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The article examines the emphasis on housing size in the application of housing policy in South Africa and, more specifically, in the Free State Province. This evaluation of housing size in the Free State is conducted against the background of the ideological debate on housing in South Africa. It is argued that, despite pressure on an increase in the housing size in the Free State, the approach has also had negative implications which need to be assessed in more detail. The specific impact of this emphasis on larger housing units has been the fact that the level of services has been neglected, upgrading of informal settlements did not take place, and housing-subsidy allocations followed the availability of stands. In the process, it neglected growing urban areas, increased the pressure on larger municipalities to spend resources on housing, contributed to the problem of horizontal equity, and emphasised the pre-selection of beneficiaries which excluded private-sector finance and ultimately resulted in a slowing down of delivery. The article concludes by arguing that the essential problem relates to the fact that communities cannot make decisions in respect of their housing size and the variety of settlement-related funds which exist.

The importance of the size of a political community for the development of civic virtue has usually been related to the advantages of small size in the possibility of direct democracy and the fulfilment of the classical ideal of freedom as governing and being governed by turn. While these are important variables for the development of civic virtue, in this article it is argued that small size also matters because it allows the development of civic virtue by a reputation-building mechanism. The correlate of this argument is that as the political community grows in size, this mechanism turns increasingly unfeasible. However, the article also claims that certain institutional devices for the spread of information about people's preferences can help the development of civic virtue even in big republics. This argument is illustrated with the example of the Roman censorship, an institution that flourished during the Roman Republican period.

Purpose - The purpose of this article is to examine the interconnected relationships between government size, country size, openness and economic growth. In fact, more trade openness increases government size, which lays stabilizer role against external shocks and GDP volatility. More country size leads to lower government share to GDP from one side and less openness from other side, where as per capita expenditure on public goods is lower, and large markets enjoy more productivity and less incentives for large market to increase openness than the small markets. Finally, economic growth and government have a negative relationship if government size exceeds the optimal size. Design/methodology/approach - We employ three models, which two of them are using 2SLS technique and the third model is using GMM system analysis to examine these relationships in eight selected MENA countries. Our panel data is for the period from 1977-2013 sourced from the World Development Indicators of the World Bank. Findings - Results prove literature proposed hypotheses for the selected region and period, and show that government share to GDP exceeds the optimal size. Moreover, more growth can be realized through more integration in the world economy. Research limitations/implications - Data limitation led to the inclusion of only eight countries of MENA region. We recommend to convert government expenditure to investment and infrastructure instead of social transfer and current expenditure. Furthermore, more studies could be done about the government expenditure structure. In addition, we recommend to minimize government intervention to the market. Finally, growth of government does not improve investment environment or reduce transactions costs, and it crowds out private sector. Originality/value - This is the first work in MENA region, and using recent econometric techniques in subject according to our knowledge.

We examine sources of systemic risk (threshold size, complexity, and interconnectedness) with factors constructed from equity returns of large financial firms, after accounting for standard risk factors. From the factor loadings and factor returns, we estimate the implicit government subsidy for each systemic risk measure, and find that, from 1963 to 2006, only our big-versus-huge threshold size factor, TSIZE, implies a positive implicit subsidy on average. Further, pre-2007 TSIZE-implied subsidies predict the Federal Reserve's liquidity facility loans and the Treasury's TARP loans during the crisis, both in the time series and the cross section. TSIZE-implied subsidies increase around the bailout of Continental Illinois in 1984 and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, as well as around changes in Fitch Support Ratings indicating higher probability of government support. Since 2007, however, the relative share of TSIZE-implied subsidies falls, especially after Lehman's failure, whereas complexity and interconnectedness-implied subsidies are substantial, resulting in an almost sevenfold increase in total implicit subsidies. The results, which survive a variety of robustness checks, indicate that the market's perception of the sources of systemic risk changes over time.

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between size and innovation in a sample of nonprofit organizations. The author employed a number of size estimates (personnel and financial) and assessed different types of innovations (administrative and technological). Additionally, since the failure to take into consideration important contextual variables has been attributed to producing misleading conclusions about the relationship between size and innovation, the author controlled for those variables (formalization, centralization, specialization, leadership, board size, and organization's age) when assessing this relationship. The results of hierarchical multiple regressions showed that although the personnel size estimates were important predictors by themselves, their significance disappeared when contextual variables were introduced. Board size and organization age were significant predictors of administrative innovations. Board size was the only significant predictor of technological innovations, as well as of a total number of innovations.

7 páginas, 3 figuras, 2 tablas ; If the size dependence of species richness varies across ecosystems, it should be reflected in the size distribution of total abundance. Using a database of phytoplankton abundance, species composition and cell size from coastal, shelf and open-ocean environments, we show that the biogeographical patterns of phytoplankton size distribution in the ocean are a result of systematic changes in the relationship between species richness and cell size. Our results indicate that, regardless of the environmental conditions, population abundance decreases consistently to the –3/4 power of cell size. By contrast, marine phytoplankton diversity peaks at small sizes in oligotrophic waters but is either a log-normal function or independent of cell size in eutrophic systems. It is argued that, operating on evolutionary time scales, size-dependent biophysical constraints for resource acquisition are reflected in the size distribution of species richness and consequently in the size structure of phytoplankton communities in the ocean. These findings indicate that the way in which biological diversity changes with body size is crucial to a better understanding of the structure and functioning of microbial plankton communities and how energy flows through pelagic ecosystems ; AMT data collection was supported by the UK Natural Environmental Research Council through the Atlantic Meridional Transect consortium (NER/O/S/2001/00680). P.C. was supported by a Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and a Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship from the European Union ; Peer reviewed

Purpose: Small state studies has emerged as a discipline, and this discipline has been initially dominated mainly by the issues of vulnerability and a lack of capacities of small states, although these issues have been gradually replaced by the discussions on the potential opportunities of small states, not just their challenges. Within this framework, the consideration needs to be done also on the effect of the state size on the economics, governance and public management, among others. Design/methodology/approach: The current theorizing in small state studies focuses on the specifics of the small economy modelling and governance. The existing economic literature has occasionally stressed the relations between the size of the state and size of government, but with rather mixed empirical results. Moreover, relations between state size and quality of governance has also been emerging issue. This study would like to integrate both approaches. The empirical research utilizes cross-national comparative investigation based on the data for 44 European states; and we specifically assess, in addition to the existing approaches, how budgetary and non-budgetary scope of government differentiates among smaller and larger states. Findings: The results of the study suggest that the effect of the size of the state does not necessary favour larger states in respect to the smaller size of government and quality of governance. Thus, although potential scale economies matter regarding the public services' provision, the structure of spending, institutional context, and innovations in public service delivery modes also have the role in shaping scope and functions of the government, whereas quality of governance seems to be independent regarding the state size, at least in the European context. Research limitations/implications: Analysis is limited to the cluster of European states, and the results should be interpreted within this context. Originality/value: After the World War II the number of states has increased substantially, in fact, it has tripled. We are currently living in the era of small states, as more than one third of the existing two hundred and more states around the globe are actually small, if we assess the multiple criteria combination. In this context, this paper would like to add to the development of the field of small state studies.

This paper uses individual level data (the Japanese General Social Survey, 2001) to examine how government size influences generalized trust. After controlling for income inequality, population mobility, city size and various individual characteristics, I found: (1) Using all samples, government size is not associated with generalized trust, and (2) After splitting the sample into worker and non-worker samples, government size does not influence generalized trust for non-workers whereas it significantly reduces generalized trust for workers. This suggests that workers, through their work experience, might confront the greater bureaucratic red tape coming from "larger government", leading to negative externality effects on the trustful relationship in the labor market.