scholarly journals Fiscal Centralization, Limited Government, and Public Revenues in Europe, 1650-1913

Author(s):  
Mark Dincecco
2009 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Dincecco

Old Regime polities typically suffered from fiscal fragmentation and absolutist rule. By the start of World War I, however, many such countries had centralized institutions and limited government. This article uses a new panel data set to perform a statistical analysis of political regimes and public revenues in Europe from 1650 to 1913. Panel regressions indicate that centralized and limited regimes were associated with significantly higher revenues than fragmented and absolutist ones. Structural break tests also suggest close relationships between major turning points in revenue series and political transformations.


Author(s):  
Michael Klein

Infrastructure services in energy, transport, water, and telecommunications services underpin the wealth of modern nations. Yet inefficiencies abound. In developing nations hundreds of millions of people lack access to modern infrastructure services. Globally, as much as 40 percent of expenditures on infrastructure may constitute waste, equivalent to some 1 to 2 percent of global GDP. Natural monopoly features and sunk costs provide incentives for the parties to infrastructure ventures to play ransom games. Particularly in developing economies prices are often well below cost. Hence investors shy away and access remains limited. Government involvement in project choice and implementation may lead to ‘white elephants’ and mismanagement. Where head-to-head competition can be introduced, such as in modern telecommunications systems, the syndrome can be kept in check. Yet where such competition is not feasible, policymaking and inevitable price and quality regulation remain a challenge, requiring patient effort at arm’s-length from day-to-day political pressures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Tobias Arnold ◽  
Sean Mueller ◽  
Adrian Vatter

Abstract Over the past decades, decentralization has become the new paradigm in how states should organize power territorially. Carefully planned institutional re-designs are the most visible expression thereof. Yet the Great Recession of 2007–2009 has pushed governments into the opposite direction, i.e., towards centralization, to better weather the fiscal drought. Given these contradictory developments, this article compares the effects of twenty-three separate state reforms with the impact of the Great Recession on fiscal centralization in twenty-nine countries over more than two decades. In the main, our analyses attribute a larger effect to design, i.e., pro-active policy making through reforms, than reactive crisis management after a great shock. However, this difference is only apparent once we consider a state’s institutional structure, that is whether a political system is unitary or federal. Our findings thus highlight the need for a multidimensional approach to better understand the drivers of fiscal de/centralization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Van Schoelandt

AbstractLibertarianism upholds individual liberty as of primary political importance. The concern for liberty leads to support for highly limited government, and sometimes even anarchism. Sometimes people come under the mistaken impression that libertarians have such a myopic concern for individual liberty that they must oppose social rules and social order. While that is too extreme, libertarianism does seem to have significant tensions with social rules, and the role of social rules within libertarianism is complex and contentious. This work aims to bring out some of this complexity and to clarify the important place of social rules in libertarian thought.


Author(s):  
Cosimo Magazzino ◽  
Marco Mele

AbstractThis paper shows that the co-movement of public revenues in the European Monetary Union (EMU) is driven by an unobserved common factor. Our empirical analysis uses yearly data covering the period 1970–2014 for 12 selected EMU member countries. We have found that this common component has a significant impact on public revenues in the majority of the countries. We highlight this common pattern in a dynamic factor model (DFM). Since this factor is unobservable, it is difficult to agree on what it represents. We argue that the latent factor that emerges from the two different empirical approaches used might have a composite nature, being the result of both the more general convergence of the economic cycles of the countries in the area and the increasingly better tuned tax structure. However, the original aspect of our paper is the use of a back-propagation neural networks (BPNN)-DF model to test the results of the time-series. At the level of computer programming, the results obtained represent the first empirical demonstration of the latent factor’s presence.


ORDO ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (70) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Cameron Harwick ◽  
Hilton Root

AbstractThis paper draws a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and ‘rationalist’ legal orders on the basis of the implied political strategy. We argue that the West’s solution to the paradox of governance – that a government strong enough to protect rights cannot itself be restrained from violating those rights – originates in certain aspects of the feudal contract, a confluence of aspects of communitarian Germanic law, which enshrined a contractual notion of political authority, and rationalistic Roman law, which supported large-scale political organization. We trace the tradition of strong but limited government to the conflict between factions with an interest in these legal traditions – nobles and the crown, respectively – and draw limited conclusions for legal development in non-Western contexts.


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