This study examines the effect of government health care and education programs on the poor in Chile from 2000 to 2006. Results are obtained from a country-wide provincial level panel data-set with information on poverty and indigence head-count ratios, measures on the severity of poverty as captured by the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke P2 statistic, per capita public expenditures on health and educat...

Transportation networks and governments are both hierarchically organized. In some states state government finances most of the highways, while in other states similar roads are financed locally. Larger governments attain scale economies. However they also tend to be more bureaucratic and have higher operating costs, all else equal, due to problems such as span of control. This study relates hi...

While budgets for agri-environmental policy in OECD countries are rapidly increasing with current policy reforms, information about the locally varying demands for policies implemented at various levels of government remains scarce. In this study, a median voter framework is used to analyse the demand for landscape management services based on the expenditures of sub-federal governments for two...

The huge regional disparity in government health expenditures (GHE) is a major policy concern in China. This paper addresses whether provincial GHE converges in China from 1997 to 2009 using the economic convergence framework based on neoclassical economic growth theory. Our empirical investigation provides compelling evidence of long-term convergence in provincial GHE within China, but not in ...

Chowdhury (1988) adopts an alternative technique to test for causality between expenditures and receipts of state and local governments and claims that he obtains results that are different from those reported in our 1987 paper (Marlow and Manage, 1987). We disagree with many of his criticisms. In this reply, we argue that he misinterprets our results and policy implications and that his result...

What allocation strategy do hegemonic party regimes use in order to increase their level of electoral support? Although the literature has established that targeting resources to marginally supportive districts is the most effective distributive strategy for competitive democracies, it is not possible to make a clear prediction about the best strategy for hegemonic party regimes due to the lack...