Organized crime reinforces its corrupting influence on politics through violent intimidation. Anti-crime measures that increase the cost of corruption but not of the exercise of violence might accordingly lead mafia-style organizations to retaliate by resorting to violence in lieu of bribery. On...

This paper revisits a part of the analysis by Banerjee et al. (2020), in which they examine the consequences of the nation-wide scale up of reforms to the funds management system (e-FMS) in India's national workfare programme, using a two-way fixed effects specification. They report a...

When Covid-19 was declared as a pandemic, countries administered lockdowns and stimulus packages were announced to address the deteriorating situation. For implementing these packages, routine control measures were simplified and often relaxed. The G20 countries were quick to react by...

Organised crime tightens its corrupting influence on politics through violent intimidation. Anti-crime measures that increase the cost of corruption but not of the exercise of violence might accordingly lead mafia-style organizations to retaliate by resorting to violence in lieu of bribery. On...

In the following article, we estimate the value of Patent Applications-PA in the context of the Environmental, Social and Governance-ESG model at world level. We use data from World Bank for 193 countries in the period 2011-2021. We found that PA is positively associated, among others, to “ CO...

This paper analyses the erosion of democracy in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the perspective of political economy. We posit that the coinciding effects of political marketing and the state financing of parties represent a peculiar mix of liberal and étatist principles that...

China's national leaders see restructuring and diversification away from resourcebased, energy intensive industries as central goals in the coming years. This paper argues that the high turnover of leading cadres at the local level may hinder state-led greening growth initiatives. Frequent cadre...

We study the rent-seeking behaviour of political parties in a proportional representation system, where the final policy choice of the parliament is a weighted average of parties' policy positions, weights being their vote shares. We find that parties' policy preferences and their rent levels...

Civil service reform is one of the most intractable yet important challenges for governments and their supporters today. However, civil service reform thus far has largely failed. Based on a review of existing literature, this paper presents principles for donors, governments, and advocates to...

This paper evaluates Kenya's food price crisis over 2002 - 11 using a political economy approach. Kenya's food prices have been high and volatile relative to world food prices. Moreover, domestic food markets are highly integrated while about 30 per cent of the changes in world market prices are...