The Australian baby bonus offering parents $3,000 on the birth of a new child was announced on May 11 2004. The availability of five years of birth data following the introduction of the baby bonus allows for a more comprehensive analysis of the policy implications than is current in the...

This paper provides evidence for the effectiveness of performance pay to government workers and how performance pay interacts with demand-side information. In an experiment covering 145 child day-care centres, I implement three separate treatments. First, I engineer an exogenous change in...

Assuming that families and educators should educate children with regard to the consumption and use of new technologies, and policy-makers will need to act accordingly to protect vulnerable children , we provide evidence of the time that children aged between 10 and 12 years old dedicate to two...

The main idea of liberalism – the inviolability of “inalienable human rights” – is considered in a historical context, not as an eternal principle, but as a changing moral and legal norm. It is argued that the economic success of the West during the transition to capitalism is associated...

This article examines the relationship between nomenklatura membership, wealth accumulation and political ties across the post-Soviet region from the 1990s up to the mid-2010s. It introduces the Post-Soviet Oligarchs (PSO) dataset, containing the sociodemographic characteristics of the...

The political system in China is often referred to as political meritocracy. This study develops a simple model of political economy to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a meritocratic system (in which political meritocrats design economic policies) relative to a democratic system...

In social sciences there has been a long debate between the defenders of institutionalism and those of liberalism. The debate has centered around the relationship that exists between the individual (agent) and the social institutions (social structure). In general, liberalism defends that the...

India is a large, heterogeneous and complex nation, with multiple languages, religions and ethnicities, and over one billion people. It stands out in having held together while sustaining a working democracy for over five decades, at relatively low levels of income. One of the main institutional...

This paper examines India’s federal system in the context of prospects for India’s future economic growth and development. After a brief review of India’s recent policy reforms and economic development outcomes, and of the country’s federal institutions, the analysis focuses on the major...

The paper approaches the problem of differentiation of strategies implemented by individual countries in the institutional competition for foreign investments by looking at the experience of Kazakhstan. It basically focuses on the contradiction between political bias and political survival...