Trade and Welfare Compensation: The Missing Links

This study uses theory from embedded liberalism to reorient the debate over efficiency versus compensation in the trade and welfare literature. We detail the causal mechanisms and provide empirical results that show how welfare spending can be a necessary condition to further trade liberalization. We argue that increases in welfare compensation lead to stronger public support for trade, which allows states to further advance along the path toward trade liberalization. Based on the 1995 and 2003 ISSP (International Social Survey Program) for 10 OECD countries, our multilevel statistical analyses (individual and country level) show that (1) workers in import-exposed sectors tend to strongly oppose trade, but this effect is substantially diminished when they receive unemployment compensation, and (2) public support for free trade is significantly associated with higher levels of trade openness.     

The Myth of the ‘Land-Grab'

正False reports of large-scale Chinese land acquisition in Africa highlight the flimsy evidence behind recent China-bashing China’s rapid rise has generated mixed feelings the world over,and nowhere do emotions run higher than in the debate over farmland ownership.Population growth,urbanization and higher consumer spending in China are major drivers of growth in the agro-food products industry,     

Ma Yun＇s Internet World

正AS the founder and chairman of Alibaba Group,every one of Ma Yun’s business decisions attracts attention.From spending RMB 1.2 billion on stakes in the Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club to wholly acquiring UCWeb,and to making the Initial Public Offering(IPO)in the U.S.,Ma Yun continues to make headlines with many fingers in many pies,despite     

Decentralized education spending and regional disparities: Evidence from Chinese counties 1997–2001

Chinese fiscal reforms in the past decade have recentralized government revenues, making lower governments more dependent on central and provincial funds. At the same time, decentralization in spending has obliged the county governments to take primary responsibility for financing compulsory education. That vertical imbalance can lead to widening regional gap in education if the central government does not carry out effective redistributive fiscal transfers. This paper examines a data set that includes all the counties of mainland China from 1997 through 2001 and finds that regional economic and budgetary disparities did carry over to education spending. The author would like to thank Professor Alice Cooper and the anonymous reviewers for invaluable suggestions.     

Policy responsiveness to all citizens or only to voters? A longitudinal analysis of policy responsiveness in OECD countries

A close connection between public opinion and policy is considered a vital element of democracy. In representative systems, elections are assumed to play a role in realising such congruence. If those who participate in elections are not representative of the public at large, it follows that the reliance on elections as a mechanism of representation entails a risk of unequal representation. In this paper, we evaluate whether voters are better represented by means of an analysis of policy responsiveness to voters and citizens in democracies worldwide. We construct a uniquely comprehensive dataset that includes measures of citizens’ and voters’ ideological (left–right) positions, and data on welfare spending in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries since 1980. We find evidence of policy responsiveness to voters, but not to the public at large. Since additional tests suggest that the mechanism of electoral turnout does not cause this voter-policy responsiveness, we outline alternate mechanisms to test in future research.     

Crime,cash, and limited options: Explaining the prison boom*

Research Summary An analysis of a state panel of prison populations from 1977 to 2005 shows that the best predictors of prison populations are crime, sentencing policy, prison crowding, and state spending. Prison populations grew at roughly the same rate and during the same periods as spending on education, welfare, health and hospitals, highways, parks, and natural resources. Current and lagged values of state spending on prison construction also accounted for a substantial amount of variation in subsequent prison populations. Public opinion, partisan politics, the electoral cycle, and social threats seem to have had little effect on the number of prisoners. Policy Implications The availability of publicly acceptable alternatives to incarceration may not be sufficient to reverse course. Federal funding of alternatives—but not prisons—would provide states with the financial incentive to reduce prison populations.     

Secrecy and military expenditures in the Russian budget

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a transparent method for collecting, structuring, and analyzing Russian budget data on defense and security-related expenditures. A precise answer to the question of how big Russia’s defense expenditures are is impossible because of issues concerning secrecy and accounting principles. We circumvent this challenge by constructing lower and upper bounds for Russia’s military expenditure, showing that depending on the chosen measure these have increased from the range of 10.3–31.2% of federal expenditures in 2011 to 12.9–35.4% in 2018. The analysis also yields additional insights into the concept of secrecy in the Russian budget; we show that 39 out of 96 subchapters in the Russian budget contain secret expenditures, many of which are not nominally related to defense or security, and that secret expenditures increased as a share of total expenditures from 12% to 17% between 2011 and 2019.     

Intermunicipal cooperation,public spending and service levels

ABSTRACT

Local governments can increase size in particular policy fields through cooperation with other local governments. This is often thought to improve efficiency, but there is little empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis. We study the case of the Netherlands, which has been a veritable laboratory of intermunicipal cooperation (IMC), using panel data for 2005–2013. We find no evidence that IMC reduces total spending of the average municipality. Indeed, IMC seems to increase spending in small and large municipalities, leaving spending in mid-sized municipalities unaffected. In one specific field, tax collection, spending may be reduced through IMC. Spending in this field is low, which may explain why total spending is unaffected. Instead of lowering spending, municipalities may have used possible cost savings as a result of IMC to improve public service levels. We do not find evidence substantiating this hypothesis, however.     

Unravelling Equality: The Impact of the United Kingdom's Spending Cuts on Women

This article examines a report on the likely impact of the spending cuts on women. The report, Unravelling Equality: A Human Rights and Equality Impact Assessment of the Spending Cuts on Women in Coventry, concludes that the public spending cuts will increase inequality between women and men. For some women the cuts may have serious negative effects on their human rights. The article argues that this report provides a blueprint for the kind of analysis which should be carried out all over the country to ensure that the impact of spending cuts on women is better understood and acted upon.     

Spending and cutting are two different worlds: experimental evidence from Danish local councils

This article investigates politicians’ preferences for cutting and spending. The research questions are where do politicians prefer to cut, where do they prefer to spend and how is this influenced by political ideology? These questions are investigated in a large-scale survey experiment fielded to Danish local councillors, who are randomly assigned to a decision-making situation, where the block grant provided to their municipality is either increased or reduced. The results show that the politicians’ preferences for cutting and spending are asymmetric, in the sense that the policy areas, which are assigned the least cuts when the grant is reduced, are rarely the ones which are assigned extra money when the grant is increased. Areas with well-organised interests and a target group which is perceived as deserving are granted more money, whereas policy areas where the target group is perceived as less deserving receive the highest cuts. Ideology matters as left-wing councillors prefer more vague categories when cutting and prioritise childcare and unemployment policies when increasing spending. In contrast, right-wing councillors prefer to cut administration and increase spending on roads.