Expectations regarding the future state of the public finances are vital for public policy formation. The UK experience has been that forecasts of the PSBR have been beset with problems since the mid-1980s. Independent assessments of the accuracy and plausibility of public finance forecasts are...

Non-domestic rates are a tax that is formally levied on the occupiers of nondomestic property in the United Kingdom. This does not imply that it is only the occupiers of business and other non-domestic property who are made worse off by the imposition of ‘business rates’. Some or all of the...

A key dimension of differentiation between health care systems concerns the relative role of the public and private sectors in delivering care. Even in countries, such as Britain, that have relied on a national health care system for 50 years, there has always been an active private sector,...

This rejoinder contrasts a Keynesian approach for explaining unemployment in Germany's eastern region with a neoclassical, market-failure approach advanced by Christian Merkl and Dennis Snower. A skewed distribution of headquarters favoring the western region, combined with insufficient levels...

'Market adoption' is often blamed for inducing precipitous decline in East Germany's comparatively inefficient economy. Government transfers and private sector investments contributed toward income and investment equalization between the east and west of Germany. But the price East Germany paid...

This paper seeks to establish that contributions to regional theory advanced by Gunnar Myrdal exhibit high levels of explanatory power when clarifying challenges facing Germany's eastern region since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Myrdal's evolutionary institutionalist contribution is contrasted...