The past three years have seen major changes in India's economic policies marking a new phase in India's development strategy. The broad thrust of the new policies is not very different from the changes being implemented in other developing countries and also all over the erstwhile socialist world. They aim at reducing the extent of Government controls over various aspects of the domestic econo...

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

• • The views expressed in this report are those of the authors. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The report synthesizes the evidence and theoretical predictions regarding the potential of several leading medical malpractice reform ideas to positively affect the performance of the medical liability system and its impact on health care delivery. For most reforms, the report analyzes evidence from well‐designed...

The allocation of production across firms is a potentially important explanation of the productivity gap between rich and poor economies. Reforms to trade policy and the domestic financial sector are often both key elements of policy packages aimed at reducing productive distortions. However, the impact of each reform in reallocating production within an economy is usually analysed independentl...

This paper investigates the determinants of political support for the privatization of education in the UK. The electorate is assumed to apply cost-benefit calculations, depending on their circumstances; a set of criteria for evaluating educational reforms is linked to individual voters' characteristics. It is then possible to identify which voters would oppose or advocate educational reforms s...

Driven by high government deficits and an unevenly distributed tax burden, recent debates on economic policy have revolved mostly around reforms in the American tax codes. Consumption tax reforms are considered to circumvent the efficiency-equity tradeoff that other reforms might encounter. This paper studies long run consequences of changing to a consumption tax regime, as well as short run we...