Suchergebnisse

Why is an understanding of political competition essential for the study of public economics and public policy generally? How can political competition be described and understood, and how does it differ from its strictly economic counterpart? What are the implications of the fact that policy proposals in a democracy must always pass a political test? What are the strengths and weaknesses of electoral competition as a mechanism for the allocation of economic resources? Why are tax structures in democratic polities so complicated, and what implications follow from this for normative views about good policy choice? How can we measure the intensity of political competition, why and how does it vary in mature democracies, and what are the consequences? This Element considers the approach to answer these questions, while also illustrating some of the interesting theoretical and empirical work that has been done on them.

"Coercion is a fundamental and unavoidable part of our social lives. Economists, however, have not yet offered a fully integrated analysis of its role in either the private or the public economy. The essays in this book are different. Since collective choices on fiscal matters emerge from and have all the essential characteristics of social interaction, including the necessity of coercion, and because there is an older tradition of work on coercion in public finance that we can build upon, the contributors to this book focus directly on the study of coercion arising through the operation of the fiscal system. A variety of important issues concerning the evolution, measurement, and implications of coercion in public finance are addressed. These include: the emergence and persistence of coercion in the financing of structured anarchies; its role in the transition from natural states to the open access society; the measurement of coercion and its connection to the foundations of welfare analysis and to the sociology of preference formation; coercion in mechanism design problems with public goods; as constraints on optimal policy design and under alternative collective choice rules; and coercion in federal states as a solution to problems of highly divided societies. The implications for contemporary tax policy of the Wicksell-Lindahl solution, for the calculation of the incidence of the fiscal system, and for experiments with coercion in laboratory settings as a potentially productive force are also explored"--

Using a unique dataset based on income tax records, authors Kathleen Day and Stanley Winer examine the factors influencing the decision to migrate within Canada, paying special attention to the role of regional variation in the generosity of public policies including unemployment insurance, taxation, and public expenditure. The influence of extraordinary events such as the election of a separatist government in Quebec and the closure of the east coast cod fishery is also considered. They look at why we ought to be concerned about public policies that interfere with market-based incentives to move, provide a wealth of information on interregional differences in public policies and market conditions, and examine what other researchers have discovered about fiscally induced migration, culminating in a discussion of the likely impact of various policy changes on migration and provincial unemployment rates. The authors' assessment of the lessons to be learned from their own and past research on policy-induced migration in Canada will be of interest to students of migration and policy makers alike.

We investigate the extent to which the intensity of political competition moderates the governance issues that arise in relation to Canada's fiscal structure. By fiscal structure we mean three distinct but interrelated fiscal dimensions of the state: financial stability, long run size and short run interventions into the private economy with respect to the business cycle. The paper is distinctive in focusing on four measures of political competitiveness that reflect the degree of competition in and between national parliamentary elections: the size of the majority of the governing party in the House; the distribution of the volatility adjusted winning margins of the governing party; the proportion of electorally marginal constituencies adjusted for asymmetry between parties; and a multiparty measure of the competitiveness of elections at the constituency level. The analysis accounts for the differing time series properties of the political and economic variables and the comingling of long and short term fiscal policies in the time series data. Estimation using a sequence of ARDL models indicates that greater political competition enhances fiscal stability, speeds up convergence of government size from above on fundamentals, and helps to align fiscal deficits better with the business cycle. The potential quantitative impact of more intense electoral competition is analyzed by applying the deficit model to the period of fiscal instability that arose in the 1980's and early 1990's.

We draw attention to, and begin to consider the implications of, the severe restrictions on emigration by Canadians to the United States introduced under the US Immigration Act of 1965. These restrictions came into effect in 1968 and lasted until mobility began to increase to some extent under the free trade agreements in the early 1990s. This is an unusual episode in Canadian history, the implications of which for the Canadian economy and for Canadian public policy appear to have received little attention. We assemble evidence that suggests that the near closing of the border led toward uncoupling of Canadian and US labour markets and to a decrease in the elasticity of labour supply in Canada. Implications for Canadian fiscal policy of a decline in labour elasticity are then derived using a model of equilibrium fiscal structure. We show that these predictions, including heavier taxation of labour income and an increase in the overall size of the public sector, are consistent with what occurred over the two decades after the near closing of the US border, as well as with the partial reopening following the free trade agreements. The analysis continues by acknowledging additional factors that determine the structure and size of the public sector, and by considering the near closing of the border in a broader historical context. We conclude with a prediction about the future course of Canada-US migration policy that follows from our analysis.

While it is clear that Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) has influenced macroeconomic theory, the extent to which his ideas about countercyclical stabilization have altered the course of public policy remains an open question. We develop a dynamic spatial voting model that allows the estimation of a counterfactual showing what planned public budgets would have been like over the cycle if Keynesianism (as interpreted by Leijonhufvud and Clower) had not had any impact on the course of public affairs. Comparison of the counterfactual with the estimated process describing ex ante policy choices after 1950 in Canada allows for the quantification of the changes in fiscal policy that can be attributed to the Keynesian revolution. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V.]

We compare the size and structure of the public sectors of Canada and the United States from 1929 to 2004 using national accounting and employment data. The challenge of defining the public sector for comparative purposes is explored and illustrated, especially with respect to the treatment of non-profits, and a number of intriguing similarities and differences in the comparative evolution of the public sectors are identified that remain to be explained. Use of a new Fisher-type government deflator for Canada indicates that, as of 2003, real government spending relative to real income was about 27 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in both countries.

We investigate the influence of public policy on interprovincial migration in Canada using new aggregated migration data for 1974-1996, the longest period studied so far. We consider the consequences of regional variation in a variety of policies, and also investigate the effects of certain extraordinary events in Quebec and in the Atlantic provinces. The results indicate that while the changing bias in the unemployment insurance system may have induced some people to move to the relatively high unemployment Atlantic region, the resulting flows are likely too small to have altered regional unemployment rates. In contrast, political events in Quebec in the 1970's and the closing of the cod fishery in 1992 appear to be associated with large changes in migration patterns.