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Switzerland has a tradition of decentralised government, decentralised tax setting and direct reference to the voters through referendums. Such mechanisms should give rise to lower taxes, better provision of public goods and higher economic growth. However, these mechanisms have not been effective in the last 30 years at preventing the growth in government spending and centralisation. This is partly because of the consensus in favour of centralisation that exists among institutionalised politicians. The performance of the Swiss economy since 1970 has consequently been dismal. Real per capita post‐tax incomes have been stagnant. There is now an opportunity for the growth of centralisation to be reversed.

In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any other country. We develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain these parallel trends in technology growth and cost growth. We show that health care productivity depends on the heterogeneity of treatment effects across patients, the shape of the health production function, and the cost structure of procedures such as MRIs with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. The model implies a typology of medical technology productivity: (I) highly cost-effective "home run" innovations with little chance of overuse, such as anti-retroviral therapy for HIV, (II) treatments highly effective for some but not for all (e.g., stents), and (III) "gray area" treatments with uncertain clinical value such as ICU days among chronically ill patients. Not surprisingly, countries adopting Category I and effective Category II treatments gain the greatest health improvements, while countries adopting ineffective Category II and Category III treatments experience the most rapid cost growth. Ultimately, economic and political resistance in the United States to ever-rising tax rates will likely slow cost growth, with uncertain effects on technology growth. (JEL H51, I11, I18, O31)

A theoretical analysis of the properties of conservative, liberal, & radical paradigms in social science & their application to the growth/no-growth debate in environmental policy literature. Conservatives were found to be working with an evolutionary model of society, suggesting that environmental problems are imperfections to be remedied by science, technology, & the free market. Liberals recognize the benefits & costs of growth, & articulate ways to minimize the costs through state regulation & planning. Radicals argue for state ownership of the means of production & new cultural values about growth as the only effective environmental policies. The future of the growth debate in terms of these paradigms is discussed. HA.

The Unified Growth Theory is receiving increasing attention from growth theorists since the seminal work of Galor and Weil (1999, 2000). These authors emphasize the need for a unified theory of growth that could account for the transition from Malthusian Stagnation to the Modern Growth Regime (1999). This interest is motivated by the lack of explanation and knowledge regarding the historical evolution of the relationship among population growth, technological change and the standard of living. This paper gives an overview of the Unified Growth Theory, its determinants and its implications.

SummaryFive arguments in favour of a growth area strategy have been analysed and though all of them lack empirical substance, they have certain merits on a priori grounds. Thus any policy which contributes, on the long‐run, to a more rapid concentration of a region's population into relatively large urban areas, is likely to create the conditions for servicing net and replacement demand for social/economic overhead capital at a low per capita cost. Moreover for a given subsidy cost, discriminatory investment in the dense, complex, urbanised areas of a region may maximise the flow of income to regional earners in the short‐run: attract the maximum flow of exogenous enterprise and capital; and give the best chance of creating a new export base which reduces the regional balance‐of‐payments deficit and provides sufficient job‐opportunities to restrain the flow out of the region of the economically active. In addition, the quality and content of shortterm regional planning may be improved if the mix and scheduling of public investment over time is given a rigorous spatial dimension. Thus, on all of these counts, there are convincing reasons for encouraging an especially rapid development of the relative large, dense interrelated urban areas and by contrast good reasons for a relative neglect of the small hinterland areas.

"We study the impact of information and communication technology on growth through its impact on organization and innovation. Agents accumulate knowledge through two activities: innovation (discovering new technologies) and exploitation (learning how to use the current technology). Exploitation requires the development of organizations to coordinate the work of experts, which takes time. The costs and benefits of such organizations depend on the cost of communicating and acquiring information. We find that while advances in information technology that lower information acquisition costs always increase growth, improvements in communication technology may lead to lower growth and even to stagnation, as the payoff to exploiting innovations through organizations increases relative to the payoff of new radical innovations"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

The paper analyzes the recent growth dynamics in China, evaluating both cyclical positions and long-term growth prospects. The analysis shows that financial cycles play a more important role than traditional inflation-based cycles in shaping the dynamics of growth. Currently, the 'finance-neutral' gap-our measure of the financial cycle-is large and positive, reflecting imbalances accumulated in the economy since the Global Financial Crisis. A period of slower growth is therefore both likely and needed in the near term to restore the economy to equilibrium. In the medium term, growth will slow

Mexico's financial system today enjoys the resilience that can only be gained through a decades-long rollercoaster ride. Things went from boom to bust in the seventies and eighties, followed by a foreign debt crisis and repeated devaluations, then more inflation, then renewed growth and soaring trade in the early years of this century thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico took a particularly severe buffeting in the international financial crisis, not because of any inherent weakness in the financial system but because the high degree of trade integration with the United States magnified the impact. But sound economic policies have helped pull the country back on track. Now financial institutions are looking for robust excellent growth. Adapted from the source document.

International audience ; The question of SME growth has been a concern of scholars, managers, practitioners and governments for a long time. The reality of growth appears to be multi-dimensional (Davidsson and Wiklund, 2006) and its determinants and measurements, especially in small businesses, have always presented a significant challenge for researchers. Hindering growth requires a good knowledge of the causes, the effects and the processes of development. Current studies on the firm's growth suggest that it is fundamental to develop integrative and comprehensive approaches of growth. More precisely, research on business growth tend to focus on entrepreneurial orientation, environmental characteristics, firm's resources and manager's personal attitudes towards growth (Wiklund and al., 2009). It also points out a need to study the influence of entrepreneurial decision making and entrepreneurial growth intention on the business growth (Achtenhagen and al., 2010). This research is an attempt to make some progress in the understanding of the SME's growth by using an integrative model of influences that allows envisaging the simultaneous influences of the firm's growth profiles (the firm's affiliation to one of the growth paths obtained in a statistical typology) and the CEO's behavior on the growth rate (in terms of