Suchergebnisse

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government vary greatly, and budget institutions -the rules according to which budgets are drafted, approved, and implemented- are one (of many) drivers of such variation. This paper argues that under more hierarchical budget rules, presidential and parliamentary systems generate a similar incentive structure for the executive branch in shaping the size of government. This hypothesis is tested on a broad cross-section of countries, presidentialism is found to have a negative impact on government size only when executive discretion in the budget process is low (that is, in a context of separation of powers). However, the negative effect of presidentialism on expenditures vanishes or is even reversed when the executive`s discretion over the budget process is higher. Hence, budget institutions that impose restrictions on the legislature`s ability to amend budget proposals can make political regimes look more alike in terms of fiscal outcomes.

Although recent research has shed new light on the political determinants and economic consequences of tax lawmaking, existing analyses rely on coarse data measuring political aggregates. Consequently, little is known about the political processes determining how tax legislation is written or their effect on the nature of tax reforms. This paper therefore develops a methodology to examine how Congress edits the content of tax legislation by measuring the ways Deputies, Senators, Presidents, and Ministers propose and amend such legislation. The Legislative Substance Scale proposed here measures the distance between a bill's original position and the actual outcome of the legislative process by comparing the differences in content according to coding of the main tax policy dimensions. The scale is used to build the first systematic database of tax lawmaking in Argentina, and to describe its general patterns of authorship, approval and substantive content across presidencies in the current democratic period.

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system (featuring appointed mayors) by a mayor-council system (with directly-elected mayors) and (ii) the fiscal incentives inherent to the equalization system. We find that municipalities with appointed mayors react less strongly to changes in fiscal incentives. The change in municipal tax rates is three times smaller compared with a system of direct mayoral elections. We point to the different electoral incentives of mayors in the two systems to explain the result.

The paper argues that national regulators can improve the stability of the domestic banking sector via two substitutable policy instruments; minimum capital requirements and effort spend on domestic supervision. Both tools increase the soundness of a national banking system, but they imply different cost burdens between domestic banks and taxpayers. The optimal domestic policy choice is characterised by trading off marginal costs and benefits born by each party. However, the optimal policy choice changes if banks are allowed to be mobile. We show that countries are better off by harmonising capital requirements on an international standard la Basel, since harmonisation counters a regulatory race with other jurisdictions and will increase national utility.

We analyze the German ecotax package in a model of overlapping generations and majority voting. The package consists of the ecotax rate and the budgetary rule which assigns a fraction of the tax revenue to the reduction of pension contributions while holding pension benefits constant. The old and the young generation have different preferences with respect to the tax rate and the use of the tax revenue. Our theoretical model as well as the calibration of our model show that the median voter s preferred tax rate may well exceed the efficient tax rate whenever his income is sufficiently high. This is the likelier the more CO2 is degraded and removed from the atmosphere. Furthermore, the median voter prefers earmarking of tax revenue to reductions in pension contributions. The latter is quite an accurate prediction of the situation in Germany where the share of tax revenue devoted to the pension scheme amounts to more than 90%.

This paper argues that institutionalization is an equilibrium phenomenon and is associated with better policies and better results in terms of economic development. In support of this argument is presented a theoretical model that extends the space of feasible actions for political actors, including the possibility of investing in both institutionalized and non-institutionalized arenas. Thus, to visualize the process of institutionalization can be endogenous to the functioning of political institutions. In addition to this conceptual model, quantitative results are presented which show that low levels of institutionalization tend to weaken the results arising from the literature of more traditional political economy. That is, low institutionalization in the context of traditional political institutions, particularly those jure measures may not be relevant in explaining policy outcomes. Still, this work opens up more questions than it answers and leaves lines of research proposals that can help provide answers to them.

Personal income taxation remains relatively low in many developing countries despite recent democratic advancement and rapid economic growth; this is hard to reconcile with standard political economy models of taxation. This paper argues that the details of political institutions help to explain these low levels of personal income taxation. In particular, legislative malapportionment enables rich elites to have disproportionate political influence. Because over-represented districts tend to be dominated by parties aligned with the elite, these groups can block legislative attempts to introduce progressive taxes. Using a sample of more than 50 countries (including 17 across Latin America) between 1990 and 2007, this paper finds that i) countries with historically more unequal distributions of wealth and income systematically present higher levels of legislative malapportionment, and ii) higher levels of malapportionment are associated with lower shares of personal income taxes in GDP.

The presidential politics literature depicts presidents either as all-powerful actors or figureheads and seeks to explain outcomes accordingly. The president and the executive branch are nonetheless usually treated as black boxes, particularly in developing countries, even though the presidency has evolved into an extremely complex branch of government. While these developments have been studied in the United States, far less is known in other countries, particularly in Latin America, where presidential systems have been considered the source of all goods and evils. To help close the knowledge gap and explore differences in policymaking characteristics not only between Latin America and the US but also across Latin American countries, this paper summarizes the vast literature on the organization and resources of the Executive Branch in the Americas and sets a research agenda for the study of Latin American presidencies.

Abstract
This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors, inspects the empirical relevance of this mechanism in European data, and outlines the proposed theoretical perspective's implications for reform design in crisis-hit economies.

JEL codes

D78; J38

Conflicts end. Often though, the roots of future conflict remain in fertile soil. The process of reconciliation among erstwhile enemies may be a way to deter future conflagrations; we have witnessed a number of examples such as in Rwanda or South Africa. However, to be sustainable and effective, this process may require cultural change. We use evolutionary game theory to model this process of cultural change. We postulate three cultures in a population – Conciliatory, Non-conciliatory, and Reciprocative. We then use the replicator dynamic to identify evolutionary stable outcomes. People in our population are boundedly rational. They may, therefore, "belong" to a particular culture. However, they learn to adopt other cultures if it is beneficial. We find first that people can learn to be Non-conciliatory even when Conciliation provides very real benefits. However, a population can learn the reciprocative culture to facilitate reconciliation. Whether it does or not depends on the initial distribution of the population among the three cultures and how people feel about the future. These results are well known in the Evolutionary Game Theory literature. However, to our knowledge, this is the first time these results have been applied to provide insights into post-conflict reconciliation processes.

We consider a model of redistributive politics in which politicians have the possibility to raise some debt and to implement a pie-increasing reform, i.e. a reform creating a net increase in the total taxable endowment. The reform benefits occur in the future and the reform costs have to be paid today, but both benefits and costs can be perfectly redistributed across voters in the period in which they occur. Voters are perfectly forward-looking and ex-ante homogeneous, and politicians are purely office-motivated. As main result, we show that a limit on debt that is sufficiently more restrictive than the natural debt limit will prevent the implementation of the reform. Such a debt limit forces the reforming candidate to pursue an overly egalitarian strategy of redistribution making it possible for a non-reforming candidate to use his better targeting capacity to win a majority of voters.

Since the beginning of transition in 1990 from a centrally planned to a market oriented economy, the performance of Poland's economy has been outstanding if we take GDP growth as our measure. In our opinion it is not specific reforms that can explain this performance but the radical ("big bang") reforms at the beginning of transition in conjunction with persistent efforts during the two decades by all governments, no matter what their political orientation, to keep on a reform path. Reforming a centrally planned economy that has very serious macroeconomic disequilibria implies reforms that can be done immediately but also structural or systemic reforms that require years to implement. Both types of reforms will be discussed. In a democratic context reforms can only be undertaken in a sustained way if a majority of voters favours such reform efforts. Even when reform-friendly governments were voted out of office in the Polish case, the new governments in Poland never reversed reforms undertaken by the previous government. This continuous reform stance over two decades is the main cause of the Polish growth miracle. The reasons for the ability of Polish policy makers to pursue economic and administrative reforms in spite of short-run costs to large sections of society will be discussed extensively

In 1878 the liberal parties lost enough votes to loose the majority in the parliament which they had defended in the general election just one year before. In this paper, the question of where the voters came from and why the voting changed so crucially within one year are re-examined. The analysis uses a new set of data aggregated at a lower level than those examined by previous studies and makes use of King's Algorithm, a tool provided by modern political science. The main finding of this paper is that the change towards protectionism was not caused by new, but by floating voters from the agricultural sector.

In order to guarantee a further successful functioning of the enlarged European Union a Federal European Constitution is proposed. Six basic elements of a future European federal constitution are developed: the European commission should be turned into an European government and the European legislation should consist of a two chamber system with full responsibility over all federal items. Three further key elements are the subsidiarity principle, federalism and the secession right, which are best suited to limiting the domain of the central European authority to which certain tasks are given, such as defense, foreign and environmental policy. Another important feature is direct democracy, which provides the possibility for European voters to participate actively in the political decision making, to break political and interest group cartels, and to prevent an unwanted shifting of responsibilities from EU member states to the European federal level.