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Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Improving the economy and efficiency of federal programs has long been a key objective of the Government Accountability Office (GAO). To this end, GAO held a workshop on December 17, 2004, to discuss the use of economic analysis, such as benefit cost or cost effectiveness, for helping to measure the performance of federal programs. The workshop's purpose was to discuss the present state of economic performance measures and identify gaps in their application and the barriers and analytical issues that limit their use in helping assess the performance of federal programs and identify opportunities for the federal government and professional and academic institutions to improve (1) the use of economic performance measures for evaluating federal programs and (2) the general economic principles and guidance on which economic performance analysis is based."

This article studies the consequences of inter-and intrastate wars for economic growth in a large cross-section of countries during the period 1960–89. It establishes that cross-country differences in economic growth are systematically related to the severity and duration of war. The combined prewar, contemporaneous, and postwar association between growth and war is negative; that is, economic performance has been lower in countries that fought a severe and/or prolonged war. However, the causal effect of war on postwar economic performance is positive. In particular, the longer or more severe the war, the higher the subsequent long-term rate of economic growth. A possible interpretation of these findings is that war is more likely to occur in poorly performing countries and/or to have a negative direct – contemporaneous – effect on growth. But in the longer term, war creates growth-enhancing possibilities. Interestingly, these effects arise mostly from civil wars and are quantitatively quite substantial. For instance, an increase in war duration by 10% leads to an increase of 2.1% in the average growth rate. The findings of this article are thus consistent with the predictions of the theories of both Organski & Kugler and Olson.

Taking Macur Olson´s theory of the decline of nations as pathbreaking in this field we develop a formal model of the behavior of interest groups and their interaction to win some deeper insights into the interior mechanics of the interest-group-state. Followed by a brief survey of empirical studies testing Olson´s theory, we at the first time in the literature present a time-series analysis of data from the German lobby-list and estimate macro-variables as economic growth and inflation using data on the number of interest groups between 1973 and 2006. Based on these theoretical and empirical results we conclude our study with some integrative reflections on the future of interest groups and the nation-state under the pressure of globalization and a footloose new economy

The grim events of the last couple of weeks, and a note from a reader last week about a short post I’d written several years ago comparing the economic performance of Israel and New Zealand, prompted me to take another look at the data. This was the chart from the earlier (2018) post As I … Continue reading Israel’s economic performance

IN PURELY ECONOMIC TERMS, CHINA'S RECORD HAS NOT BEEN OUTSTANDING. HOWEVER, OTHER DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, ESPECIALLY INDIA, COULD LEARN FROM CHINA'S EXPERIENCE. IN THE CASE OF AGRICULTURE, WHILE PER CAPUT FOOD CONSUMPTION IS ONLY SLIGHTLY HIGHER THAN THAT OF INDIA, THE CHINESE DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM HAS ENSURED A MORE EQUITABLE SHARE OF FOOD AMONG THE POPULATION.