s tructural change is defined as a change in the relative weight of the important constituents of the macro-economic indicator such as production, taxes, imports and exports, workforce etc. since the structure change is one of the main reasons for the growth and economic development of countries, the investigation of the trend of changes in economic important constituents is important. tax as a...

Article history: Received 6 February 2009 Received in revised form 10 August 2009 Accepted 9 September 2009 Available online 30 September 2009 JEL classification: D71 D72 F53 H11

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense of this observation, featuring fiscal decentralization, local governments as custodians of land use ...

Analysis of the economic effects of constitutional rules has made substantial progress over the last decade. This survey provides an overview of this rapidly growing research area and also discusses a number of methodological issues and identifies underresearched areas. It argues that the next logical step of Positive Constitutional Economics is to endogenize constitutional rules. JEL classific...

the authors examine the effects of government expenditure on economic growth in iran, using annual data for the period of 1973-2003. in this paper, they lookat the offects of human, physical capital, and government budget on gdp. in the model developed in this paper, accumulation of human capital is dependent on physical. human capital, and government budget as well. the result indicate that go...

In this paper we present a generalization of power indices which includes the preferences of the voters. Using a Multilinear Extension perspective (Owen, 1972a) we measure the probability of the players’ voting ’yes’ for a particular political issue. Further, we randomize the issues and show the influence that the Agenda Setter can have on a player’s power. We demonstrate these results using da...

In the presence of spillovers, decentralized provision of local public goods may lead to a higher surplus than centralized provision even though localities have identical preferences. Indeed, free-riding costs associated to decentralization can be lower than the costs of rent-seeking and influence activities under centralization. Actually, centralization yields a higher level of regional surplu...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms – privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization– as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main finding is a strong empirical relationship from reforms to FDI, in particular, from financial liberalizati...

In a second best environment, the optimal policy choice sometimes follows first best rules, as described in a number of scattered works. This paper presents a formal general argument which allows to unify much of the literature. It lays down the information structure and separability assumptions under which the results hold in a variety of setups, with extensions to preference heterogeneity and...

Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters’ ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holdin...