Based on a panel data model this paper investigates whether the effects of fiscal policy on national saving in Europe have changed after the Maastricht Treaty came into force. Recently Giavazzi, Jappelli and Pagano (2000) found evidence that national saving responds nonlinearly to fiscal policy...

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a non-parametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

Estimations of the shadow economies for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing countries is 38.7%, in 28 transition...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e., the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...

This paper investigates the relationship between the size of government and economic growth in OECD countries in 1960–2000. The underlying idea is that government expenditures on public goods basically have a positive effect on growth, but this growth effect tends to decline or even reverse...

In this paper we use plant level data on the start-up size of new plant entries and detailed information on the grants received by such plants in order to investigate whether grant receipt encourages plants to start-up with more employment than without support. The data relate to manufacturing...

Being of crucial importance for agricultural production and also having experienced significant price volatility, phosphate and its future availability have drawn growing at-tention from both academics and the public over the last years. This paper overviews the recent literature and data on the...

Food security in China affects the livelihood and well-being of one-fifth of the world population. Climate change is now affecting agriculture and food production in every country of the world. Here the authors present the IMPACT model results on yield, production, and net trade of major crops...

This research paper analyzes the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity in quantity terms, value of production in monetary terms and food security in India. The study undertook state wise analysis based on secondary data for the duration of 1980 to 2009. Climate variation affects...

Global climate change presents long-term risks to agriculture. In general, global climate change is expected to positively affect Russian agriculture. In high and middle latitudes, global warming would expand the growing season. Acreages of agricultural crops may expand toward the north,...