Practitioners and scholars of public administration currently seem to have overcome comprehensive reform strategies and are focusing their attention on minor changes in public administration that generate short-term outcomes with lower transactional costs. In that sense, many have argued that...

OECD indicators of structural policy show that policy changes in Italy since 1998 should have improved the environment for entrepreneurship significantly, but in the same period its economic performance has deteriorated noticeably. This may be partly because there is a difference between policy...

Public sector reforms and a refocusing of spending, partly through privatisation, have created a leaner and more effective government in Mexico. Primary expenditure, at around 18 per cent of GDP in 1999, is less than half the average for the OECD. At the same time, there are important spending...

In this article we introduce and showcase how social media can be used to implement experiments in public administration research. To do so, we pre-registered a placebo-controlled field experiment and implemented it on the social media platform Facebook. The purpose of the experiment was to...

Should a social program be run at a higher or lower level of government? We consider a government-run program supplying a private good to consumers. We focus on a tradeoff between the advantage of a high level of government in resource allocation and its disadvantage in consumer information. We...

Across 69 countries, higher tax rates are associated with less unofficial activity as a percent of GDP but corruption is associated with more unofficial activity. Entrepreneurs go underground not to avoid official taxes but to reduce the burden of bureaucracy and corruption. Dodging the Grabbing...

Across 69 countries, higher tax rates are associated with less unofficial activity as a percent of GDP but corruption is associated with more unofficial activity. Entrepreneurs go underground not to avoid official taxes but to reduce the burden of bureaucracy and corruption. Dodging the Grabbing...

Volumes have been written — both by courts and commentators — about the so-called independent agencies. These agencies are thought of as distinct from executive branch agencies and constitutionally insulated from presidential influence. Yet few have taken the time to ask even the most basic...

This paper is based on the governance chapter contributions to the 2003/04 Global Competitiveness Report (GCR). Building from the 2002/03 chapter contribution to the GCR, it argues that governance continues to be at a crossroad, its underperformance being evident in most regions and across many...