Measurement of both federalism and decentralization has been contentious. We introduce three new indicators reflecting important aspects of both federalism and decentralization. The three new indicators are the result of principal component analysis. When we try to identify their main...

Transparency in government actions strengthens the relationship between government and society. The goal of the present study was to ascertain the level of transparency of administrative information in the south of Brazil. This descriptive study, which employed statistical methodology, found a...

The economic effects of federalism are unclear: some papers find that federalism has strong positive effects on a number of economically relevant variables, others find negative effects. The results often crucially hinge upon the proxies for federalism used. In this paper, we critically survey...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Most of the results of the former intra-country studies could be confirmed. On the basis of some 30 countries, a higher degree of direct democracy leads to lower total...

The economic slow-down of several States in India including Gujarat during the later half of 90s has caused considerable disturbance in the State's fiscal equilibrium. The fiscal deficit has more than doubled during last five years and government's debt has jumped up from 17 percent of GSDP to...

This study contains further evidence on the economic effects of direct democratic institutions. A first study found that countries with national initiatives have higher government expenditure and are characterized by more rent-seeking activity, that the effects of direct democratic institutions...

This is the first study that assesses the economic effects of direct democratic institutions on a cross country basis. Its results are based on up to six new measures produced to reflect the legislative basis for using direct democratic institutions as well as their factual use. In addition, a...

The present paper aims at assessing the possible efficiency of the principle of national contributions, assumed in the 2015 Paris Framework Convention on Climate Change. Strong historical evidence indicates that any significant development of constitutional states used to take place, in the...

Hace un año, un grupo heterogéneo de investigadores del Centro de Investigación de la Universidad del Pacífico (CIUP) inició un esfuerzo colectivo para pensar en el futuro de nuestra economía y sociedad más allá del corto plazo. El trabajo que presentamos a continuación resume algunas...

This article investigates and compares the root causes of transnational terrorism and piracy. In order to accomplish this, we construct a novel data set that catalogues terrorist activity and piracy over the years 1992–2008, paying particular attention to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean since...