Suchergebnisse

Despite a long history of research on political budget cycles, their existence and magnitude are still in question. By conducting a systematic analysis of the existing literature we intend to clarify the debate. Based on data collected from over 1; 700 regressions and 57 studies, our meta-analysis suggests that leaders do manipulate fiscal tools in order to be re-elected but to an extent that is significantly exaggerated by scholars. However, we show the incumbents' strategy differs depending on which tools they leverage. Finally, we discuss in further details how authors' methodological choices and country institutions affect political budget cycles.

Using a remotely sensed pixel data set, we develop a multilevel model and propensity score weighting with multilevel data to assess the impact of protected areas on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. These techniques allow taking into account location bias, contextual bias and the dependence of spatial units. The results suggest that protected areas have slowed down deforestation between 2005 and 2009, whatever the type of governance. The results also evidence that protected and unprotected areas do not share the same location characteristics. In addition, the effectiveness of protected areas differs according to socioeconomic and environmental variables measured at municipal level.

International audience Over the last decade, distance-based methods have been introduced and then improved in the field of spatial economics to gauge the geographic concentration of activities. There is a growing literature on this theme including new tools, discussions on their specific properties and various applications. However, there is currently no typology of distance-based methods. This paper fills that gap. The proposed classification helps understand all the properties of distance-based methods and proves that they are variations on the same framework.

Several research institutions have forecast that global economic growth this year will be slow and weak, as in the past few years. Key contributing factors are China's rebalancing process, the US monetary policy normalization, and slowdowns in emerging market economies (EMEs). Korea is not an exception. The country has been recording minus growth in exports for 16 consecutive months. Of particular concern are the shipbuilding and shipping industries, which are the backbone of the Korean economy, and have been showing extremely poor performance during the last couple of years due to deficient global demand and excessive supply. The total amount of loans provided by government-run banks to major companies in the shipbuilding and shipping industries reaches over 20 trillion won. Since this could give rise to financial instability, the Korean government, at this stage, is considering "Korean Quantitative Easing". Korean Quantitative Easing (QE) differs from QE in the US. In the case of Korean QE, the central bank buys bad debts from government-run banks and gives out loans to insolvent companies or the government.