Volume 1 (2013): Edition 1 (December 2013)

The economic consequences of public sector oversizing have been analyzed in hundreds of scientific contributions. The empirical branch of this literature tries to measure these effects through the use of three main tools: cross-sectional analysis of countries’ samples, time-series analysis of individual economies, and panel-data analysis. Most authors conclude that the current size of the public sector is too big in their analyzed economies, thus leading to reduced output. For different reasons, however, the results of both cross-sectional and time-series analyses are open to criticism. This article aims to check the validity of the converging conclusions obtained by time-series analyses. To this end, a simultaneous-equation model is designed, which evades the critiques addressed to prior contributions. Application of this model to 24 OECD countries during the 1975-to-2007 period suggests that at least most of these have indeed let their public sector grow beyond the level that is optimum for their economic performance.

Based on the World Values Surveys 2005 data, measures of different aspects of religion are constructed and tested against various measures of democracy on a cross-national level for a set of 41 countries. The analyses reveal that there are some significant inter-linkages between the involved variables; however, the religious variables act in a nonuniform manner on the explanatory ones. We conclude that both conceptual and empirical arguments support the idea of democracy viewed as a religious dependent variable.

Globalisation is not a state of the world but an evolutionary process, which entails the increasing planetary integration of markets for goods and services, markets of location sites for economic activities, markets of production factors as technologies and information. Regions are involved in the globalization process to a different extent depending on their industrial specialization and physical accessibility from outside.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how regions most exposed to globalization face tougher competition. Distinguishing between open and closed regional economies, the paper investigates the regional performance of each type of region and identifies the most important success factors linked to growth performance patterns. The aim of the analysis is to determine whether the role played by each success factor in regional growth changes across regions with different degrees of openness to the rest of the world. Interestingly, our results do not clearly show that more open regions take advantage from particular success factors. The impact of most success factors on regional differential growth, in fact, do not change among groups of regions. A higher average regional growth rate in open regions with respect to closed ones is therefore mainly explained by the regional endowment of success factors rather than by differentiated marginal effects among groups of regions.

We explore a short run structural macroeconomic model with a focus on “the problem of financing economic development“ (Kaleçki, 1976). It is demonstrated that banks, in contrast to nonbanks, have a unique role to play in the production and circulation of commodities in a monetary economy. A case is made for class-based policy.