This paper focuses on the political economy of policy reform in post-socialist countries. It investigates the impact of institutions on economic transformation processes and seeks to develop and empirically test a concept of governance that will strengthen policy reforms and make them sustainable. By arguing that effective policy reforms require an adequate politico-institutional foundation, th...

The paper considers two countries each populated by workers and capitalists and equipped with a government that collects taxes to nance productive expenditure and income redistribution. The share of income redistributed de nes the size of the welfare state. Both groups in each country bene t from an abolition of the welfare state in the long run. Nevertheless, the optimal scal policy in autarky...

OBJECTIVES To examine whether the Health System Reforms delivered the promise of being a coherent and mutually supporting reform programme; to identify the underlying programme theory of the reform programme; to reflect on whether lessons have been learned. METHODS Documentary analysis mapping the implicit and explicit programme theories about how the reforms intended to achieve its goals and...

Major issues and challenges encountered in modeling and analyzing agricultural and trade policy reforms are reviewed. We focus on modeling approach, and pay special attention to the type and scope of models, calibration of a realistic baseline scenario, representation of the reform agreement, use of extra-model information, choice of metrics to measure reform impacts, and emerging issues in pol...

I develop a quantitative, dynamic general equilibrium model of life cycle behavior to study the effects of several policy reforms on assets composition over the life cycle, wealth distribution and aggregate saving. Privatizing social security increases aggregate saving, decreases overall wealth inequality, and generates large welfare gain, especially for agents with high initial productivity. L...

This chapter first presents and summarises results from recent analytical literature, explaining the implications of different policy menus to abate pollution in a small, polluted, competitive economy opening to world trade. This situation is consistent with the stylised facts of many developing economies evolving in a global marketplace and with emerging environmental concerns. The context of ...

Barry Eichengreen’s paper pushed me to take a different look at the crisis and I encourage everyone to read the paper carefully . I will separate these very brief remarks into three parts . First, I will review his basic observations, concentrating on what I see as his more novel points . Next I will present one picture that informs my thinking on the role of global imbalances in the crisis . F...

Of the many studies estimating effectiveness of policy reforms most have been considering various types of policy reforms in isolation from each other. Such pattern has also been the case in water resource regulations. In the case of groundwater almost all policy interventions considered in the literature have been implemented individually, without taking into account the possible interactions ...

This chapter reviews the evidence on the potential effect of pro-growth structural reforms on wage dispersion and household income inequality and examines whether specific policies driving GDP growth over the past decades may have also contributed to widening inequalities. In doing so, it distinguishes between the main channels via which policies affect growth and income distribution and identi...