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Drug Policy and the Public Good is an objective analytical basis on which to build global drug policies. It presents the accumulated scientific knowledge on drug use in relation to policy development on a national and international level. It also presents new epidemiological data on the global dimensions of drug misuse.

"The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine marked a turning point in American foreign policy. In 1904, President Roosevelt announced that, not only were European powers not welcome in the Americas, but that the U.S. had the right to intervene in the affairs of Central American and Caribbean countries that were unstable and did not pay their debts. We use this change in U.S. policy to test Kindleberger's hypothesis that a hegemon can provide public goods such as increased financial stability and peace. Using a newly assembled database of weekly sovereign debt prices, we find that the average sovereign debt price for countries under the U.S. 'sphere of influence' rose by 74% in the year following the announcement of the policy. With the dramatic rise in bond prices, the threat of European intervention to support bondholder claims in the Western Hemisphere waned, and the U.S. was able to exert its role as regional hegemon. We find some evidence that the Corollary spurred export growth and better fiscal management by reducing conflict in the region, but it appears that debt settlements were driven primarily by gunboat diplomacy and the threat of lost sovereignty"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

In public good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of its members find it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, their inherent asymmetric nature may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informal sanctioning harder to accomplish. In this paper we experimentally investigate public good provision in normal and privileged groups with and without decentralized punishment. We find that compared to normal groups, privileged groups are relatively ineffective in using costly sanctions to increase everyone's contributions. Punishment is less targeted towards strong free-riders and they exhibit a weaker increase in contributions after being punished. Thus, we show that privileged groups are not as privileged as they initially seem.

In this paper, we study a two-country dynamic setup with environmental externalities and potential model misspecification in relation to this public good. Under model uncertainty, robust policies help to correct the inefficiencies associated with free riding on public good provision, implying that there are welfare benefits from robust policies even when the fear of model misspecification proves to be unfounded. However, the incentive to free ride on the precautionary policies of the other country may discourage the implementation of robust policies, despite their welfare superiority.

Historically, for sustaining and reproducing their economic lives, people have obtained goods and services through various ways. How did people tackle issues that the market did not handle well? This volume compares early modern efforts to provide "public goods"—defined in contraposition to market-mediated goods and goods provided through personal relations, such as kinship ties. We examine poverty and famine relief, infrastructure building, and forestry management in East Asia and Europe, using Japan's Tokugawa era (1603–1868) as a benchmark from which consider the cases in Prussia, China, and England. Taking advantage of rich scholarship on the role of autonomous village and regional society in Japan's early modern history, the volume highlights the diverse approaches to providing public goods across societies, relativizing the discussion on the formation of fiscal state drawn from the experience in "advanced" Western Europe, and it constructs the beginnings of an early modern basis for forecasting the diversity in public-goods provision future into the modern and contemporary periods.