The demand for transparency: An empirical note

By encouraging socially wasteful rent seeking and corruption, natural resources abundance might not be a blessing but a country’s curse. A recent attempt to impede these practices of corruption with theft is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The purpose of this organization is to verify and fully publish company payments and government revenues from oil, gas, and mining. Using a probit estimation technique the paper analyses empirically the political and socio-economic factors which determine a country’s participation in EITI, which can be interpreted as revealed willingness to reform.     

Bargaining Power of Smaller States in Germany's Länderfinanzausgleich 1979–90

In this paper we explore the impact of politicalfactors on redistribution across the states in theGerman Länderfinanzausgleich. From a public choiceperspective the smaller states are supposed to have ahigher influence on decisions in the secondlegislative chamber due to a lower shadow price oftheir votes, which implies a higher bargaining power.As the federal government's policy depends on amajority in the second chamber there is an incentiveto buy smaller states' votes. Controlling for GDP percapita, we find statistically significant support forour hypotheses.     

A race to liberalization? Diffusion of economic policy reform among OECD-economies

Most OECD economies witnessed a liberalization of economic policies over the past thirty years. The present paper examines to what extent this development is caused by domestic political and economic factors on the one hand, and international policy diffusion via competitive interaction of governments on the other. Employing a comprehensive index of economic reform it can be shown that policy diffusion is a driving factor for economic liberalization. Especially in the fields of regulatory, monetary and trade policies we find significant interdependence of policy choices, as suggested by theories of policy diffusion.