Governments have paid great attention to the results of happiness research. In many countries, the object of government policy is no longer taken to be development in terms of raising GNP. Their focus has shifted to a National Index of Happiness. This paper analyses whether such an aggregate Happiness Index is a better guide to development than GNP or other indices of development. We argue that...

This paper develops an approach to political equilibrium in a twoparty setting. The approach characterizes political resource allocation as trading o¤ the utility of core party supporters and swing voters, i.e. those who are not attached to either party. The model has three stages. First parties determine their electoral strategies. Second, an election is held. Third, policy is chosen. To illus...

The production, sale and use of alcohol has proliferated since the first recordings of alcohol use in the middle ages. Today, alcohol is consumed by over 2 billion people, with global sales of alcoholic beverages in excess of $US967 billion (year 2005 value). Alcohol has many positive features, including individual pleasure to the drinker; a lubricant in the context of socializing and celebrati...

The word ‘planning’ is often used to denote the technical elaboration of the means needed for the implementation of a policy which is considered as already given. This use of the word, however, obscures an important element in the concept of planning: far from being given a priori, an economic policy needs itself to be planned or, shall we say, designed. Some of the principal problems connected...

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the most important objectives of monetary policy are to provide price stability, economic growth and favorable employment levels. since achieving these goals is not directly accessible for policy makers, so introducing and studying the appropriate tools and intermediate targets seem necessary. for this reason, this paper tries to answer this question: whether can we introduce an appropriate rul...

in the previous article written by the author of this paper we saw that economic principles governing  legislation policy in the field of copyright make legislator enact efficient laws and regulations on copyright and prevent him to enact contrary regulations in the same fields. the previous article considered three economic principles and now this article tries to examine two economic principl...

We study the cyclical behavior of fiscal policy to explain why some countries exhibit pro-cyclical fiscal policy stances–being expansionary in good times and contractionary in bad times. We develop a model that links the polarization of preferences over fiscal spending to the pro-cyclicality bias. We then present evidence that social polarization as measured by income inequality and educational...

In this paper we develop an economic growth model that includes anthropogenic climate change. We include a publicly funded research sector that creates new technologies and simultaneously expands the productivities of existing technologies. The environment is affected by R&D activities both negatively, through the increase of output from productivity growth, as well as positively as new technol...