Many public policies seek to promote, maintain, modify or improve collective actions. The development of a country requires actions that are complex and wide in scope. This and following texts sort out: i) two general classes of problem-situations that lack collective action; and ii) kinds of...

Problems of collective action are at the roots of several public policies and, as shown in this text, there are many mechanisms and tools to be used in order to solve those problems. Although three groups of mechanisms and tools have not been stressed in the usual debates of public policy, they...

The problem of coordination concerns how to make actions or choices of social agents (individuals or organizations) match in the right way. Some problems of coordination are also problems of separation. In many cases of lack of coordination, communication is faulty or not very reliable....

Millions of South Africans in thousands of demonstrations have protested the unequal allocation of public services. Despite the African National Congress's promise to reduce the disparities generated by apartheid, the level of public services remains highly uneven across the country. Most...

A core challenge for media economics in the digital age is to establish frameworks that neither endanger user safety nor undermine the diversity of information. Hate speech, misinformation and sensationalism must not take over, yet freedom of opinion and expression must remain intact. To bolster...

In this article, the author examines the impact of government expenditure on economic growth. A review of empirical studies shows that researchers have found a negative link between government spending and economic growth in most cases. This paper is based on yearly data between 1995 and 2020 in...

The international development debate is increasingly referring to the notion of the "social contract" - often, however, without a clear definition of the term and its implications. We therefore make a suggestion for measuring at least some elements of social contracts in order to make it easier...

Previous studies were plagued with considerable problems when interpreting and empirically analysing Wagner's Law. Therefore, we initially present some kind of "pure theory of government's share" for a two-person society based on the pure theory of public and private goods as originally...

We examine whether the Samuelsonian definition of public goods can be reconciled with "Wagner's Law", that is, public expenditures outpacing economic growth. While both predominantly focus on the demand-side, they differ with respect to their socio-political foundations. Taking the latter into...

The paper discusses implications for practice and theory of the recently completed Joint Evaluation of General Budget Support 2004-06 based on case studies in Burkina Faso, Malawi, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Uganda and Vietnam. The paper first looks at the extent to which general budget...