This paper is a part of a wider research concerning taxation in the main world economic areas, carried on at the Department of Public economic on the University of Pvia, Italy, directed by L. Bernardi and P. Profeta, under the supervision of Vito Tanzi. The paper illustrates and discusses the...

Child malnutrition is a pervasive problem in sub-Saharan Africa that affects individual and national development. This article examines the impact of participation in village savings and loan (VSL) groups, alone and in combination with a rotating labor scheme called Ajuda Mútua (AM), on...

Pre-election polls sometimes fail to reach the purpose for which they are carried out: to provide accurate predictions of electoral out-comes. By looking at the 2006 Italian General Elections, this paper aims to assess the role that different factors play in determining the accuracy of the...

South and East Asia are a particularly fast developing world economic areas, and are becoming increasingly more economically integrated. These countries, however, are not homogenous, and are lacking in any supra - national Authority. The total fiscal pressure of South and East Asian countries...

We conduct two large-scale randomised experiments on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to study methods of reducing panel attrition. The first experiment compares different strategies for tracing and maintaining contact with sample members. We find that change-of-address cards...

The paper discusses the main aspects of taxation in South and East Asia. Particolar attention is given to the main issues which emerge from the tax systems of China, India, Japan, Malysia, South Korea and Thailand

The overall sample design for Understanding Society has been described in an earlier working paper in this series (Lynn 2009). This paper describes the special measures taken to boost the sample of members of five key minority ethnic groups in Great Britain. A new method was developed to...

Complex planning procedures often amplify the difference in investment time between generation and transmission. In this work we consider a transmission project in Italy and, relying on a recently proposed methodology, we compare costs and benefits of anticipating the planning process before the...

Smoking, like many health-related behaviors, has "social" aspects. The smoking habits of my neighbors are likely to shape my own smoking habits, due to what is known in economics as “peer effects”. These complementarities in behavior may result from emulation, joint consumption, conformism,...