Governments can choose among various tools to leverage business research and development (R&D). They can offer direct support via grants or procurement or they can use fiscal incentives, such as R&D tax incentives. More countries are now using tax incentives than a decade ago and the schemes are more generous than ever. As of today more than 20 OECD governments provide fiscal incentives to sust...

I welcome the Comment by Didier Raoult (Jan 9, p 104), which proposes the post-Darwinist concept of the evolutionary pathway as a rhizome instead of a tree, with inheritance occurring not only vertically but also laterally. He rightly addresses how the genomic revolution has forced us to reconsider the way we describe evolution. Perhaps one of the most important unresolved issues in the study o...

We analyze the determinants of government debt under the twin assumptions that governments have limited horizons and default only when government income falls short of debt service requirements. We derive a government’s maximum sustainable debt ratio, that is, the debt ratio chosen by a myopic government whose horizon does not extend beyond its current term in office. Maximum sustainable debt v...

Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................... 2 Recent Experiences with Consolidation ...................................................................................................................... 4 Consolidation and the Costs of Delivering Government Ser...

In the scope and vision of using and expanding the types of services e-government portals can offer to citizens, one of the major challenges and possible barriers is the security concern. Unlike typical websites that include largely data to browse and download, such portals are expected to have sensitive private personal data about country citizens. The threat of possible intrusion or identity ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the current level of activity of Australian local governments in twenty-nine food and nutrition action areas and whether the level of activity had changed between 1995 and 2007. DESIGN A cross-sectional study utilising a postal survey was undertaken of all local governments in Australia. The same instrument and protocol were used in 1995 and 2007. SETTING Australian l...

We relax the standard assumption in the strategic trade policy literature that governments possess complete information about the economy. Assuming instead that governments must obtain information from firms, we examine firms’ incentive to disclose information to the governments in the Brander-Spencer setting. With quantity competition, we find firms disclosing both demand and cost information,...

— This study is the first attempt to examine the determinants of expenditure decentralization at sub-provincial levels in China. The Chinese central government gives detailed guidelines to local governments on public finance, but, ironically, their expenditure assignment is far from being well-regulated. Differences in fiscal decentralization on the expenditure side are enormous among local gov...

No one would dispute that measures to reduce smoking are one of the most effective public health initiatives that any community can deliver. Nor would they dispute that increases in the retail price of tobacco products are one of the most successful means of reducing tobacco consumption. In Canada, successive tax increases in the early 1990s drove down tobacco consumption before a concerted tob...