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A view prominently expounded is that the interaction between the composition and the volume of public expenditures is directly affected by political, institutional, psephological and ideological indicators. A crucial component of public expenditures, social expenditures play an important role in the economy as they directly and indirectly affect the distribution of income and wealth. Social expenditures aim at reallocating income and wealth unequal distribution. These expenditures comprise cash benefits, direct in-kind provision of goods and services, and tax breaks with social purposes. The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between political structure, i.e. government fragmentation, ideological composition, elections and so on, and the social expenditures in Greece. Employing data from the Comparative Political Dataset (CPDS) and the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX), a time series analysis was conducted for Greece for the 1980-2014 period. The findings of the study indicate that voter turnout, spending on the elderly population and the number of government changes have positive and statistically significant effects on social expenditures in Greece while debt stock and cabinet composition have negative effects.

In recent years there has been growing evidence of a reversal of earlier privatizations at the municipal level. We use data on over 800 cases of re-municipalization worldwide to examine propositions drawn from theory on the choice between public versus private sector delivery and policy implementation. We find that sectors with strong network characteristics are associated with lower probabilities of implementation. Also, it takes longer to implement re-municipalization policies in network sectors. On the other hand, re-municipalization is more likely to be implemented and implemented faster in the case of personal services including health and education. The results do not find that greater clarity about re-municipalization policy is associated with the level of implementation. There is some support for the hypothesis that the quality of government is positively associated with the probability of implementing policy but not the time taken to complete the task. However, other institutional factors such as legal traditions are found to be significant determinants of policy implementation and its finalization. The great recession was found to have increased the probability of implementing reforms and there is some evidence of faster implementation in the post-recession period. However, we fail to find evidence that policy implementation is more efficient over time and policy learning in this regard is not evident.

The objective of this paper is to test the hypotheses that Governance in small states differs from that of larger countries and that this conclusion can be applied to high-income as well as low-income small states. The paper utilizes three international indicators of governance, namely the Worldwide Governance Indicators, the Corruption Perception Index and the Legal System and Property Rights Index (one of the indices of the Economic Freedom of the World Indicators). These particular three indices were used because they cover a large number of countries, including many small states. This subject is important due to the fact that a fifth of politically independent states are small ones, with a population of 2 million or less. Many of these states are also islands, located in the Caribbean region, the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Six of the 28 member states of the European Union are such small states. In addition, the small island states located in the Pacific and Indian Ocean have vast Exclusive Economic Zones under their jurisdiction. The manner in which these states are governed is therefore of utmost importance for global governance. This paper consists of five sections. Following this introduction, Section 2 presents a brief literature review. Section 3 describes the methodology to be used for deriving the results presented in Section 4. The final chapter discusses some implications of the results. ; peer-reviewed