economic growth a meta analysis despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth this article challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy growth literature it applies meta regression analysis to the population of 483 estimates derived from 84 studies on democracy and growth using traditional meta analysis estimators the bootstrap and fixed and random effects meta regression models it derives several robust conclusions taking all the available published evidence together it concludes that democracy does not have a direct impact on economic growth however democracy has robust significant and positive indirect effects through higher human capital lower inflation lower political instability and higher levels of economic freedom democracies may also be associated with larger governments and less free international trade there also appear to be country and region specific democracy growth effects overall democracy s net effect on the economy does not seem to be detrimental

optimality properties of alternative systems of taxation of foreign capital income foreign source capital income taxes are examined from the point of view of optimal taxation in the framework of a simple economy with international real capital flows a taxonomy of alternative systems of such taxation is first presented showing how crediting and other tax parameters induce what are called source based residence based and related systems next tax rates are determined that are optimal from a single country s point of view given those of the others the achievability of these rates under the various systems is analyzed finally tax rates that are optimal from an international point of view are considered again achievability of an international optimum under the various systems is considered leading to the main conclusions that i a pure residence based system in all countries can achieve an international fiscal optimum ii it cannot however be sustained as an equilibrium

strategic responses to resource management pressures in agriculture institutional gender and location effects sustainable management of natural resources by farmers is under increasing public scrutiny in australia the case of water unsustainably used and stored by agricultural businesses has gained attention with communities in catchments potentially deprived of water and placed at downstream risk yet sustainable water management institutional policy mechanisms remain disjointed around the country the study reported here applies a strategic response typology to a survey of 404 farmers in four different institutional environments in australia to explore their responses to institutional pressures findings demonstrate a convergence in typologies that relate to farmers organising each other and communities influencing and networking for the benefit of agricultural resource management thereby questioning the traditional continuum of resistance furthermore the mid range typology avoidance emerges as a highly problematic typology for sustainable water management policymakers especially those in weaker institutional environments where there is a need to develop policy instruments that retain farmer water management decision making power and encourage networks the paper also extends the strategic response typology to enable understanding of how gender and location affect strategic responses to institutional pressures findings provide insight for policy design in times of increasing catastrophic flood and drought conditions exacerbated by poor water management practice

managing electricity procurement cost and risk by a local distribution company abstract a local electricity distribution company ldc can satisfy some of its future electricity requirements through self generation and volatile spot markets and the remainder through fixed price forward contracts that will reduce its exposure to the inherent risk of spot price volatility a theoretical framework is developed for determining the forward contract purchase that minimizes the ldcs expected procurement cost subject to a cost exposure constraint the answers to the questions of what to buy and how to buy are illustrated using an example of a hypothetical ldc that is based on a municipal utility in florida it is shown that the ldcs procurement decision is consistent with least cost procurement subject to a cost exposure constraint and that an internet based multi round auction can produce competitive price quotes for its desired forward purchase

tax policy a survey this paper surveys recent theoretical and empirical work in the field of tax policy it considers the issues involved in choosing the tax base and rate structure and the incidence of taxes it also examines objectives of the tax system other than the pursuit of revenue both economic and noneconomic the administration of tax systems and the fiscal relations between different levels of government both internationally and domestically it concludes by examining the relationship between tax analysis and tax policy copyright 1990 by royal economic society

a theory of interregional tax competition a general equilibrium model is constructed to study tax competition where local governments compete for capital by holding down property tax rates and public expenditure levels an exact definition of tax competition is provided and both the existence and nonexistence of tax competition are shown to be theoretically possible it is argued however that tax competition must occur under empirically reasonable conditions inefficiency in public production is also explicitly modeled the amount of capital used to produce a given level of public service output is shown to be greater than that which is required to minimize costs evaluated at the prices facing private firms

forward contracting and selling price determination for a retailer to procure the electric energy to be sold to its clients a retailer has to face two major difficulties while buying electric energy it must cope with uncertain pool prices or sign forward contracts at higher average prices while selling electricity it should handle the uncertainty of the end user demand and the fact that customers might choose a different retailer if the selling price is not competitive enough we propose a risk constrained stochastic programming framework to decide which forward contracts the retailer should sign and at which price it must sell electricity so that its expected profit is maximized at a given risk level the developed model takes into account the elastic behavior of end users with respect to the selling price offered by the retailer a realistic case study illustrates the methodology proposed

making room for smallholder cooperatives in tanzanian tea production can fairtrade do that the objective of this article is to examine the different ways that smallholders are brought into fairtrade certification schemes in the tanzanian tea industry we examine the different ownership relations of processing factories and the perceived benefits of these different arrangements we use descriptive qualitative analysis based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted between 2008 and 2010 to identify the significance between factory ownership organization and fairtrade certification we find that there is a movement toward innovation in the organizational strategies which includes new ownership arrangements of processing factories and outgrower contracts that have been associated with certified fairtrade production we also suggest that organizational innovation is significant for obtaining scheme success yet perceived benefits of and increased information about fairtrade production is independent from ownership shares in processing

optimal price and quantity determination for retail electric power contracts considering the viewpoint of a retailer this paper analyzes the problem of setting up contracts on both the supplier and end user sides to maximize profits while maintaining an acceptable level of settlement risk the proposed stochastic optimization model can assist retailers with these efforts and guide them in their contractual arrangements a realistic example illustrates the capabilities of the methodology proposed

studying optimal paternalism illustrated by a model of sin taxes the classical economic approach to policy analysis assumes that people always respond optimally to the costs and benefits of their available choices a great deal of evidence suggests however that in some contexts people make errors that lead them not to behave in their own best interests economic policy prescriptions might change once we recognize that humans are humanly rational rather than superhumanly rational and in particular it may be fruitful for economists to study the possible advantages of paternalistic policies that help people make better choices we propose an approach for studying optimal paternalism that follows naturally from standard assumptions and methods of economic theory write down assumptions about the distribution of rational and irrational types of agents about the available policy instruments and about the government s information about agents and then investigate which policies achieve the most efficient outcomes in other words economists ought to treat the analysis of optimal paternalism as a mechanism design problem when some agents might be boundedly rational this approach has many advantages first and foremost by explicitly addressing when and how people do and don t pursue their own best interests economists will be better able to contribute to policy debates to contribute to debates over regulating private financial decisions we must study whether financial decisions are based on fallacious statistical reasoning and whether self control problems lead people to borrow too heavily to contribute to debates over teenage smoking we must study whether teenagers become smokers against their long run best interest economists will and should be ignored if we continue to insist that it is axiomatic that constantly trading stocks or accumulating consumer debt or becoming a heroin addict must be optimal for the people doing these things merely because they have chosen to do it a second advantage of our approach is that it forces us to look for the best feasible policy our

tax incidence when individuals are time inconsistent the case of cigarette excise taxes abstract one of the most cogent criticisms of excise taxes is their regressivity with lower income groups spending a much larger share of their income on goods such as cigarettes than do higher income groups we argue that traditional quantity based measures of incidence are only appropriate under a very restrictive time consistent model of consumption of sin goods a model that is much more consistent with existing evidence on smoking decisions is a time inconsistent formulation where excise taxes on cigarettes serve a self control function that is valued by smokers who would like to quit but cannot this self control function benefits lower income groups more since they have a significantly higher price sensitivity of smoking calibrations show that as a result cigarette taxes are much less regressive than previously assumed and are even progressive for a wide variety of parameter values

taxing and regulating vices we study the optimal taxation and regulation of sin goods goods that are enjoyable to consume but also create future negative health consequences within a setting in which individuals are time inconsistent and thus consume too much regulation makes the consumption of sin goods less pleasurable and taxation involves administrative and compliance costs in contrast to previous literature we find that regulation can be beneficial even when corrective taxes are available and individuals are homogeneous moreover despite the inefficiencies associated with the use of both instruments the consumption of the sin good might fall short of the first best the results are robust to consumers heterogeneity

quasi hyperbolic discounting and retirement abstract some people have self control problems regularly this paper adds endogenous retirement to laibson s quasi hyperbolic discounting savings model quarterly journal of economics 112 1997 443 477 earlier selves think that the deciding self tends to retire too early and may save less to induce later retirement still earlier selves may think the pre retirement self does this too much saving more to induce early retirement the consumption pattern may be different from that with exponential discounting other observational non equivalence includes the impact of changing mandatory retirement rules or work incentives on savings and a possibly negative marginal propensity to consume out of increased future earnings naive agents are briefly considered

market oriented institutions and policies and economic growth a critical survey this paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth focusing on studies using the economic freedom ef indicator of the fraser institute this index is critically discussed also various serious shortcomings of empirical studies using this index are identified nevertheless there are strong indications that liberalization i e an increase in the ef index stimulates economic growth this paper also reviews studies on the determinants of ef political liberalization is often found to enhance economic liberalization whereas there is less evidence for causality running in the other direction

the fair trade movement parameters issues and future research although fair trade has been in existence for more than 40 years discussion in the business and business ethics literature of this unique trading and campaigning movement between southern producers and northern buyers and consumers has been limited this paper seeks to redress this deficit by providing a description of the characteristics of fair trade including definitional issues market size and segmentation and the key organizations it discusses fair trade from southern producer and northern trader and consumer perspectives and highlights the key issues that currently face the fair trade movement it then identifies an initial research agenda to be followed up in subsequent papers

minimum wage legislation and unemployment insurance as instruments for redistribution the use of minimum wages and unemployment insurance as instruments for redistributing income is analyzed the government is assumed to be able to implement an optimal income tax in an economy consisting of two types of individuals who differ in ability the effect of introducing a minimum wage which induces involuntary unemployment will be to improve social welfare under weak conditions circumstances under which combining unemployment insurance with the minimum wage will be welfare improving are also considered

social comparisons and optimal taxation in a small open economy in this paper we analyze how international capital mobility affects the optimal labor and capital income tax policy in a small open economy when consumers care about relative consumption the main

tax policy and present biased preferences paternalism under international capital mobility this paper deals with tax policy responses to quasi hyperbolic discounting earlier research on optimal paternalism typically abstracts from capital mobility if capital is mobile between countries it may no longer be possible for national governments to control domestic savings via capital taxation as in a closed economy in this paper we take a broad perspective on public policy responses to self control problems by showing how these responses vary i between closed and open economies ii between small open and large open economies and iii depending on whether or not both source based and residence based capital taxes can be used

organic agriculture and fair trade a happy marriage a case study of certified smallholder black pepper farmers in india summary this study examines whether the joint adoption of organic and fair trade systems adds additional benefits to smallholders in developing countries we use panel data collected from 300 smallholder rural black pepper growers in kerala india to assess household welfare impacts we apply a multinomial endogenous switching regression model along with a counterfactual analysis to estimate certification effects results show that both certification systems have a significant impact on income compared to conventional black pepper farming however membership in fair trade marketing systems does not increase income of organic farmers but has positive effects on asset accumulation of smallholder farmers

strategic capital tax competition a pecuniary externality and a corrective device abstract d e wildasin journal of urban economics25 193 212 1989 identifies a source of inefficiency in capital tax competition models with price taking jurisdictions and provides a pigovian correction this paper identifies a second source of inefficiency in a non price taking environment when a jurisdiction increases its capital tax it affects the price of capital and thus other jurisdictions returns from trade in capital the pigovian correction to internalize this pecuniary externality is derived since a focus of recent research is on non price taking environments the existence of the pecuniary externality is important in qualifying existing results in the literature

the political economy of growth democracy and human capital democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy we argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators in addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies we conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30 year panel of 128 countries we find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth rather we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in nonpoor countries t he relationship between democracy and economic growth has received considerable attention in recent years as yet however there is no consensus among analysts on the relationship between these two widely studied variables sound theoretical positions have been advanced suggesting that democracy is both an impediment and facilitator of growth careful quantitative tests of the relationship have produced contradictory results in our view existing studies fail to develop an adequate political theory of growth and as a result their empirical models are typically misspecified with competing arguments on both sides of the question many analysts merely add a variable for democracy to existing economic models and then look at the sign of the coefficient and its significance this is inadequate democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy we argue that there are important indirect effects of democracy on growth that are manifested through public health and education where economists typically use life expectancy and secondary school enrollment as proxies for human capital we expect that democracy will itself be an important determinant of the level of public services captured in these indicators thus in

assessing the impact of fair trade coffee towards an integrative framework this article presents an impact assessment framework that allows for the evaluation of positive and negative local level impacts that have resulted from responsible trade interventions such as fair trade and ethical trade the framework investigates impact relating to 1 livelihood impacts on primary stakeholders 2 socio economic impacts on communities 3 organizational impacts 4 environmental impacts 5 policies and institutional impacts and 6 future prospects it identifies relevant local level stakeholders and facilitates the analysis of conflicting interests the framework was developed in the context of and is applied in this article to the fair trade coffee industry in northern nicaragua it was designed however so that it can be applied across commodity sectors and responsible trade initiatives it is able to do this by accommodating for differences in the social environmental political and institutional contexts of different areas and by taking into account the distinct nature of an initiative s overall objectives different levels of intervention and the full range of stakeholders involved

nodal pricing for distribution networks efficient pricing for efficiency enhancing dg as distributed generation dg becomes more widely deployed distribution networks become more active and take on many of the same characteristics as transmission we propose the use of nodal pricing that is often used in the pricing of short term operations in transmission as an economically efficient mechanism nodal pricing would properly reward dg for reducing line losses through increased revenues at nodal prices and signal prospective dg where it ought to connect with the distribution network applying nodal pricing to a model distribution network we show significant price differences between buses reflecting high marginal losses moreover we show the contribution of a dg resource located at the end of the network to significant reductions in losses and line loading we also show the dg resource has significantly greater revenue under nodal pricing reflecting its contribution to reduced line losses and loading

political regimes and economic growth arguments that relate regimes to growth focus on property rights pressures for immediate consumption and the autonomy of dictators while everyone seems to agree that secure property rights foster growth it is controversial whether democracies or dictatorships better secure these rights the main mechanism by which democracy is thought to hinder growth is pressure for immediate consumption which reduces investment only states that are institutionally insulated from such pressures can resist them and democratic states are not the main argument against dictatorships is that authoritarian rulers have no interest in maximizing total output these views are summarized in turn

towards a theory of the direct indirect tax mix despite the fact that all developed economies levy broadly based indirect taxes alongside direct taxes little theory is devoted to explaining the direct indirect tax mix our purpose is to show that if different taxes have different evasion characteristics some optimal tax mix emerges naturally assuming that only income tax can be evaded and focusing on a two class economy we analyse the case for supplementing optimal non linear income taxation with commodity taxation and we develop conditions under which the latter should or should not be uniform

economic freedom culture and growth how do economic freedom and culture impact economic growth this paper argues that culture as measured by the world values surveys and economic institutions associated with economic freedom are both independently important for economic prosperity but the strength of their impact can be better understood only when both are included in the growth regression our results indicate that economic freedom is more important than culture for growth outcomes suggesting substitutability between the two we posit that culture is important for growth when economic freedom is absent diminishing in significance once economic freedom is established

effects of fair trade certification on social capital the case of rwandan coffee producers summary fair trade certification may have important social effects on small scale producers but empirical evidence is limited we conducted logistic regressions using data from a 2009 survey of rwandan coffee farmers to estimate the link between fair trade and social capital measured as farmer trust and participation while controlling for various other factors that could influence social capital particularly membership in a cooperative organization the results show a negative association between fair trade and farmer trust in cooperative leadership and a positive association with a perceived higher level of participation of women social capital is linked most significantly to farmers interaction with their neighbors

foreign aid and statehood in africa has foreign aid destroyed state institutions in africa african states depend on development assistance to conduct basic government operations yet few of these states are well governed or effective at providing public goods the two trends mounting foreign aid and static or diminishing state performance raise an obvious question is aid dependency contributing to misrule and state failure in africa many critics argue the two phenomena are related i find they are not my analysis fails to show a negative association between aid receipts and two measures of democracy and economic freedom instead the evidence is consistent with a small positive relationship between aid and these indicators of state performance since the international community seems bent on reducing foreign aid an important issue is how african states can maintain and improve their performance with less foreign assistance

optimal sin taxes abstract we investigate sin taxes on unhealthy items such as fatty foods that people may by their own reckoning consume too much of we employ a standard optimal taxation framework but replace the standard assumption that all consumers have 100 self control with an assumption that some consumers may have some degree of self control problems we show that imposing taxes on unhealthy items and returning the proceeds to consumers can generally improve total social surplus because such taxes counteract over consumption by consumers with self control problems while at the same time they naturally redistribute income to consumers with no self control problems who consume less such taxes can even create pareto improvements finally we demonstrate with some simple numerical examples that even if the population exhibits relatively few self control problems optimal taxes can still be large

the institutional framework and economic development the compound growth rates of per capita output and farrell type efficiency measures for 115 market economies over the period 1960 80 were compared with measures of political civil and economic liberty it was found that the institutional framework has significant and large effects on the efficiency and growth rate of economies politically open societies which subscribe to the rule of law to private property and to the market allocation of resources grow at three times the rate and are two and one half times as efficient as societies in which these freedoms are abridged

optimization of electricity retailer s contract portfolio subject to risk preferences when an electricity retailer faces volume risk in meeting load and spot price risk in purchasing from the wholesale market conventional risk management optimization methods can be quite inefficient for the management of an electricity contract portfolio in this context we develop a multistage stochastic optimization approach which accounts for the uncertainties of both electricity prices and loads and which permits the specification of conditional value at risk requirements to optimize hedging across intermediate stages in the planning horizons our experimental results based on real data from nordpool suggest that the modeling of price and load correlations is particularly important the sensitivity analysis is extended to characterize the behavior of retailers with different risk attitudes thus we observe that a risk neutral retailer is more susceptible to price related than load related uncertainties in terms of the expected cost of satisfying the load and that a risk averse retailer is especially sensitive to the drivers of the forward risk premium

asymmetric tax competition abstract the paper analyzes nash equilibrium when two jurisdictions set tax rates on a tax base which is mobile between them population differences imply tax differences the smaller jurisdiction levies a lower tax rate in equilibrium and its residents are better off than those in the larger jurisdiction the nash equilibrium is inefficient if the two jurisdictions merged the resulting allocation would be efficient however if differences in population are great enough residents of the small jurisdiction would be made worse off by such a merger

how robust is the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth using various indicators for economic freedom it is shown that increases in economic freedom are robustly related to economic growth this conclusion holds even if the impact of outlying observations is taken into account the level of economic freedom is not related to growth

pigou tiebout property taxation and the underprovision of local public goods abstract pigou s proposition that the use of distorting taxes rather than neutral head taxes reduces public service levels is examined in this paper a simple model with a national system of competing local governments is utilized to demonstrate that the use of a distorting property tax on mobile capital decreases the level of residential public services the case where public services are an intermediate producer good is also considered

choice and procrastination author s o donoghue ted rabin matthew abstract recent models of procrastination due to self control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self control problems we develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self control problems this menu model replicates earlier results and generates new ones a person might forego completing an attractive option because she plans to complete a more attractive but never to be completed option hence providing a non procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination and a person may procrastinate worse pursuing important goals than unimportant ones

a medium term decision model for discos forward contracting and tou pricing time varying prices by motivating customers to reduce their consumption in peak periods propel the electricity industry towards a higher efficiency compared to that of common flat prices focusing on time of use tou sale prices this paper establishes a stochastic model for the medium term decision making problem faced by a distribution company disco the developed model deals with the disco s decisions on the level of involvement in forward contracts and in the pool as well as the sale prices offered to customers the demand response to tou prices is captured using a price elasticity matrix pem the objective is to maximize the disco s profit while the exposure risk imposed by uncertainties is limited to a given level the model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming milp problem that can be effectively solved via commercial software packages a typical finnish 20 kv urban distribution network is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed model

political freedom economic freedom and income convergence do stages of economic development matter in the literature theory and empirical evidence on the nexus of political freedom economic freedom and economic growth are mixed in this paper we test the hypothesis that the effect of political freedom on promoting economic growth is realized and detectable at later stages of social and economic development using panel data for a sample of 104 countries between 1970 and 2003 we find strong support for our hypothesis while economic freedom has greater effects on income convergence in the oecd countries political freedom clearly promotes the convergence among those oecd countries

ethical objections to fairtrade the fairtrade movement is a group of businesses claiming to trade ethically the claims are evaluated under a range of criteria derived from the utilitarian ethic firstly if aid or charity money is diverted from the very poorest people to the quite poor or the rich there is an increase in death and destitution it is shown that little of the extra paid by consumers for fairtrade reaches farmers sometimes none it cannot be shown that it has a positive impact on fairtrade farmers in general but evidence suggesting it harms others is presented many of the weaknesses are due to an attempt to impose political views on farmers and others secondly the unfair trading criteria require that sellers do not lie about their product nor withhold information that might alter the decisions of a substantial proportion of buyers it is argued that the system only can exist because of the failure of the fairtrade industry to give the facts on what happens to the money and what it can be proved it achieves this unfair trading compromises the reputation of charities in general much of the trading may constitute the criminal offence of unfair trading in the eu

power portfolio optimization in deregulated electricity markets with risk management in a deregulated electric power system multiple markets of different time scales exist with various power supply instruments a load serving entity lse has multiple choices from these instruments to meet its load obligations in view of the large amount of power involved the complex market structure the risks in such volatile markets the stringent constraints to be satisfied and the long time horizon a power portfolio optimization problem is of critical importance for an lse to serve its load maximize its profit and manage its risks in this paper a midterm power portfolio optimization problem with risk management is presented key instruments are considered risk terms based on semi variances of spot market transactions are introduced and penalties on load obligation violations are added to the objective function to improve algorithm convergence and constraint satisfaction to overcome the inseparability of the resulting problem a surrogate optimization framework is developed enabling a decomposition and coordination approach numerical testing results show that our method effectively provides decisions for various instruments to maximize profit and manage risks and it is computationally efficient

purchase allocation and demand bidding in electric power markets the purchase allocation problem is one of the most important problems faced by an electric energy service provider under new market environments the optimal purchase allocation problem for dual electric power markets and demand bid generation are discussed in this paper the price volatility is explicitly considered in purchase allocation problems and the sequential nature is modeled by conditional stochastic characteristics an analytical solution for the optimal allocation is derived with given demand and statistical characteristics of the market prices the method for generating demand bids for purchaser based on market allocation and price forecasting is then developed the numerical simulations for market allocation and bid generation are demonstrated based on the actual data of the u s california power market

what accounts for the variation in retirement wealth among u s households even among households with similar socioeconomic characteristics saving and wealth vary considerably life cycle models attribute this variation to differences in time preference rates risk tolerance exposure to uncertainty relative tastes for work and leisure at advanced ages and income replacement rates these factors have testable implications concerning the relation between accumulated wealth and the shape of the consumption profile using the panel study of income dynamics and the consumer expenditure survey we find little support for these implications the data are instead consistent with rule of thumb mental accounting or hyperbolic discounting theories of wealth accumulation jel di d91 e21

public goods and optimal paternalism under present biased preferences this paper concerns the provision of a state variable public good in a two type model under presentbiased consumer preferences the preference for immediate grati cation facing the high ability type weakens the incentive to adjust public provision in response to the self selection constraint

determinants of non life insurance expenditure in developed and developing countries an empirical investigation the determinants of non life insurance expenditure in a panel data set covering 36 developed countries and 31 developing countries for the period 2000 2011 are analysed results of our instrumental variable analysis indicate that economic freedom income bank development urbanization culture and law systems are the key drivers of the non life insurance expenditure across countries however their impacts differ significantly between the groups of developed and developing countries suggesting that the heterogeneity among countries in terms of the level of development plays an important role the global financial crisis is also found to influence the direction of those effects especially in developed countries the article yields useful policy and economic implications for governments and multinational non life insurance companies with regard to the development of the non life insurance sector an important engine for economic growth and prosperity

tax competition and tax coordination in an optimum income tax model abstract the paper uses the self selection approach of stiglitz 1982 to study tax competition and tax coordination in a many country optimum income tax model in the model the government can impose a non linear tax schedule on wage income and a source based tax on mobile capital in an uncoordinated equilibrium it turns out that countries can use the capital tax instrument to weaken the self selection constraint the paper presents examples where positive and negative capital taxes are optimal from a single country perspective if the production function is weakly separable between labor and capital it can be shown that the optimal capital tax is zero the paper also shows that contrary to the standard tax competition model the uncoordinated equilibrium can be efficient if the wealth distribution the endowments with capital among individuals is egalitarian a coordination of capital taxes does not affect welfare for non egalitarian wealth distributions a coordinated increase in capital taxes can raise or lower welfare depending on the redistributive impact of a higher capital tax

national competitive advantage and the roles of economic and political freedom evidence from hong kong the equivocal interrelationships between economic performance and the institu tions of respectively economic and political freedom are examined using data from firms op erating in hong kong an economy where both an erstwhile paramount international business reputation for competitiveness and the institutional basis on which it was predicated have come into question in recent years it is hypothesized that i both economic and political freedom declines will be associated with a proxy for future economic performance competitiveness decline but that ii the correlation of economic freedom declines with competitiveness de cline will be mediated by political freedom declines hierarchical regression analyses tend to support these hypotheses although results vary by firm origin

are fair trade goods credence goods a new proposal with french illustrations in the literature fair trade ft goods are usually associated with other products differentiated by process attributes such as organic food genetically modified gm food or child labour free clothing all of these products are regarded as credence goods this classification refers to the simplified definition of credence goods which describes product attributes which consumers cannot evaluate even after having consumed the good focusing on the characteristics of ft goods this article proposes a reassessment of the link between ft goods and credence properties as defined by darby and karni we first demonstrate that 1 the usual classification masks important particularities of ft goods compared to other goods with process attributes and 2 the full definition of credence goods may even provide a better description of the quality of ft goods however and this is our second theoretical contribution the lack of consensus among experts concerning ft standards and their level of efficiency encourage us to consider ft goods as indeterminate goods as defined by lupton this result leads us to suggest a new typology of product attributes summarized in an innovative diagram it sheds light on how competition between the different ft approaches works and why the ft market is still confined to a niche if not threatened with collapse we mainly illustrate our theoretical analysis with observations relating to the french ft market and institutions

economic freedom and taxation is there a trade off in the locational competition between countries this paper investigates the relationshipbetween economic freedomand taxation we argue that an economicallyfree environment improvesthe attractiveness of a location which inturn enables governmentsto levy higher business taxes to test thishypothesis empirically weestimate the impact of economic freedom onthe national tax policy where the latter is measured by thecorporate tax revenue related tognp corporate tax ratio we utilize adata set of 46 developed and lessdeveloped countries between 1980 and 1997and find a clear confirmationof our hypothesis further a simulationanalysis reveals that the observedchange in economic freedom has equalizedthe international distributionof corporate tax ratios

information sharing and tax competition among governments abstract the residence based principle has been proposed as a second best measure to the full international coordination of capital tax policies this system requires that tax authorities have full information about the foreign investments of their residents however the degree of information transmission among governments can be considered as a strategic variable we show that under some features of the tax system there will not be any information sharing while there are institutional arrangements under which governments may transmit partial information for strategic purposes we also show that full information sharing is not necessarily a pareto optimum

resolving the global imbalance the dollar and the u s saving rate the massive deficit in the u s trade and current accounts is one of the most striking features of the current global economy and to some observers one of the most worrying although the current account deficit finally began to shrink in 2007 it remained at more than 5 percent of gdp more than 700 billion while some observers claim that the u s economy can continue to have trade deficits of this magnitude for years some would say for decades into the future i believe that such enormous deficits cannot continue and will decline significantly in the coming years this paper discusses the reasons for that decline and the changes that are needed in the u s saving rate and in the value of the dollar to bring it about reducing the u s current account deficit does not require action by the u s government or by the governments of america s trading partners market forces alone will cause the u s trade deficit to decline further in practice however changes in government policies at home and abroad may lead to faster reductions in the u s trade deficit more important the response of the u s and foreign governments and central banks will determine the way in which the global economy as a whole adjusts to the decline in the u s trade deficit reductions in the u s current account deficit will of course imply lower aggregate trade surpluses in the rest of the world taken by itself a reduction in any country s trade surplus will reduce aggregate demand and therefore employment in that country i will therefore look at what other countries china japan and european countries can do to avoid the adverse consequences of the inevitable decline of the u s trade deficit

a stochastic framework for short term operation of a distribution company this paper presents a stochastic framework for short term operation of a distribution company disco the proposed framework optimizes disco s operational decisions in two hierarchical stages the first stage called day ahead operation stage daos deals with the operational decisions on purchases from the day ahead market and commitment of distributed generation dg units the objective of this stage is to minimize the expected operating cost while the financial risk exposed by uncertain real time prices and loads is restricted to a given level the model associated with this stage is based on the mixed integer programming mip format the second stage named real time operation stage rtos deals with disco s activities in real time in rtos decisions are made on real time market transactions dispatch of online dgs and invocation of load curtailments lcs such that the expected operating cost is minimized this stage is formulated as a nonlinear programming nlp problem to investigate the effectiveness of the developed framework it is applied to a typical finnish 20 kv urban distribution network

a note on optimal paternalism and health capital subsidies this paper concerns the policy implications of a potential self control problem underlying the consumption of unhealthy food our results show that subsidies on wealth and healthcapital can be used

economic freedom and growth decomposing the effects most studies of the relation between economic freedom andgrowth of gdp have found a positive relation one problem inthis area is the choice of economic freedom measure a singlemeasure does not reflect the complex economic environment anda highly aggregated index makes it difficult to draw policyconclusions in this paper we investigate what specific typesof economic freedom measures that are important for growth the robustness of the results is carefully analysed since thepotential problem with multicollinearity is one of thenegative effects of decomposing an index the results showthat economic freedom does matter for growth this does notmean that increasing economic freedom defined in generalterms is good for economic growth since some of thecategories in the index are insignificant and some of thesignificant variables have negative effects

government size and growth a survey and interpretation of the evidence the literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings this conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied an alternative approach of limiting the focus to studies of the relationship in rich countries measuring government size as total taxes or total expenditure relative to gdp and relying on panel data estimations with variation over time reveals a more consistent picture the most recent studies find a significant negative correlation an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0 5 to 1 percent lower annual growth rate we discuss efforts to make sense of this correlation and note several pitfalls involved in giving it a causal interpretation against this background we discuss two explanations of why several countries with high taxes seem able to enjoy above average growth one hypothesis is that countries with higher social trust levels are able to develop larger government sectors without harming the economy another explanation is that countries with large governments compensate for high taxes and spending by implementing market friendly policies in other areas both explanations are supported by ongoing research

confronting the coffee crisis can fair trade organic and specialty coffees reduce small scale farmer vulnerability in northern nicaragua summary this paper links changing global coffee markets to opportunities and vulnerabilities for sustaining small scale farmer livelihoods in northern nicaragua changing governance structures corporate concentration oversupply interchangeable commodity grade beans and low farm gate prices characterize the crisis in conventional coffee markets in contrast certified fair trade and organic are two alternative forms of specialty coffee trade and production that may offer opportunities for small scale producers a research team surveyed 228 farmers to measure the impact of sales on organic and fair trade markets the results suggest that participation in organic and fair trade networks reduces farmers livelihood vulnerability 2004 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

optimum taxation with errors in administration abstract the paper compares the welfare levels which can be achieved by two distinct tax regimes lump sum taxation where one attempts to identify individuals and allocate transfers or subsidies on the basis of characteristics and income taxation where characteristics are not observed but personal incomes are measured and taxed where there are no errors in classifying individuals lump sum taxation is superior but where mistakes are made in the allocation of lump sum grants or subsidies income taxation may be more attractive the level of errors where the regimes are equally desirable in terms of social welfare is computed in simple models following that of feldstein 1973 where there is strong aversion to inequality then income taxation becomes preferable at quite small errors in analysing income taxation it is shown that in the feldstein model with endogenous wages the marginal tax rate in optimum income taxation on the more skilled is negative and that on the less skilled is positive in contrast to the standard results see seade 1977 with exogenous wages

self selection and pareto efficient taxation abstract this paper analyses the set of pareto efficient tax structures the formulation of the problem as one of self selection not only shows more clearly the similarity between this problem and a number of other problems such as the optimal pricing of a monopolist which have recently been the subject of extensive research but also allows the derivation of a number of new results we establish i under fairly weak conditions randomization of tax structures is desirable ii if different individuals are not perfect substitutes for one another in production then the general equilibrium effects until now largely ignored in the literature of changes in the tax structure may be dominant in determining the optimal tax structure in particular if the relative wage of high ability and low ability individuals depends on the relative supplies of labor the optimal tax structure entails a negative marginal tax rate on the high ability individuals and a positive marginal tax rate on the low ability individuals the marnitude of which depends on the elasticity of substitution iii if individuals differ in their preferences pareto efficient taxation may entail negative marginal tax rates for high incomes while iv if wage income is stochastic the marginal tax rate at the upper end may be 100 our analysis thus makes clear that the main qualitative properties of the optimal tax structure to which earlier studies called attention are not robust to these attempts to make the theory more realistic