End-user computers that have become infected with malware are a danger to their owners and to the Internet as a whole. Effective action to clean-up these computers would be extremely desirable, yet the incentives conspire to dissuade ISPs (and others) from acting. This paper proposes a role for government in subsidising the cost of clean-up. The organisations that tender for the government cont...

Growth of national healthcare spending is a problem confronting national governments of all industrially advanced countries. Healthcare spending in the U.S. reached 13.9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2003, compared to only 8% in Japan. In the U.S., health insurance is voluntary, with 15% of the population uninsured. In Japan, health insurance is mandatory and virtually universal, with...

This paper analyzes features of perfect taxation – also known as optimal taxation – when one or more private markets is imperfectly competitive. Governments with perfect information and access to lump-sum taxes can provide corrective subsidies that render outcomes efficient in the presence of imperfect competition. Relaxing either of these two conditions removes the government’s ability to supp...

1 million people are predicted to get infected with Lyme disease in the USA in 2018. Given the same incidence rate of Lyme disease in Europe as in the USA, then 2.4 million people will get infected with Lyme disease in Europe in 2018. In the USA by 2050, 55.7 million people (12% of the population) will have been infected with Lyme disease. In Europe by 2050, 134.9 million people (17% of the pop...

The promise of E-Government (and its more recent spin-offs of EDemocracy, E-Participation, E-Procurement, and a range of other “E-‘s”) is to engage citizenry in government in a user-centered manner, but also to develop quality government services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective. User-centered EGovernment suggests that governments will provide services and resources tailore...

Based on a panel of 24 OECD countries this present paper shows that the total government sector is contracted by Baumol’s cost disease. The most affected government services are education and healthcare. Furthermore, this paper shows that Baumol’s cost disease produces adverse consequences under a balanced budget rule such as a debt brake, which is a key element of the EU Fiscal Compact. Govern...

In the institutional context of China’s political centralization and fiscal decentralization, this study explores environmental regulations that make central local governments join efforts in air pollution control. Policy simulations an evolutionary game show best approach is to internalize costs benefits governments’ objective function. The effectiveness several policy instruments examined ind...

OBJECTIVE To provide cost guidance for developing a locally adaptable and nationally scalable community health worker (CHW) system within primary-health-care systems in sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS The yearly costs of training, equipping and deploying CHWs throughout rural sub-Saharan Africa were calculated using data from the literature and from the Millennium Villages Project. Model assumpti...

This paper offers a new explanation for why some governments consistently impose such high agricultural tax rates that their revenues decline, and consistently spend what tax revenue they have on things other than productive public investments such as agricultural R&D. We propose an intertemporal political economy model, in which taxes and R&D levels are set in a repeated game between governmen...

This paper regards the government-to-business (G2B) relationship as a principal/agent relationship with asymmetric information. It brings about monitoring costs for the government, bonding costs for the businesses and a residual loss for society. In the case of government regulation these costs can be seen as transaction costs, which can be minimized in a trust-based design of the regulation. W...