This paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long-run government spending: Wagner's Law and different variants of the ratchet effect. We analyze data spanning from the early 19th century until the present day in Sweden and the United Kingdom....

In 1974 Britain elected a Labour government pledged to expand public spending significantly. Labour followed its programme for two years, but after that began to cut both government spending and taxation, anticipating the post-1979 Conservative agenda. This paper examines the history of this...

Many state and local government officials seem bedazzled by visions of tourists paying for entertainment and leisure attractions in such magnitude that significant economic development benefits will flow from these “smokestack-less” businesses. Public officials turn to a variety of public...

The government's 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review was anything but comprehensive. The cuts to government spending were modest, and large swathes of state activity were barely touched. Britain will remain a heavily regulated, high-tax, high-spend economy. Instead of totally reviewing the...

This paper discusses the role which (funded) defined benefit private sector occupational pension schemes play in national pensions in a sub-group of OECD countries. The paper shows that in the majority of countries under consideration statutory (state) pension schemes are the main if not only...

This paper aims to study the distribution of fiscal power between the legislature and the executive in each of the 70 countries analysed - by comparing Legislative Budget Institutions of 70 countries. This paper also provide practical insights for developing financial strategies that would...

We leverage on important findings in social psychology to build a behavioral theory of protest vote. An individual develops a feeling of resentment if she loses income over time while richer people do not, or if she does not gain as others do, i.e. when her relative deprivation increases. In...

The Defence Preparations Act 1951 was conceived as a solution to an ideological as much as the constitutional dilemma the Menzies government faced as a result of the inflationary crisis of 1950-51. Drawing on Cabinet Notebooks, we argue that the government used the Act to facilitate peacetime...