Several recent studies have found a negative relation between government size and economic growth in rich countries. Since countries with big government have experienced above average improvements in both the Economic freedom index and the KOF globalization index, we argue that existing studies...

The Swedish system for inter-regional redistribution is examined from a political economy perspective and a growth perspective. A number of recent Swedish studies of this system are examined. Political economy concerns are found to be adequately represented in academic studies of this system,...

The term "intellectual property" is a relatively a modern term, first used in its current meaning when the UN established the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1967. Beforehand laws around the world protected various aspects of informational goods - inventions and creations -...

Using the economic freedom index and the newly developed KOF-index of globalization, it is shown that the Scandinavian welfare states have experienced faster, bigger and more consistent increases in these areas, compared to the smaller European and the so called liberal welfare states. The...

We conduct an extensive robustness analysis of the relationship between trust and growth for a later time period (the 1990s) and with a bigger sample (63 countries) than previous studies. In addition to robustness tests that focus on model uncertainty, we use Least Trimmed Squares, a robust...