The determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in politicaleconomy. Here, we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems.Having a more informed and politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governmentsto be responsive. This...

Today efficient states can be represented as sovereign authorities governing successful economies that provide high, stable and rising standards of welfare for their citizens. Such states emerged slowly and painfully over centuries of geopolitical rivalry and conflict among aristocracies for...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification forcapital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought tobe taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to benonlinear functions of income and consumption and find that, when ability...

This paper analyses three options for financing higher education:• Tax funding, as proposed by the Liberal Democrats and, more recently, the Tories.• Tax funding plus upfront charges, as at present.• Tax funding plus deferred charges, as proposed in the White Paper on highereducation...

This paper – a companion to Iain Crawford's and my earlier evidence to the SelectCommittee (Barr, 2002a,b,c,d,e; Crawford, 2002) – offers a strongly supportive assessmentof the strategy in the White Paper (Department for Education and Skills, 2003).[...]

This paper puts forward a strategy for achieving two objectives in higher education –improved access and increased quality – about which there is unanimous agreement.[...]

How do you fund university education? In the UK, the governmentplans to introduce variable fees from 2006, to be paid back after thestudent graduates, but the debate continues worldwide. What isthe best solution, offering what people want but at a realistic price?Nicholas Barr offers his...

Rather than being a handicap, the proposals to introduce top-up fees will prove aboon to students.[...]

Universities need cash, students need support and there are too few working-classentrants. After a two-year extension, Charles Clarke and the class of '73 are all set todeliver answers to these problems. Nicholas Barr offers a guide to how you, theexaminers, should mark their responses.[...]

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour Government’seducation policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that hisGovernment would make education a priority. The first part of thepaper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to theeconomy at large and within the...