BACKGROUND The Millennium Development Goals call for a 75% reduction in maternal mortality between 1990 and 2015. Skilled birth attendance and emergency obstetric care, including Caesarean section, are two of the most important interventions to reduce maternal mortality. Although international pressure is rising to increase donor assistance for essential health services in developing countries,...

A consensus exists that rising income levels and technological development are among key drivers of total health spending. Determinants of public sector health expenditure, by contrast, are less well understood. This study examines a complex relationship across government health expenditure (GHE), sociopolitical risks, and international aid, while taking into account the impacts of national inc...

In a recent article Chen et al. (2005) analyse the role of government expenditure in an imperfectly competitive static model, introducing a government-expenditure externality through the production function. Our purpose in the present paper is to argue that the claim from the authors that their model generates an endogenous markup is in our view incorrect. We argue that their model does not con...

In June 2003, the Koizumi administration created the "Trinity Reform Package." In this context, "trinity" means the decentralization reform process that involves three factors: local tax, local allocation tax grant and national government disbursement. There is, however, a missing link in the reform. This is local bond, which is one of major revenue source for local governments. In particular, ...

This study aims at examining the role of coalition parties on local government expenditure. The are comprised several that support regional head in government. Specifically, this focuses two important aspects expenditure: education and health research question is “Does have a significant effect expenditure?”. independent variable elected heads. dependent expenditure, which consists expenditures...

Most analyses of government budgets and their differential impacts on women and men tend to focus on the expenditure side of the budget, with very little attention being given to the revenue side. It is usually assumed that government expenditure has a greater direct impact than revenue in addressing issues such as poverty and inequality. However, the revenue side of the budget, and specificall...

This paper analyses the effects of discretionary fiscal policy by presenting new empirical evidence for Germany within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Following Blanchard and Perotti (2002), the SVAR model is identified by applying institutional information. We find no compelling evidence for the effectiveness of discretionary fiscal policy. Cutting taxes does not tend to s...

Most analyses of government budgets and their differential impacts on women and men tend to focus on the expenditure side of the budget, with very little attention being given to the revenue side. It is usually assumed that government expenditure has a greater direct impact than revenue in addressing issues such as poverty and inequality. However, the revenue side of the budget, and specificall...

In this paper I analyze the impact of increasing government infrastructure investment by using existing large foreign exchange reserves in a fully optimizing model matching the Chinese economy. Even though the private investment falls in the nontradable sector, real expenditure and money balance decrease in the short run, the infrastructure investment greately enhances the efficiency and produc...