a dynamic theory of collective goods programs a collective goods program such as an entitlement program distributes benefits and costs according to constituents characteristics this paper presents a dynamic theory of the legislative choice of collective goods programs based on a sequential model of proposal making and voting in a majority rule legislature where the status quo in a session is given by the program last enacted a stationary markov perfect equilibrium is characterized for a unidimensional collective goods program and yields a generalized median voter theorem comparative statics on preferences and legislative procedures and a characterization of the dynamics of such programs equilibrium programs can expand or contract over time but they ultimately converge to the median on the path to that point legislators may act strategically to address the durability problem that a future legislature can undo the actions of the present legislature by strategically positioning the status quo to limit the changes that future legislatures can make

past as prologue understanding energy use in post 2002 china abstract from 2002 to 2009 china s energy use nearly doubled making it the world s largest emitter of carbon dioxide more than a decade ahead of forecasts why did energy use in china rise so rapidly after 2002 using index decomposition analysis we find that the vast majority of growth in energy consumption in china over the 2000s was due to gdp growth with a small but important amount due to structural change as a result of china s emergence as a net metals exporter changing prices and data anomalies make energy intensity and structural change appear to be more important drivers of energy consumption than they actually were the infamous reversal in energy intensity in china from 2002 to 2004 may simply be an artifact of difficulties in accurately deflating value added about half of the growth in energy consumption in china from 2002 to 2007 was driven by heavy industry using structural decomposition analysis we find that growth in heavy industrial output was due primarily to growth in construction and equipment investment with a small amount due to an increase in net metal exports in tandem these two findings suggest that the primary driver of energy consumption in china after 2002 was an acceleration of the country s investment dominated model of gdp growth without rebalancing the economy toward consumption there are limits to what improvements in energy conversion efficiency and end use energy efficiency can achieve in moderating growth in china s energy use

two party competition with persistent policies abstract when campaigning for reelection incumbent parties promises to voters are constrained by their records in office while opposition parties can use their time away from power to develop new platforms in this paper i introduce incumbent policy persistence in a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy motivated parties and characterise the long run outcomes of its markov perfect equilibria incumbents reduced policy flexibility leads to alternation in power and policy dynamics that converge to alternations at policies equally preferred by the median voter convergence of policies towards the median is a robust equilibrium outcome while convergence to the median is not while alternations far from the median are never limits of equilibrium dynamics alternations close to the median can be reached only if policy dynamics start exactly there i show that these results are robust to voters being forward looking and to limited policy commitment by parties

co2 emissions energy consumption and economic growth in china a panel data analysis this paper examines the causal relationships between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption and real economic output using panel cointegration and panel vector error correction modeling techniques based on the panel data for 28 provinces in china over the period 1995 2007 our empirical results show that co2 emissions energy consumption and economic growth have appeared to be cointegrated moreover there exists bidirectional causality between co2 emissions and energy consumption and also between energy consumption and economic growth it has also been found that energy consumption and economic growth are the long run causes for co2 emissions and co2 emissions and economic growth are the long run causes for energy consumption the results indicate that china s co2 emissions will not decrease in a long period of time and reducing co2 emissions may handicap china s economic growth to some degree some policy implications of the empirical results have finally been proposed

does decentralization contribute to efficiency evidence from oecd countries abstractthis article provides evidence on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and technical efficiency we begin the first stage of this study with a data envelopment analysis to obtain technical efficiency estimates for a sample of 23 oecd countries over the period 1992 2009 in a second stage we explore the effects of fiscal decentralization and other control variables on technical efficiency the results including all the control variables reveal a statistically significant negative relationship between fiscal decentralization of public expenditure and technical efficiency

environment and development is there a kuznets curve for co2 emissions this article re examines the relationship between growth in per capita income and environmental degradation using econometric techniques appropriate for smooth transition regressions with panel data this is a more intuitive and flexible methodology than the polynomial models widely used in the literature and it can reconcile some of the mixed results found previously the methodology is applied to carbon dioxide emissions from nonoecd countries over the period 1971 to 1997 although there is no evidence of environmental kuznets curve we find two regimes namely a low income regime where emissions accelerate with economic growth and a middle to high income regime associated with a deceleration in environmental degradation

dynamic bargaining and stability with veto players this note examines the structure of stationary bargaining equilibria in the finite framework of anesi 2010 the main result establishes a tight connection between the set of equilibrium absorbing points and the von neumann morgestern solutions assuming that players are patient that the voting rule is oligarchical and that there is at least one veto player with positive recognition probability a set of alternatives corresponds to the absorbing points of an equilibrium if and only if it is a von neumann morgenstern solution we also apply our analysis of ergodic properties of equilibria to the persistent agenda setter environment of diermeier and fong 2012 we show that all equilibria are essentially pure and we extend their characterization of absorbing sets to allow an arbitrary voting rule and by removing the restriction to pure strategy equilibira

unequal economic development in china spatial disparities and regional policy reconsideration 1985 1995 zhao x b and tong s p 2000 unequal economic development in china spatial disparities and regional policy reconsideration 1985 1995 reg studies 34 549 561 almost two decades into the implementation of deng xiaoping s get rich first policy and coastal development strategy income inequality and an imbalance in regional development have emerged as two of the most disturbing factors affecting contemporary china this paper examines regional disparities in contemporary china and their changing trends and magnitude based on a time series analysis of data sets for income and production across china for the last 10 years this paper focuses on the examination of gini coefficients and coefficients of variation for two key economic indicators gdp per capita and household income per capita at four levels of geographical aggregation provincial regional urban and rural given that chinese policy makers appear to have been strongly influenced by the two western theories of regional development w

bargaining in standing committees with an endogenous default committee voting has mostly been investigated from the perspective of the standard baron ferejohn model of bargaining over the division of a pie in which bargaining ends as soon as the committee reaches an agreement in standing committees however existing agreements can be amended this article studies an extension of the baron ferejohn framework to a model with an evolving default that reflects this important feature of policymaking in standing committees in each of an infinite number of periods the ongoing default can be amended to a new policy which is in turn the default for the next period the model provides a number of quite different predictions i from a positive perspective the key distinction turns on whether the quota is less than unanimity in that case patient enough players waste substantial shares of the pie each period and the size principle fails in some pure strategy markov perfect equilibria in contrast the unique markov perfect equilibrium payoffs in a unanimity committee coincide with those in the corresponding baron ferejohn framework ii if players have heterogeneous discount factors then a large class of subgame perfect equilibria including all markov perfect equilibria are inefficient

dynamic legislative policy making abstract we prove existence of stationary markov perfect equilibria in an infinite horizon model of legislative policy making in which the policy outcome in one period determines the status quo for the next we allow for a multidimensional policy space and arbitrary smooth stage utilities and we assume preferences and the status quo are subject to arbitrarily small shocks we prove that equilibrium continuation values are differentiable and that proposal strategies are continuous almost everywhere we establish upper hemicontinuity of the equilibrium correspondence and we provide weak conditions under which each equilibrium of our model determines an aperiodic transition probability over policies we establish a convergence theorem giving conditions under which the invariant distributions generated by stationary equilibria must be close to the core in a canonical spatial model finally we extend the analysis to sequential move stochastic games and to a version of the model in which the proposer and voting rule are determined by play of a finite perfect information game

designing an emissions trading scheme for china an up to date climate policy assessment abstract we assess recent chinese climate policy proposals in a multi region multi sector computable general equilibrium model with a chinese carbon emissions trading scheme ets when the emissions intensity per gdp in 2020 is required to be 45 lower than in 2005 the model simulations indicate that the climate policy induced welfare loss in 2020 measured as the level of gdp and welfare in 2020 under climate policy relative to their level under business as usual bau in the same year is about 1 the chinese welfare loss in 2020 slightly increases in the chinese rate of economic growth in 2020 when keeping the emissions target fixed at the 2020 level after 2020 in absolute terms the welfare loss will reach about 2 in 2030 if china s annual economic growth rate is 0 5 percentage points higher lower the climate policy induced welfare loss in 2030 will rise decline by about 0 5 percentage points full auctioning of carbon allowances results in very similar macroeconomic effects as free allocation but full auctioning leads to higher reductions in output than free allocation for ets sectors linking the chinese to the european ets and restricting the transfer volume to one third of the eu s reduction effort creates at best a small benefit for china yet with smaller sectoral output reductions than auctioning these results highlight the importance of designing the chinese ets wisely

fiscal federalism and economic growth this paper uses an endogenous growth model with overlapping generations to explore the connection between fiscal federalism and economic growth the analysis shows that federalism which allows public good levels to be tailored to suit the differing demands of young and old consumers who live in different jurisdictions increases the incentive to save this stronger incentive in turn leads to an increase in investment in human capital and a byproduct of this higher investment is faster economic growth

a structure decomposition analysis of china s production source co2 emission 1992 2002 this paper provides an empirical analysis of the relative impacts of various factors on co2 emissions from production of goods and services in china during two consecutive periods of 1992 1997 and 1997 2002 results show that on the positive side level of final demand for goods and services was the main reason for the increase of production source co2 emission while structure of net export has similar positive effect during the first period of 1992 1997 on the negative side technology factors remains as the main factors reducing emissions the level of net export played some role in the first period but the effects were seen in the second period from energy intensity fuel mix and input mix the results suggest that economic structure be focused as an important factor for co2 emission reduction with construction and transport as two key industries to lower carbon emission

markovian equilibria in dynamic spatial legislative bargaining existence with three players abstract the paper proves by construction the existence of markovian equilibria in a dynamic spatial legislative bargaining model three players bargain over one dimensional policies in an infinite horizon in each period a sequential protocol of proposal making and voting with random proposer recognitions and a simple majority produces a policy that becomes the next period s status quo an equilibrium exists for any profile of proposer recognition probabilities any profile of players ideal policies and any discount factor in equilibrium policies converge to the median s ideal policy players moderate and propose policies close to the median s ideal in an attempt to constraint future proposers but the tendency to moderate is a strategic substitute as the opponent of a moderating player does not moderate

how ambitious are china and india s emissions intensity targets abstract several developing economies have announced carbon emissions targets for 2020 as part of the negotiating process for a post kyoto climate policy regime china and india s commitments are framed as reductions in the emissions intensity of the economy by 40 45 and 20 25 respectively between 2005 and 2020 how feasible are the proposed reductions in emissions intensity for china and india and how do they compare with the targeted reductions in the us and the eu in this paper we use a stochastic frontier model of energy intensity to decompose energy intensity into the effects of input and output mix climate and a residual technology variable we use the model to produce emissions projections for china and india under a number of scenarios regarding the pace of technological change and changes in the share of non fossil energy we find that china is likely to need to adopt ambitious carbon mitigation policies in order to achieve its stated target and that its targeted reductions in emissions intensity are on par with those implicit in the us and eu targets india s target is less ambitious and might be met with only limited or even no dedicated mitigation policies

does fiscal federalism promote regional inequality an empirical analysis of the oecd 1980 2005 sorens j does fiscal federalism promote regional inequality an empirical analysis of the oecd 1980 2005 regional studies this paper explores the relationship between fiscal federalism understood as institutionalized regional economic self rule and convergence in regional per capita incomes the principal economic argument against fiscal federalism is that unless paired with generous equalization grants it will enhance regional inequalities by reducing inter regional redistribution does the evidence support this claim multilevel spatial regressions on primary sub national jurisdictions in twenty five organisation for economic co operation and development oecd countries show that lower income regions tend to catch up with higher income regions only when they enjoy substantial economic powers indeed there is more convergence across member states of the european union than across regions within almost any of the european union member states fiscal federalism may pose less serious tradeoffs tha

does tax competition really promote growth abstract this paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input absent stochastic shocks decentralized tax setting two or more jurisdictions maximizes the rate of growth as the constant returns to scale present with endogenous growth implies extreme tax competition stochastic shocks imply that households face a portfolio choice problem which dampens down tax competition and may raise taxes above the centralized level growth can be lower with decentralization our results also predict a negative relationship between output volatility and growth with decentralization

decentralization and the composition of public expenditure in spain gonzalez alegre j decentralization and the composition of public expenditure in spain regional studies this paper examines the effects of fiscal decentralization on the economic distribution of public expenditures using panel data from the seventeen spanish regions 1984 2003 it is shown that fiscal decentralization is a crucial determinant of the share of the public budget devoted to capital the estimation run is based on a model in which the utility of the representative agent from the current public expenditure depends on the distance to the level of the administration that provides it that could be the cause why decentralized economies experience a higher share of current expenditure in the budget of the public administrations gonzalez alegre j la decentralisation et la structure des depenses publiques en espagne regional studies cet article cherche a examiner l impact de la fiscalite decentralisee sur la distribution economique des depenses publiques a partir des donnees provenant d une

fiscal decentralization and economic growth abstract fiscal decentralization may indeed have a direct impact on economic growth but the theoretical underpinnings for this relationship remain largely undeveloped a fair summary of the empirical search for a direct relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth is that it remains an open question much less attention has been devoted in the literature to the indirect channels through which fiscal decentralization may affect economic growth we argue that much work remains to be done before policy advisors and decision makers can formulate and implement decentralization programs on the basis of improving the rate of economic growth

does income polarization affect economic growth the case of the european regions ezcurra r does income polarization affect economic growth the case of the european regions regional studies this paper examines the relationship between income polarization and economic growth in the regions of the european union over the period 1993 2003 the results indicate that the level of income polarization is negatively associated with regional growth this finding is in fact robust to various alternative specifications including a number of additional explanatory variables such as initial per capita gross domestic product industry mix human capital stock population density or market potential furthermore it should be noted that the observed negative correlation between polarization and economic performance does not depend on the number of groups used to analyse the degree of income stratification within the sample regions ezcurra r la polarisation des revenus affecte t elle la croissance economique le cas des regions europeennes regional studies cet article etudie les relations en

the impact of financial development on carbon emissions an empirical analysis in china given the complexity between china s financial development and carbon emissions this paper uses some econometric techniques including cointegration theory granger causality test variance decomposition etc to explore the influence of financial development on carbon emissions results indicate that first china s financial development acts as an important driver for carbon emissions increase which should be taken into account when carbon emissions demand is projected second the influence of financial intermediation scale on carbon emissions outweighs that of other financial development indicators but its efficiency s influence appears by far weaker although it may cause the change of carbon emissions statistically third china s stock market scale has relatively larger influence on carbon emissions but the influence of its efficiency is very limited this to some extent reflects the relatively lower liquidity in china s stock markets finally among financial development indicators china s fdi exerts the least influence on the change of carbon emissions due to its relatively smaller volume compared with gdp but it is mainly utilized in carbon intensive sectors now therefore with the increase of china s fdi in the future many efforts should be made to adapt its utilizing directions and play its positive role in promoting low carbon development

fiscal decentralization and economic growth reconsidered recent studies examining the relation between fiscal decentralization and economic growth have failed to take account of the extent of the independent taxing powers available to sub national governments and thus have substantially overstated the degree of effective decentralization results from a cross section study of 19 oecd member countries suggest that when the measure of fiscal decentralization is limited to the revenues over which sub national governments have full autonomy its impact on economic growth is not statistically significant

regional economic disparities and decentralisation the study of the influence of decentralisation on economic growth has received some attention in recent years but very few studies deal with its impact on regional inequalities this paper analyses the impact of both fiscal and political decentralisation on regional inequalities using alternative measures for a sample of 17 oecd countries in order to check for other possible influences the study also includes measures of public sector size and the type of party in government the final section studies the relevance of fiscal decentralisation in the regional convergence process observed by several authors during the past two decades the research reveals a strong negative correlation between decentralisation especially fiscal decentralisation and regional inequalities and also a positive influence of decentralisation on regional convergence

a three player dynamic majoritarian bargaining game this file contains two sets of calculations first we report the calculations of demands and continuation values of proposition 1 second the mixing probabilities of proposition 1 are shown to be well defined

federal competition and economic growth abstract this paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the united states to estimate the causal impact of inter jurisdictional competition on income growth we find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17 increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969 2006 and a 10 increase in 2006 income per employee decomposing income effects using 2000 census worker level data we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers to work more hours we also present evidence that inter jurisdictional competition leads local governments to raise more in taxes spend more and issue more debt per capita but does not help them obtain more inter governmental transfers however the additional cost from this increase in expenditures to a median wage employee is much smaller than the increase in that employee s wages due to greater inter jurisdictional competition

aid growth and devolution considering aid modality and different types of decentralization in this paper we provide further evidence on the relationship between decentralization and foreign aid effectiveness our previous work has shown that decentralization decreases aid effectiveness i e the impact of aid on economic growth is negative in decentralized countries however our previous work has not taken different types of aid and different types of decentralization into account which is at the heart of our current analysis we consider different measures of decentralization in particular measures of fiscal decentralization derived from government finance statistics and measures of political decentralization that are constructed based on countries constitutional rules in addition we take different types of aid into account grants loans technical assistance total net oda and we distinguish between multi lateral and bi lateral aid in order to consider differences in the donor structure our empirical analysis is based on panel data of up to 53 developing countries in our growth regressions we combine all types of decentralization with the different types of aid we find important differences between different types of decentralization i fiscal decentralization negatively affects aid effectiveness in line with our previous work ii employment decentralization may increase aid effectiveness and iii political decentralization does not hamper aid effectiveness or may even have positive effects

decomposing the decoupling of co2 emissions and economic growth in brazil abstract this paper examines the occurrence of a decoupling between the growth rates in economic activity and co 2 emissions from energy consumption in brazil from 2004 to 2009 this decoupling was highlighted when economic activity and co 2 emissions moved in opposite directions in 2009 more generally we observe several periods of relative decoupling in brazil but not to the extent witnessed in 2009 to identify the determinants of emissions change we develop a decomposition model based on a log mean divisia index lmdi framework the results indicate that the carbon intensity and energy mix are the main determinant of emissions reduction in brazil between 2004 and 2009 modifications in the economy structure are also associated to emission mitigation in the period such evidence demonstrates similarities with events of decoupling registered for the interval 1980 1994 in brazil finds from brazil differ from observations in other countries in which improvement in energy intensity has been the most common determinant of emissions reduction

carbon dioxide mitigation target of china in 2020 and key economic sectors china proposed a co2 mitigation target in 2020 to deal with anthropogenic global climate change chinese policy makers mainly focus on three factors comprising consumption structure changes energy technology development and new energy increments in addition sectoral co2 reduction is increasingly concerned in the world thus it is significant to investigate integrated impacts of three factors to china s co2 mitigation target as well as to identify key economic sectors for achieving this target in this study energy demand and co2 emission in 2020 are predicted five scenarios are generated to illustrate the contributions of three factors in addition twelve key economic sectors for reducing energy demand and co2 emission are identified from both production and final demand perspectives under integrated impacts of three factors china s co2 intensity per unit gross domestic product in 2020 will decrease by about 43 9 in 2020 than 2005 level in the short term china s co2 mitigation will be highly dependent on energy technology development in the long term it will mainly rely on reshaped consumption structure changes and new energy development in addition china s future policies should focus on 12 identified key economic sectors

co2 emissions and economic activity short and long run economic determinants of scale energy intensity and carbon intensity we analyze the short term and the long term determinants of energy intensity carbon intensity and scale effects for eight developed economies and two emerging economies from 1973 to 2007 our results show that there is a difference between the short term and the long term results and that climate policy are more likely to affect emission over the long term than over the short term climate policies should therefore be aimed at a time horizon of at least 8 years and year on year changes in emissions contains little information about the trend path of emissions in the long run capital accumulation is the main driver of emissions productivity growth reduces the energy intensity while the real oil price reduces both the energy intensity and the carbon intensity the real oil price effect suggests that a global carbon tax is an important policy tool to reduce emissions but our results also suggest that a carbon tax is likely to be insufficient decouple emission from economic growth such a decoupling is likely to require a structural transformation of the economy the key policy challenge is thus to build new economic structures where investments in green technologies are more profitable

is income inequality harmful for regional growth evidence from the european union this article examines the relationship between income inequality and economic growth in the regions of several european union countries over the period 1993 2002 using the information provided by the european community household panel taking into consideration the relevance of spatial effects in this context different versions of a spatial econometric model are estimated the results indicate that the degree of income dispersion is negatively associated with regional growth this finding is in fact robust to various alternative specifications including a number of additional explanatory variables such as initial per capita gdp the sectoral composition of economic activity human capital stock population density and market potential furthermore the observed negative correlation between income inequality and economic performance does not depend on the specific measure used to quantify the degree of income dispersion

fiscal decentralisation and idc economic growth an empirical investigation the impact of fiscal decentralisation on ldc economic growth and development is widely debated in the development literature notwithstanding this there has been little attempt to test systematically this relationship accordingly in this note we present an empirical examination of the relationship between the level of fiscal decentralisation and economic growth rates across a sample of twenty three ldcsfrom 1974 to 1991 we fail to find however any strong systematic relationship between the two among our sample of ldcs

environment kuznets curve for co2 emissions a cointegration analysis for china abstract this study examines the long run relationship between carbon emissions and energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of china by employing time series data of 1975 2005 in particular the study aims at testing whether environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship between co 2 emissions and per capita real gdp holds in the long run or not auto regressive distributed lag ardl methodology is employed for empirical analysis a quadratic relationship between income and co 2 emission has been found for the sample period supporting ekc relationship the results of granger causality tests indicate one way causality runs through economic growth to co 2 emissions the results of this study also indicate that the carbon emissions are mainly determined by income and energy consumption in the long run trade has a positive but statistically insignificant impact on co 2 emissions

china s strategy for carbon intensity mitigation pledge for 2020 evidence from a threshold cointegration model combined with monte carlo simulation methods abstract this paper specifies a nonlinear threshold cointegration to analyze the nonlinear relationship between carbon intensity and economic growth in china the tests and estimated results clearly confirm that fast paced economic growth that is the growth rate of gross domestic product gdp is greater than 9 053 impede the reduction of carbon intensity because it weakens the negative effects of tertiary industry development and energy efficiency on carbon intensity while it also increases the positive effect of unclean energy mix on carbon intensity in order to find a moderate range of economic growth rate that is both beneficial for industrial structuring and energy mix transformation and at the same time facilitate reduction in carbon intensity monte carlo simulations are employed the results show when the growth rate of gdp is between 7 and 8 4 it can promote structural bonus of industrial structure and energy consumption structure on carbon intensity and carbon intensity in 2020 would decline by about 40 60 compared to 2005 level these conclusions mean it is necessary for china to carefully set its economic growth target through transformation and optimization of its economic structure and energy mix in order to continuously reduce carbon intensity

decoupling factors on the energy output linkage the spanish case the recent increase of energy intensity in spain and the ratification of the kyoto protocol call for the implementation of energy policies in spain in this paper we investigate the relationship between gross domestic product gdp and energy consumption ec by taking into account several decoupling factors that can affect this linkage specifically we have considered the temporal aggregation of data and its seasonal adjustments the multivariate methodology the substitution between ec and other inputs and the technological changes empirical tests reveal a long run relationship between ec and gdp that can only be established in a complete way with a multivariate cointegration analysis furthermore a short run unidirectional causality from ec to economic growth is found therefore primary ec plays an important role as a limiting factor for economic growth in spain in the short run

the impact of fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditure panel data evidence from italy grisorio m j and prota f the impact of fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditure panel data evidence from italy regional studies this paper is an original contribution to the understanding of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and public expenditure composition it studies the effects of the ongoing decentralization process in italy on the share of different categories of public spending in total expenditure of the italian regional administrations over the period 1996 2008 the data used allow one to go beyond the usual distinction between current and capital expenditures and to present a functional classification of public expenditures through a panel data analysis the paper shows that the level of decentralization influences the composition of expenditure

agglomeration effects on regional economic disparities a comparison between the uk and japan in this study the reason and cause of regional economic disparities in terms of per capita value added are investigated by comparing the uk and japanese regions special attention is paid to agglomeration effects on the differences of regional productivities the gini coefficients of per capita values added exhibit relatively higher levels for the uk regions than for japanese regions over the period 1995 2003 the cause of this difference is found to be in labour productivities rather than employment rates or labour per population furthermore a decomposition of labour productivity into main industries clarifies agglomeration effects on manufacturing and service related industry between both countries based on these findings the production functions are estimated by main industries and differences in agglomeration effects on industries between the two countries are examined taking a dynamic view of the changing disparities across regions an increase in regional disparities is associated with the cum

fiscal federalism decentralization and economic growth a meta analysis the theoretical literature on fiscal federalism has identified several channels through which government decentralization could affect economic growth much of the literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services but decentralization may also increase growth by raising the ability of the political system to innovate and carry out reforms in contrast some authors argue that decentralization increases corruption and government inefficiency and thus may diminish growth given this theoretical ambiguity several studies have attempted to identify the effect of decentralization on economic growth empirically over the last two decades we review and conduct a meta analysis of this empirical literature based on our analysis we point out open questions and discuss possible ways to answer them jel h77 043 c52 i introduction building on various theoretical contributions an empirical literature analyzing the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth has emerged since the 1990s the relevant studies vary as to whether they use cross sectional time series or panel data as to whether they rely on cross country or single country samples and they vary in estimation methods decentralization measures and sample composition given the size and heterogeneity of the empirical literature it is useful to review the individual studies and summarize their main findings conducting a comprehensive search we identify 31 published and unpublished studies on the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth each of these studies estimates several models resulting in over 400 individual estimates while we first review these studies in a traditional manner our main aim is to analyze these estimates quantitatively specifically the main contribution of this article is to offer a meta analysis of the empirical findings on fiscal decentralization and economic growth a meta analysis is a useful methodology in our context as it is difficult to obtain clear cut conclusions with only a traditional survey of empirical literature the individual studies vary substantially in their characteristics and correspondingly in the findings they report by conducting a meta analysis however we can identify how the idiosyncratic characteristics of a particular study relate to its findings the meta analysis approach thus addresses model uncertainty with regard to each individual estimate in addition it can also serve as a partial response to the methodological critique of empirical research on fiscal decentralization by rodden 2004 as it helps to clarify the quantitative effects of different decentralization measures and estimation techniques finally as meta analytical techniques are rarely used in economics we also aim at contributing to the further establishment of this methodology stanley 2001 2008 the next section briefly discusses the various theoretical arguments as to why fiscal decentralization may affect economic growth we then provide a short traditional survey of the empirical studies in section iii we review this literature more systematically and quantitatively in section iv in section v we report the results of meta regressions and discuss how the idiosyncratic characteristics of a given study are related to its specific findings finally section vi provides a discussion of the results and some conclusions ii how could fiscal federalism affect economic growth theoretical approaches within the framework of the solow swan model solow 1956 swan 1956 fiscal federalism may be associated with a different level of efficiency in governance than unitary systems leading to a different value of solow s a the level of technology a regime change toward federalism would then be associated with temporarily different growth rates and eventually different levels of income but not with persistent growth differences

the impact of fiscal decentralization on economics performance in high income oecd nations an institutional approach this paper examines the impact of public sector decentralization on per capita income controlling for differences in institutional arrangements among countries panel data regressions on a sample of observations from 20 high income oecd nations spanning the years 1972 to 2005 indicate that decentralization is positively related to income the empirical analysis shows that institutions consistent with economic freedom enhance the positive income effects of decentralization thus the impact of public sector decentralization is dependent upon a nation s institutional environment

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

energy consumption carbon emissions and economic growth in china abstract this paper investigates the existence and direction of granger causality between economic growth energy consumption and carbon emissions in china applying a multivariate model of economic growth energy use carbon emissions capital and urban population empirical results for china over the period 1960 2007 suggest a unidirectional granger causality running from gdp to energy consumption and a unidirectional granger causality running from energy consumption to carbon emissions in the long run evidence shows that neither carbon emissions nor energy consumption leads economic growth therefore the government of china can purse conservative energy policy and carbon emissions reduction policy in the long run without impeding economic growth

wind power generation an impact analysis of incentive strategies for cleaner energy provision in brazil brazil has adopted various strategies to encourage alternative renewable energy sources in pursuit of cleaner and sustainable energy production to this end strategies should support the reduction of the financial risk for potential investors in the renewable energy market therefore this study aims to analyze the impact of incentive strategies on the financial risk of wind power generation projects in brazil in different marketing environments from a quantitative approach using monte carlo simulation in three scenarios we evaluate the impact of funding from the national development bank and participation in the clean development mechanism in the financial returns of the investor in a regulated contracting environment and free contracting environment measured by the net present value we conduct a statistical analysis to find out if there were statistically significant differences in investor risk in each scenario the main results of the study are as follows the wind speed the selling price of energy and disbursement for the investment have the most significant impact on the financial return the project viability probability is greater than 85 in all scenarios regardless of the marketing environment the regulated market is less risky for the producer than the free market since there is a statistically significant difference in net present value variances for all scenarios in the regulated contracting environment funding is critical to reducing risk and carbon credit trading is not a suitable policy for providing financial security to renewable energy producers thus we conclude that in brazil the contracting of projects from auctions in the regulated contracting environment with the support of the national development bank has been important for neutralizing the producer s financial risks

fiscal decentralization and economic growth a cross country study abstract we use a panel data set of 46 countries over the 1970 1989 period to investigate the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth we find a negative relationship between fiscal decentralization and growth in developing countries but none in developed countries several explanations are offered for our findings

uniqueness of stationary equilibria in a one dimensional model of bargaining abstract we prove uniqueness of stationary equilibria in a one dimensional model of bargaining with quadratic utilities for an arbitrary common discount factor for general concave utilities we prove existence and uniqueness of a minimal stationary equilibrium and of a maximal stationary equilibrium we provide an example of multiple stationary equilibria with concave nonquadratic utilities

aid growth and devolution summary this paper examines whether the degree of fiscal decentralization in aid receiving countries matters in explaining aid effectiveness the decentralization theorem predicts that the devolution of powers should increase aid effectiveness since local decision makers are better informed about local needs thereby decentralization may also have reverse effects e g through coordination problems excessive regulation administrative costs and local capture we use panel data for up to 60 countries and find that aid contributes to economic growth in centralized developing economies whereas it is less effective or even harmful in decentralized countries the cases of indonesia the philippines and uganda support our findings our results imply that donor countries should carefully consider how the two development instruments foreign aid and decentralization interact

fiscal decentralization and economic growth in the oecd what impact if any does fiscal decentralization fd have on economic growth further investigations of the inter relationships between fd and economic growth are timely given that government decentralization remains at the forefront of many organization for economic cooperation and development oecd policy agendas this study incorporates a range of measures of fd to better account for the direct impact of different levels of subnational fiscal autonomy on economic growth the analysis also considers the impact of previously omitted public sector decentralization variables that provide further indication of the extent to which subnational governments sng are closer to the people and potentially better able to account for local preferences in fiscal decision making whilst little evidence of a direct relationship between fd and output growth is found some evidence is found to suggest that federal systems tend to have lower growth rates than do unitary states independent of their degree of decentr

comparing climate policies to reduce carbon emissions in china new huadu business school research fund national social science foundation of china 12zd059 shandong social science planning fund program 12djjj12 independent innovation foundation of shandong university iifsdu 2012gn038 ministry of education research of social sciences china postdoctoral science foundation 2013m530309

searching for leviathan an empirical study in several papers and a recent book geoffrey brennan and james buchanan 1977 1978 1980 have put forth a striking and controversial view of the public sector drawing by analogy on the conventional theory of monopoly in the private sector they envision a monolithic government that systematically seeks to exploit its citizenry through the maximization of the tax revenues that it extracts from the economy from this perspective they develop a fiscal constitution whose central purpose is to constrain leviathan by limiting in various ways its access to tax and other fiscal instruments while the leviathan hypothesis has been the source of lively debate and a wide range of policy proposals it has not been the subject of much systematic empirical work or testing this is a matter of some importance since the policy implications of the leviathan view are disturbing to put it mildly in particular brennan and buchanan virtually stand on their heads many of the basic theorems in public finance for an efficient and equitable tax system if in fact the leviathan view is an inaccurate depiction of the functioning of the public sector the introduction of their policy proposals is likely to make a sorry mess of the fiscal system the leviathan model does however have some straightforward implications for observable fiscal behavior it is the purpose of this paper to examine one of these testable implications brennan and buchanan stress that fiscal decentralization is itself a powerful constraint on leviathan competition among governments in the context of the interjurisdictional mobility of persons in pursuit of fiscal gains can offer partial or possibly complete substitutes for explicit fiscal constraints on the taxing power 1980 p 184 such competition among governments in a federal system that places heavy reliance on local fiscal decisions will greatly limit the capacity of leviathan to channel resources into the public sector in short as indicated by the epigraph to this paper the leviathan model implies that other things equal the size of the public sector should vary inversely with the extent of fiscal decentralization 2

economic reform and interprovincial inequalities in china abstract this note is an attempt to explore two issues 1 the trend of interprovincial inequality in the post 1978 reform era in china and 2 the factors behind the dynamics of interprovincial inequality using recently released provincial gross domestic product gdp data we have shown that interprovincial inequality decreased in the fast half of the 1980s but started to increase in the second half of the 1980s to understand the impact of sectoral reforms on interprovincial inequality the overall inequality in provincial per capita gdp is decomposed into the contributions by the primary secondary and tertiary sectors it seems that the trend of interprovincial inequality has been largely induced by the reforms of the industrial sector which make up a large share of the secondary sector in addition national income data from the socialist national accounting system are used to identify the impact of interprovincial resource flows on interprovincial inequalities the findings seem to suggest a relative decline in the role of redistributive budgetary transfers