natural resources and sub national economic performance does sub national democracy matter abstract the differentiation in the impact of resources on economic growth is often explained by the specifics of institutional factors the aim of this paper is to investigate how sub national political differences influence the effect of natural resources on economic growth using a dataset of russian regions this paper demonstrates that sub national democratization influences the growth effects of resources and considers possible mechanisms for this influence the paper finds that in russia natural resources are only capable of promoting growth in the regions with non democratic political systems that at the same time have an efficient and non corrupt bureaucracy

partial fiscal decentralization and demand responsiveness of the local public sector theory and evidence from norway this paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism that spending discretion when granted to localities allows public good levels to adjust to suit local demands the test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal decentralization under which earmarking of central transfers for particular uses is eliminated allowing funds to be spent according to local tastes the greater role of local demand determinants following partial decentralization is confirmed by the paper s empirical results which show the effects of the 1986 norwegian reform

on implicit forms of multiproduct multifactor production functions a quest for generality in economic analysis appears to underlie the long tradition of the use of implicit functions however insufficient attention is given to weaknesses and limitations of implicit functions as they are traditionally used e g cohen and cyert hadar henderson and quandt malinvaud naylor naylor and vernon and samuelson among others careless use of implicit functions can result in faulty analysis in particular clarification of these limitations is needed especially as they pertain to the study of multiproduct multifactor mp mf production processes this paper is a rigorous examination of certain issues regarding implicit functions and mp mf production processes because any relation that explicitly determines one argument as a function of the remaining arguments can be written in implicit function form our results also apply to explicit function representations of mp mf production the functions examined here are continuously differentiable and can be used as production feasibility constraints in a lagrangian or kuhn tucker analysis of the mp mf firm the theory of mp mf production is relevant in the conceptualization of resource allocation problems throughout agriculture for example few important real world analyses of agricultural production or marketing operations are single product in nature in fact in his extensive literature review on production efficiency in agricultural processing and marketing french states multiple outputs are effectively the rule rather than the exception similarly mp mf theory is prominent in the study of environmental and natural resource problems involving technological externalities despite the importance of the theory it appears that work to date is a collection of special cases of a potentially more general theory it is our hope that this paper will stimulate a reexamination of mp mf production theory

do external grants to district governments discourage own revenue generation a look at local public finance dynamics in ghana summary using rich panel data on all of ghana s districts local public finances over 11 years this paper investigates the way that intergovernmental and other transfers to local governments affect local governments incentives to collect internally generated revenues and funds igf we find that despite an incentive scheme built into one of the major intergovernmental grants the flow of all grants taken together discourages rather than encourages igf this is reflected both in the depressing effect of transfers on igf levels as well as on igf growth

federalism chinese style the political basis for economic success in china china s remarkable economic success rests on a foundation of political reform providing a considerable degree of credible commitment to markets this reform reflects a special type of institutionalized decentralization that the authors call federalism chinese style this form of decentralization has three consequences first it fosters competition not only in product markets but also among local governments for labor and foreign capital this competition in turn encourages local government experimentation and learning with new forms of enterprises regulation and economic relationships second it provides incentives for local governments to promote local economic prosperity finally it provides a significant amount of protection to local governments and their enterprises from political intrusion by the central government

ex post redistribution in a federation implications for corrective policy abstract this paper analyzes whether changes in the timing of equalizing transfers to state governments necessitate an adjustment in federal corrective policy according to the existing literature assuming an ex ante choice of transfers the corrective grant is equal to the marginal damage benefit inflicted by externality generation when the federal government accommodates state finances ex post the grant differs in formula from existing prescription allocative federal policy corrects state policy incentives twofold it entails a correction for the distortion in the marginal benefit of state spending as in earlier literature and for the distortion in the marginal cost of public funds induced by the ex post provision of transfers the required grant rule is generically disproportionate to the equilibrium externality even with lump sum taxation furthermore the ex post provision of transfers is critical for the nature of the equilibrium inefficiency equalizing transfers at least partly internalize consumption spill overs but simultaneously establishes a new source of inefficiency as a final result the existing prescription for allocative federal policy continues to apply if the public good is pure

explaining differences in public sector efficiency evidence from russia s regions summary using the case of russia s regions this paper extends the literature on public sector efficiency in three directions an attempt to better understand differences in public sector efficiency through the study of subnational governments in one country the first examination of public sector efficiency of subnational governments in emerging markets and the first study of public sector efficiency in russia three types of scores of public sector performance and efficiency indicate substantial differences across regions an econometric examination suggests that they are largely explained by per capita income the share of federal transfers in subnational government revenue quality of governance and democratic control and the level of spending

an investigation of the determinants of profitability in new zealand manufacturing industries in 1986 87 the empirical investigation of the structure condust performance relationship has had to grapple with the problem that higher than usual profitability might arise from superior production efficiency or alternatively from markets subject to lower competitive pressures as such the nature of investigation has evolved over time to include the market power efficiency debate and the new industrial organisation emphasis on the joint determination of profitability and market structure the purpose of this paper is to present some new zealand evidence with a unique feature being to include a measure of firm level efficiency in a disaggregated model estimated using firm level data the results suggest both market power and efficiency play a role in determining profitability although efficiency dominates

domestic market power and foreign trade abstract this paper develops a conjectural variation model to include foreign trade and applies it to the swedish industry the main conclusions emerging from the empirical application are that the degree of implicit collusion is generally very low in sweden and further that while high seller concentration exerts a positive influence on this degree there is strong and counteracting competitive pressure from foreign trade a more general conclusion is that it is important to include foreign trade in analyses of market power in open economies

incentives to provide local public goods fiscal federalism russian style abstract based on a unique data set on russian city budgets this paper shows that revenue sharing between regional and local governments provides local governments with no incentive to increase tax base or provide public goods any change in local government s own revenues is almost entirely offset by changes in shared revenues this leads to governmental over regulation of private businesses it is shown that fiscal incentives are a determinant of the formation of private business and the efficiency of public goods provision the russian federalism is compared to the chinese federalism where fiscal incentives reputedly are stronger in many provinces

public sector efficiency in transition and beyond evidence from czech local governments this article provides the first comparison of public sector efficiency in and beyond transition we compare the comprehensive efficiency scores of 202 local governments in the czech republic in the transition period of 1995 1998 and the post transition period of 2005 2008 and identify the period specific determinants of local government efficiency we observe convergence to the best practice frontier but also a growing efficiency gap between small and large governments in both periods municipal size and the main fiscal variables qualitatively affect efficiency in the same direction and in line with the fiscal stress hypothesis left wing ideology is only robustly associated with cost inefficiency in the transition period the geographic distances begin to matter for efficiency only in the post transition period

democracy market liberalization and political preferences abstract we estimate the impact of market development and democratization on subjective political preferences we rely on the specific situation of frontier zones and the considerable regional variations in culture and economic development in the countries of the former socialist bloc for identification using a survey conducted in 2006 we find a positive and significant effect of democracy on support for a market economy but no effect of market liberalization on support for democracy hence in contrast with the conventional wisdom concerning the sequencing of political and economic reforms democratization may become a necessary condition to obtain public support for further economic liberalization

regional decentralization and fiscal incentives federalism chinese style abstract aligning the interests of local governments with market development is an important issue for developing and transition economies using a panel data set from china we investigate the relationship between provincial government s fiscal incentives and provincial market development we report three empirical findings first we find that during the period of fiscal contracting system the discrepancy between ex ante contracts and ex post implementation was relatively small suggesting that the fiscal contracts were credible second we find a much higher correlation about four times between the provincial government s budgetary revenue and its expenditure during 1980s and 1990s as compared to 1970s demonstrating that provincial governments faced much stronger ex post fiscal incentives after reform third we find that stronger ex ante fiscal incentives measured by the contractual marginal retention rate of the provincial government in its budgetary revenue are associated with faster development of the non state sector as well as more reforms in the state sector in the provincial economy this holds even when we control for the conventional measure of fiscal decentralization finally we compare federalism chinese style to federalism russian style

political decentralization and corruption evidence from around the world abstract how does political decentralization affect the frequency and costliness of bribe extraction by corrupt officials previous empirical studies using subjective indexes of perceived corruption and mostly fiscal indicators of decentralization have suggested conflicting conclusions in search of more precise findings we combine and explore two new data sources an original cross national data set on particular types of decentralization and the results of a firm level survey conducted in 80 countries about firms concrete experiences with bribery in countries with a larger number of government or administrative tiers and given local revenues a larger number of local public employees reported bribery was more frequent when local or central governments received a larger share of gdp in revenue bribery was less frequent overall the results suggest the danger of uncoordinated rent seeking as government structures become more complex

decentralization of governance and development all around the world in matters of governance decentralization is the rage even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the european union and states rights in the united states decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in latin america africa and asia the world bank for example has embraced it as one of the major governance reforms on its agenda for example world bank 2000 burki perry and dillinger 1999 take also the examples of the two largest countries of the world china and india decentralization has been regarded as the major institutional framework for the phenomenal industrial growth in the last two decades in china taking place largely in the nonstate nonprivate sector india ushered in a landmark constitutional reform in favor of decentralization around the same time it launched a major program of economic reform in the early 1990s on account of its many failures the centralized state everywhere has lost a great deal of legitimacy and decentralization is widely believed to promise a range of benee ts it is often suggested as a way of reducing the role of the state in general by fragmenting central authority and introducing more intergovernmental competition and checks and balances it is viewed as a way to make government more responsive and efe cient technological changes have also made it somewhat easier than before to provide public services like electricity and water supply relatively efe ciently in smaller market areas and the lower levels of government have now a greater ability to handle certain tasks in a world of rampant ethnic cone icts and separatist movements decentralization is also regarded as a way of diffusing social and political tensions and ensuring local cultural and political autonomy these potential benee ts of decentralization have attracted a very diverse range

the profitability concentration relation market power or efficiency industrial economists have been studying the relationship between profitability and concentration using cross industry samples for many years now however as sometimes happens once it appeared that some consensus had been achieved with few exceptions market concentration and industry profitability are positively correlated peltzman i977 p 229 people began to question the interpretation of those results in particular demsetz e g i973 i974 and others suggested that rather than concentration market power leading to higher prices and profits the causal direction in fact ran from greater efficiency to both higher profits and incidentally to higher concentration our purpose here is to subject these conflicting hypotheses to cross industry empirical test using u k data in order to do this we first develop a model which is sufficiently general to allow for both alternative explanations of a positive concentration profitability correlation in the light of this model we then examine the implications for the within industry relation between market share and firm level profitability more specifically we explore demsetz s claim that the empirical form of this relationship should signal which of the alternative hypotheses is consistent with the between industry profitability concentration correlation our model suggests that in certain special circumstances this claim is partly justified in that it should be possible to assess the relative strengths of the market power and efficiency effects from the within industry relation more generally however factors such as product differentiation and scale economies may seriously impair the information content of the relation with at least a strong suspicion that the estimates will tend to exaggerate the evidence in favour of the efficiency hypothesis in the event our results tend to confirm that for most industries the within industry data offer little conclusive support for either hypothesis but for a not insignificant minority of industries the evidence suggests some support for the view that both efficiency and market power are at work simultaneously our model is detailed in section ii and estimated on u k data in section iii after which we offer a few comments in section iv first however we drovide a backcloth to the later analysis

foreign trade elasticities and import discipline this paper provides new evidence on the trade as discipline7rsquo hypothesis by considering the determination of price cost margins with a panel of 41 four digit us food manufacturing industries from 1972 to 1987 following the empirical specification suggested by competitive fringe oligopoly models we include estimated domestic demand elasticities and cross price elasticities of import demand as explanatory variables and the empirical results confirm the importance of these variables in assessing the hypothesis

price cost margins and imports in an oligopolistic market abstract in a recent letter in this journal urata 1979 found an unexpected positive and significant association between price cost margins and import to domestic shipment ratio for the u s textile and apparel industries in the present letter a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon is presented by extending a conjectural variation oligopoly model

competing in taxes and investment under fiscal equalization the paper considers a model of federation with two heterogeneous regions that try to attract the capital by competing in capital income taxes and public investment that enhance the productivity of capital regions choices determine allocation of capital across the regions and their revenues under a tax sharing scheme this framework allows for the examination of different approaches to fiscal equalization schemes boadway r flatters f 1982 efficiency and equalization payments in a federal system of government a synthesis and extension of recent results canadian journal of economics 15 613 633 weingast b r 2006 second generation fiscal federalism implication for decentralized democratic governance and economic development working paper hoover institution stanford university we show that tax competition distorts downwards public investments and that the equalization grants discourage public investments with a little effect on equilibrium taxes however the equalization schemes remain beneficial not only for the federation and under a low degree of regional asymmetry also for each region c 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

environmental economics an evolutionary critique and a plea for pluralism abstract environmental economics is a contradiction in terms the contradiction is intuitive to the puzzled lay person inquiring about the nature of our subdiscipline it is explicit to those who think of environmental systems in terms of complex evolving interconnectedness and identify the economic model with the atomistic and mechanistic assumptions of classical mechanics within the subdiscipline we try to resolve the contradiction by internalizing externalities by matching market feedbacks with environmental relations while acknowledging that insights can be drawn from the market view of environmental problems i argue in this essay that 1 the contradiction is nerver resolved 2 multiple incongruous perspectives are all we have for understanding the interface between economic and environmental systems and 3 environmental economics will thrive with a return to philosophical pluralism to the open acceptance of the contradiction

cartel stability and tariff policy abstract in this paper we investigate the effect that tariff policy has on the ability of firms to collude in oligopolistic industries we find that small tariff rates lead to an industry structure more conducive to collusive behavior while large tariff rates weaken cartels there exists a critical tariff rate which has no effect on the cartel s stability this critical value is found to be a decreasing function of n the number of firms in the industry and n d n the proportion of firms that are domestic

inter industry variations in the effect of trade on industry performance this paper develops an empirical model to measure the strength of import discipline across industries allowing it to vary sys tematically with various features of industry market structure the m odel is applied to a panel of data for eighty two belgian three digit industries for the period 1973 78 and the results suggest that the parameters of the structural model are stable over time that the ext ent of discipline is endogenous and that about 70 percent of the ind ustries in the sample experience significant trade induced competitiv e discipline copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

federalism as a commitment to reserving market incentives the authors advance a new perspective in the study of federalism their approach views federalism as a governance solution of the state to credibly preserving market incentives market incentives are preserved if the state is credibly prevented from compromising on future economic success and from bailing out future failures the salient features of federalism decentralization of information and authority and interjurisdictional competition help provide credible commitment or these purposes in addition the authors suggest that some federalism are self sustaining

the measurement of profitability and the diagnosis of market power this paper develops a model which yields the specification of an empirical test for the difference between price and marginal revenue which will be significantly positive if a firm exercises market power the test can be carried out with any of a number of commonly used measures of accounting profitability and embodies a specific functional form for the consideration of nonconstant returns to scale the model is estimated for four firms in the medical surgical supply industry and four firms in the motor vehicle industry the results are consistent with the hypothesis that product differentiation is an important basis for firm specific market power import quotas are shown to increase market power in the motor vehicle industry claims that accounting data cannot be used to analyze market power are rejected

economic development legality and the transplant effect abstract we analyze the determinants of effective legal institutions legality using data from 49 countries we show that the way the law was initially transplanted and received is a more important determinant than the supply of law from a particular legal family countries that have developed legal orders internally adapted the transplanted law and or had a population that was already familiar with basic principles of the transplanted law have more effective legality than countries that received foreign law without any similar predispositions the transplanting process has a strong indirect effect on economic development via its impact on legality while the impact of particular legal families is weaker and not robust to alternative legality measures

market structure and price cost margins in a paper that has become a standard reference in the structure conductperformance approach to industrial economics cowling and waterson 1976 developed a theoretical rationale for expecting industry profitability to be positively correlated with the level of concentration their model based on a simple algebraic description of oligopoly behaviour has been interpreted as providing a justification for the common empirical practice of cross industry regression analysis of price cost margins in terms of concentration levels in the present paper we show that on further examination this model implies a joint determination of margins and concentration this provides some interesting comparative static results of relevance to inter industry differences in concentration levels equally however it leads to various cautionary insights concerning the meaning of price cost margin versus concentration regressions

did government decentralization cause china s economic miracle many scholars attribute china s market reforms and the remarkable economic performance they have fostered in part to the country s political and fiscal decentralization political decentralization is said to have stimulated local policy experiments and restrained predatory central interventions fiscal decentralization is thought to have motivated local officials to promote development and harden enterprises budget constraints the locally diversified structure of the prereform economy is said to have facilitated liberalization reexamining these arguments the authors find that none establishes a convincing link between political or fiscal decentralization and china s successes they suggest an alternative view of the reform process in which growth enhancing policies emerged from competition between promarket and conservative factions in beijing

energy productivity and chinese local officials promotions evidence from provincial governors abstract improving energy productivity is one of the most cost effective ways to achieve a sustainable development target the existing literature has shown some factors that have driven the improvement in china s energy productivity however these studies do little to tackle the role of chinese local officials political promotions can be seen as the most important career incentive for chinese local officials hence we intend to study whether energy productivity affects chinese local officials promotions in this paper the data of position changes for the 31 provincial governors during 1978 2012 are utilized we adopted probit models to empirically examine the correlation between provincial governors political promotions and energy productivity the empirical results demonstrate that 1 energy productivity has a significantly positive impact on provincial governors political promotions in china meaning that the provincial governors have the momentum to improve energy productivity and 2 the effect of energy productivity on provincial governors political promotions has evolved dynamically changing along with the transformation of the economic growth mode and the adjustment of the local officials promotion mechanism the results are helpful in understanding the drivers of the improvement in china s energy productivity and provide insightful implications for conducting energy policy in china

how do local governments decide on public policy in fiscal federalism tax vs expenditure optimization previous literature widely assumes that taxes are optimized in local public flnance while expenditures adjust residually this paper endogenizes the choice of the optimization variable in particular it analyzes how federal policy toward local governments in uences the way local governments decide on public policy unlike the presumption the paper shows that local governments may choose to optimize over expenditures the result most notably prevails when federal policy subsidizes local flscal efiort the results ofier a new perspective of the e ciency implications of federal policy toward local governments and thereby enable a more precise characterization of local government behavior in flscal federalism

misaligned incentives and the scale of incarceration in the united states abstract the incarceration rate has increased substantially in the united states between the 1980s and the 2000s in this paper i explore an institutional explanation for this growth the fact that costs of incarceration are not fully internalized typically prison is paid for at the state level but county employees such as judges prosecutors or probation officers determine time spent in custody i exploit a natural experiment that shifted the cost burden of juvenile incarceration from state to counties keeping overall costs and responsibilities unchanged this resulted in a stark drop in incarceration and no increase in arrests suggesting an over use of prison when costs are not internalized the large magnitude of the change suggests that misaligned incentives in criminal justice may be a significant contributor to the current levels of incarceration in the united states

profitability concentration imports and exports the case of taiwan s midstream petrochemical industries based on an open economy oligopoly model causalities among domestic firms price cost margin pcm domestic concentration import and export shares are derived and a simultaneous equation system is established by utilizing the 1989 1997 data of taiwan s midstream petrochemical industries three stage least squares is used to estimate the system the empirical results confirm the derived results and demonstrate 1 there exist simultaneous relationships among domestic pcm domestic concentration import and export shares 2 import concentration affects domestic concentration positively but affects domestic pcm import and export shares negatively 3 diversifying international markets improves domestic firms pcm 4 domestic firms seem to be in a situation of collusion

concentration and profitability in a dichotomous economy the case of taiwan this paper is an attempt to apply a two regime and a recursive structure performance analysis to one of the newly industrializing countries taiwan a two regime approach is employed because taiwan s market structure is hypothesized as being dichotomous the export oriented sector being distinct with the domestic oriented sector a recursive system is used because industry concentration is not only a determinant of profitability but is itself determined by other variables

second generation fiscal federalism the implications of fiscal incentives abstract first generation fiscal federalism fgff studies the performance of decentralized systems under the assumption of benevolent social planners second generation fiscal federalism sgff studies performance based on the fiscal and political incentives facing subnational officials the paper focuses on three aspects of sgff first it considers the design of intergovernmental transfers while fgff emphasizes correcting vertical and horizontal equity sgff emphasizes the importance of fiscal incentives for producing local economic prosperity sgff extends fgff approaches by showing how non linear transfer systems can produce both equalization and high marginal fiscal incentives to produce local economic growth second the paper raises the fiscal incentive approach showing how different tax systems produce different fiscal incentives for political officials to choose policies third the paper discusses the interaction of democracy and fiscal federalism

fiscal incentives and policy choices of local governments evidence from china abstract this paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of china based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue sharing scheme we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem we find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to urbanizing china i e to developing the real estate and construction sectors when their retention rate of enterprise tax revenue was reduced the increase from the new revenue source compensated for half of the losses in revenue that resulted from the reassignment of fiscal rights the reassignment had also the effect of retarding the industrial growth of domestically owned firms in particular

the unequal enforcement of liberalization evidence from russia s reform of business regulation we document the unequal enforcement of liberalization reform of business regulation across russian regions with different governance institutions which leads to unequal effects of liberalization national liberalization laws were enforced more effectively in subnational regions with more transparent government a more informed population a higher concentration of industry and stronger fiscal autonomy as a result liberalization had a substantial positive effect on the performance of small firms and the growth of the official small business sector in regions with stronger governance institutions in contrast in regions with weaker governance institutions we observe no effect of reform and in some cases even a negative effect

collusion versus differential efficiency testing alternative hypotheses the predictions of collusion and efficiency based static equilibrium explanations of interindustry profitability differences are formally developed and tested using appropriate econometric techniques with intraindustry data on seventy u s internal revenue service minor manufacturing industries in 1963 and 1972 none of the explanations has much explanatory power the 1963 data are consistent with collusion based models while the 1972 data are inconsistent with all non null hypotheses considered patterns of profitability are sharply different in the two years in complex ways apparently unrelated to cyclical forces or the phase ii price controls implications of these results are discussed copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

regional inequalities fiscal decentralization and government quality abstractregional inequalities fiscal decentralization and government quality regional studies there are theoretical arguments supporting the view that regional income inequalities the degree of fiscal decentralization and the quality of government are simultaneously determined this article argues that existing empirical work has failed to deal adequately with this possibility in light of this it applies a simultaneous equation model which accounts for the joint determination of these three variables to a panel of 23 organisation for economic co operation and development oecd countries the empirical evidence that emerges from the analysis suggests that a process of fiscal decentralization accompanied by measures to improve the quality of government would be an effective strategy for reducing regional inequalities

biases in technical efficiency scores caused by intra input aggregation mathematical analysis and a dea application using simulated data in data envelopment analysis dea applications involving multiple inputs and outputs inputs are aggregated into the total amounts of each type of input for example if input types labour and capital are used to produce multiple outputs the total amount of labour used to produce all outputs is treated as one aggregated input and the total amount of capital as another resources are not disaggregated into input variables measuring the amount of labour used to produce the first output the amount of labour used to produce the second output the amount of labour used to produce the third output and so on for both labour and capital it is shown that such intra input aggregation causes downward bias in reported technical efficiency scores with variations in bias unrelated to true technical efficiency therefore with few exceptions any technical efficiency comparisons among dmus are invalid the presence of intra input aggregation bias is demonstrated mathematically simulation is used to exhibit it

whither russia a review of andrei shleifer s a normal country in this review the author reflects on the heated debates around views about russia s postcommunist transition expressed in essays collected in new andrei shleifer s book a normal country russia after communism harvard university press 2005 which were initially published at different times during transition she focuses on the three questions that have been in the center of the debate among academics and policymakers what should the sequencing and the speed of reforms be should a country have political centralization for fiscal decentralization to be efficient is russia normal the author argues that russia s most recent history provides convincing evidence in support of the logic of political and economic transformation as it was understood by shleifer as early as the beginning of the 1990s

fiscal federalism in russia a critique of the oecd proposals the oecd proposes to kill two birds with one stone in russia by simultaneously improving fiscal federalism and using the financial reform process to press for full market liberalisation this paper scrutinises the initiative and finds it wanting because the consensus reforms advocated conflate the re centralisation of fiscal authority with optimal ownership property rights and effective market building perpetuating the illusion that there are no bad market systems the g 7 and putin must do better yeltsin s mis privatisation and mis liberalisation which spawned rent seeking asset stripping asset seizing and a disregard for profit maximising from current operations have proved to be path dependent and need to be rectified putin s increasingly visible efforts to rein private property rights must also be taken into account in designing on optimal fiscal federalist regime copyright 2004 oxford university press

simultaneous equations models of the structure performance paradigm abstract this paper is concerned with determining the dimension of the simultaneous equations model surrounding the basic profits concentration relationship a very general model is considered and then simplified using a simple test for exogeneity and it is concluded that the model is nonlinear in concentration and that simultaneous interaction occurs between profits and foreign competition variables

government in transition abstract the speed of economic reforms is not the only important determinant of the success of the transition to a market economy the transition of government from a communist state to an institution supporting a market economy is as critical survey evidence shows that russia lags significantly behind poland in the transition of its government which may account for its inferior economic performance despite adopting similar economic reforms i argue that the lack of turnover of old communist politicians and the creation of inappropriate electoral and fiscal incentives for these politicians may account for the poor performance of the russian government and suggest some strategies for improving the situation