This book contains material that I have presented in seminars at the Universities of Bochum, Mannheim, Munich, Salerno, and Southern California at Los Angeles, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, the Max-Planck-Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, and on various international meetings and conferences. In preparing and revising the material I have benefited from comments, discussions, and advice from several colleagues. I had particularly close and friendly collaboration with Alexander Kemnitz and Robert von Weizsicker to whom I am very grateful. I am also grateful to Michele Boldrin, Axel Borsch-Supan, Friedrich Breyer, Karen Feist, Tullio Jappelli, Leo Kaas, Marco Pagano, Gerhard Schwooiauer, Carl Christian von Weizsacker, and Wolfgang Wiegard for their comments and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financial support. Mannheim, January 2002 Berthold U. Wigger Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. Public Pensions and Economic Growth: The Basic Framework . . 5 2. 1. The Analytical Elements 7 2. 1. 1. The Individuals 7 2. 1. 2. The Firms 10 2. 1. 3. The Public Pension Program 11 2. 1. 4. The Competitive Equilibrium 12 2. 2. Productivity Growth 13 2. 3. Allocative Efficiency 19 2. 4. Public Pension Reform 25 Appendix 2 . . . . . . 30 3. The Allocative Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Endogenous Growth Economies 33 3. 1. Investment Externalities, Intergenerational Transfers, and Pareto-improvements . . . . . . . 35 Contents x 3. 1. 1. A Subsidy to Private Savings 35 3. 1. 2. A Pareto-Improving Policy 38 3. 2.

In recent years, publications on power indices and coalition formation have multiplied. Obviously, the application of these concepts to political institutions, more specifically, to the analysis of the European Union and, as it seems, the election of the President of the United States is getting more and more popular. There are, however, also new theoretical instruments and perspectives that support these applications: First of all, the probabilistic model of coalition formation has to be mentioned which is made operational by the multilinear extension of the characteristic function form of coalition games. This instrument triggered off a reinterpretation of existing power indices and the formulation of new indices. This development is accompanied by an intensive discussion of the concept of power in general - what do we measure when we apply power measures? - and the properties that an adequate measure of power has to satisfy. Various concepts of monotonicity were proposed as litmus test. The discussion shows that the underlying theories of coalition formation play a decisive role. New results will be discussed in this volume. Its contributions put flesh and blood on the theoretical innovations and their applications that led to a growing interest in power indices and coalition formation.

As the reader of this book probably already knows, I have devoted a great deal of time to the topic which is, rather unfortunately, named rent seeking. Rent seeking, the use of resources in actually lowering total product although benefiting some minority, is, unfortunately, a major activity of most governments. As a result of this, I have stumbled on a puzzle. The rent-seeking activity found in major societies is immense, but the industry devoted to producing it is nowhere near as immense. In Washington the rent-seeking industry is a very conspicuous part of the landscape. On the other hand, if you consider how much money is being moved by that industry, then it is comparatively small. The first question that this book seeks to answer is: How do we account for the disparity? A second problem is that almost all rent seeking is done in what superficially appears to be an extremely inefficient way. I recently got estimates of the net cost to the public of the farm program and its net benefit to the farmers. The first is many times the second. Indeed, it is not at all obvious that in the long run, today's farmers are better off than they would be if the program had never been implemented. Of course, in any given year, cancelling the program would be quite painful. The first section of this book, then, is devoted to this problem.

Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics presents a collection of papers analyzing the political systems of ten nations. It intends to provoke a conscious effort to compare, and investigate, the public choice of comparative politics. There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political science literature. This work, however, presents an empirically oriented study of the politics, bureaucratic organization, and regulated economies of particular nations in the canon of the comparativist. It therefore provides a public choice view at the level of nations, not of systems. This compendium of work on comparative politics meets two criteria: In every case, a model of human behavior or institutional impact is specified; Also in every case, this model is confronted with data appropriate for evaluating whether this model is useful for understanding politics in one or more nations.

It has taken a long time to make this book. Many initial drafts of the chapters published in this book were presented in November 2000 during a two-day conference on Interactive governance: towards a post-parliamentary democracy held in Enschede (The Netherlands). The Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG) sponsored the . conference. After this conference the organisers discussed the possibility of making a book on the basis of papers presented at this event. In the end it was agreed that such a publication would indeed be worthwhile provided the initial papers were fundamentally revised. Moreover it was agreed that also supplementary chapters should be included, in order to strengthen the international comparative perspective. On this basis authors of the conference papers chapters and envisioned new chapters were invited to (re)submit drafts. The completion of the book, however, was unexpectedly halted by the tragic sudden death of our co-editor and dear friend Oscar van Heffen. In his lifetime he was the driving force behind this project. Without his efforts, insightful comments and helpful suggestions this book, in its present form, would never have been published. As such we dedicate this volume to his memory, the completion of the book being an honorary debt to our friend and his wife Mirjan.

Banking privatisation represents one of the major forces which are significantly changing the banking sector in Europe. Studying the process of banking privatisation thus helps to understand the dynamics of the sector. This book analyses - from the perspective of both commercial banking and investment banking - the various processes of banking privatisation in Europe and their effects on the strategies and structures of banks. In its theoretical part, the book considers technical and financial aspects of banking privatisation from Spain, France, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Russia. An indispensable reading for investment bankers, regulators as well as policy-makers responsible for the existence of efficient and stable banking systems.

It is now twenty years since the concept of rent-seeking was first devised by Gordon Tullock, though he was not responsible for coining the phrase itself. His initial insight has burgeoned over two decades into a major research program which has had an impact not only on public choice, but also on the related disciplines of economics, political science, and law and economics. The reach of the insight has proved to be universal, with relevance not just for the democracies, but also, and arguably more important, for all forms of autocracy, irrespective of ideological com plexion. It is not surprising, therefore, that this volume is the third edited publication dedicated specifically to scholarship into rent-seeking behavior. The theory of rent-seeking bridges normative and positive analyses of state action. In its normative dimension, rent-seeking scholarship has expanded, enlivened, in some respects turned on its head, the traditional welfare analyses of such features of modern economics as monopoly, externalities, public goods, and trade protection devices. In its positive dimension, rent-seeking contributions have provided an important analy tical perspective from which to understand and to predict the behavior of politicians, interest groups and bureaucrats, the media and the academy within the political market place. This bridge between normative and positive elements of analysis is invaluable in facilitating an understanding of and evaluating the costs of state activity within a consistent paradigm."

The book gives an overview of the implications of population ageing on economic development and financial systems. It describes several challenges which the ageing process poses for central banks, giving special consideration to the situation in Europe. The first two chapters discuss the relationship between ageing and saving and between ageing and international capital flows. Other chapters consider the possible implications for financial markets. The final part raises issues which are of particular relevance for central banks, namely ageing and financial stability and how ageing will affect monetary policy.

Consumers have always been concerned about the quality, and particularly the safety, of the foods they eat. In recent years this concern has taken on additional prominence. Consumer focus on food safety has been sharpened by reports about new risks, such as that posed by "mad cow" disease, and about more familiar sources of risk, such as food borne pathogens, pesticides, and hormones. At the same time, some consumers are in creasingly interested in knowing more about how their food is produced and in selecting products based on production practices. Some of the questions consumers are asking in clude whether food is produced with the use of modern biotechnology, whether it is or ganically produced, how animals are treated in meat and egg production systems, and whether food is produced using traditional methods. Recent trends also show increased consumer demand for a variety of food products that are fresh, tasty, and available on a year-round basis. This has fostered increased global trade in food. For example, consumers in temperate climates such as North America are able to buy raspberries throughout the year, and Europeans can enjoy South American coffee. Trade in processed food products is actually increasing more rapidly than trade in agricultural commodities, further addressing the demand for variety among consumers."

Covers applications to risky assets traded on the markets for funds, fixed-income products and electricity derivatives.
Integrates the latest research and includes a new chapter on financial modeling.

Aesthetics and Economics is a pioneering effort at treating aesthetics from the point of view of economic theory, and addresses the contradictions which have arisen from economists' work in this field over the years. Starting from an historical review of the treatment of aesthetics in economic thought, Aesthetics and Economics goes through the integration of a number of recent advances in economic thinking with the main topics of aesthetics, from creativity to interpretation. The subject is systematically treated on the grounds of a restatement of the optimization analysis on non-consequentialist bases, starting from the Kantian definition of aesthetic judgement up to its contemporary developments. A specific information asymmetry characterizing the agents' behaviours arises from the aesthetic qualification of consumption, production and investment processes, thus affecting the usual equilibrium and optimization conditions, resulting in new institutional interventions in the market. Certification' of the aesthetic nature of goods and stocks is needed and gives place to original market strategies and optimization problems.

This book offers the newest knowledge related to relevant themes on the Asian economies as well as the latest concepts. In a succinct manner, it deals with the principal normative and positive strands with which one need to be properly familiar in this subject area. The tightly written volume covers a great deal of ground and imparts knowledge on the Asian economy related themes to students, researchers and policy makers alike.

This book studies the interactions between monetary and fiscal poUcies in the euro area. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on competition between the European central bank, the American central bank, the German government, and the French government. As to policy cooperation, the focus is on the same institutions. These are higher-dimensional issues. The pohcy targets are price stability and full employment. The policy makers follow co- turkey or gradualist strategies. The policy decisions are taken sequentially or simultaneously. Monetary and fiscal policies have spillover effects. Special features of this book are numerical simulations of policy competition and numerical solutions to policy cooperation. The present book is part of a larger research project on European Monetary Union, see the references at the back of the book. Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association. Other parts were presented at the International Conference on Macroeconomic Analysis, at the International Institute of Public Finance, at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, at the Gottingen Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg, and at the Passau Workshop on International Economics.

Inter and Intra Governmental Arrangements for Productivity - An Agency Approach focuses on public productivity. It addresses long standing and current questions on government productivity. Its scope and coverage range from theory to very specific applications. First of all it demonstrates the applicability of a theoretical framework to concrete issues in the public sector: the Principal Agent (PA) theory or the Agency theory. Secondly, it demonstrates the different perspectives of this theoretical framework as seen by researchers and practitioners from various countries. The volume is based upon the revised seminar papers from a conference that was held at the University of Twente. Two trends obvious in this world are its increasing global character and the need for increasingly efficient and effective organizations. Inter and intra governmental organizations need to learn to effectively and efficiently work together in complex web like relationships. This study forms a major step in that direction. It consolidates several current economic concepts that are highly visible and specifically applies them to various levels and functions of government. It emphasizes that PA theory is a powerful conceptual framework because of the economic focus on transactions between principals and agents. The issues of information asymmetry, across government constituents, political/diplomatic considerations, and the narrow focus of PA problems will be described. Attention is also given to the issues of citizen demands, internal markets, franchising, competitive procurement and contracting in'. The study concentrates on academic thinking about the applicability of PA concepts to administrative theory building. As such it makes a current, valid contribution to the knowledge and practice of public administration world-wide.

Due to the developments in the role of governments, the importance of government accounting and financial reporting is increasing. This led to changes in Government Accounting all over the world. For institutional, public finance and other reasons this has not always been done for central governments and regional and local governments in the same way. Some countries maintain the cash basis, some changed over to the accrual basis. Many of them started at first with lower government levels, only few changed over completely. Comparative Issues in Government and Accounting aims to give insight in the array of different patterns the world shows with respect to government accounting and financial reporting. Of course a complete overview would have been too ambitious a goal. This book brings together an interesting number of academics coming from a representative number of countries to get an impression of the situation and especially of the existence and the backgrounds of similarities and differences. Thirty-five authors and co-authors produced 21 chapters reflecting on the situations in 16 countries on 4 continents. Countries dealt with are Albania, Australia, Belgium, China, Egypt, Finland, France, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This book was initiated while the three major authors were at the Development Centre of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, working on its program on economic growth, trade, and sustainability. We wish to thank the OECD Development Centre for its support. The book was completed during summer 2001 at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University. We appreciate the resources and financial support CARD provided for publication of this work. Sandra Clarke provided technical editing of the manuscripts and oversaw the indexing of the book; Becky Olson prepared the camera-ready copy of the final manuscript. We thank them for their instrumental help in these last steps. Part of the work presented in this volume previously appeared in some form in journals. The analysis of Chile presented in Chapter 6 appeared as "Growth, Trade, Pollution and Natural-Resource Use in Chile. Evidence from an Economywide Model," Agricultural Economics 19(1998): 87-97; and as "Trade Integration, Environmental Degradation, and Public Health in Chile: Assessing the Linkages," Environment and Development Economics, in press. The work on Costa Rica and Indonesia summarised in Chapter 10 appeared as "Is There a Trade-off Between Trade Liberalisation and Pollution Abatement in Costa Rica? A Computable General Equilibrium Assessment," Journal of Policy Modeling 20(1): 11-31; and as "The Environment and Welfare Implications of Trade and Tax Policy," Journal of Development Economics 52(1997): 65-82.

Global warming is a serious threat to the stability of world climate and to economic prosperity in some regions. The book offers a theoretical analysis which focuses on double dividend issues. Moreover, the ecological tax reform in Germany and the options of modern energy policy are described and evaluated. The volume presents innovative model simulations and analyzes, in the context of the model, the benefits of a modified tax reform, based on a Schumpeterian approach. Finally, implications for the European Union and other countries are discussed.

Small businesses in virtually all industrialized countries find it increasingly difficult to obtain finance from institutional sources. Banks have become more risk-averse; venture capital funds, previously of only marginal significance, are now often concentrating their investments on established companies; and management buyouts and buyins and pressures to reduce government spending have resulted in a reduction in public policy initiatives. In this context there is a growing interest in the role of the informal venture capital market as an alternative source of risk finance for small business. Informal Venture Capital: Investors, Investments and Policy Issues in Finland investigates the phenomenon of business angels' - wealthy private individuals who invest in small businesses - who are increasingly recognized throughout the developed world as representing the most important source of venture capital for entrepreneurial businesses in their start-up and early growth stages. This volume answers key questions about these investors, and contributes significant new evidence on aspects of the informal venture capital market which have not been examined in previous studies. It further provides an authoritative assessment of the effectiveness of policy initiatives to stimulate the supply of informal venture capital, based on the experiences in Finland.

The motivation for the mathematical modeling studied in this text on developments in credit risk research is the bridging of the gap between mathematical theory of credit risk and the financial practice. Mathematical developments are covered thoroughly and give the structural and reduced-form approaches to credit risk modeling. Included is a detailed study of various arbitrage-free models of default term structures with several rating grades.

Highly esteemed author

Topics covered are relevant and timely

Sovereign risk and financial crises play a key role in current international economic developments, particularly in the case of economic downturns. As the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s revealed once again, financial crises are the rule rather than the exception in capitalist economies. The event also revealed that international public debt agreements are contingent claims. In a world of increasing economic interdependencies, the issues of financial crises and country defaults are of critical importance. This volume goes to the heart of the academic discussion on sovereign risk and financial crises by centering on quantitative-empirical aspects, evaluating prominent approaches, and by proposing new methods. Part I of the volume identifies key factors and processes that are central in analyzing sovereign risk while Part II focuses on the determinants and effects of financial crises.

This book explores theoretical and practical implications of reflecting the fair value of liabilities for insurance companies. In addition, the contributions discuss the disclosure of these values to the financial and regulatory communities and auditing firms which are actually calculating this illusive but important variable. It combines contributions by distinguished practitioners from the insurance, accounting and finance fields, with those of prominent academics. One of the central themes of the collection is that adequate disclosure of the true economic value of insurance company liabilities is both possible and desirable. Wherever possible, the insurance valuation process is wedded with modern financial theory. For example, the use of option pricing theory is applied to insurance companies, where the true value of the firm's liabilities is a critical variable. Methods such as cash flow, earned profit and indirect discount are explored.

G. Galeotti* and M. Marrelli** *Universita di Perugia **Universita di Napoli 1. The economic analysis of optimal taxation has permitted considerable steps to be taken towards the understanding of a number of problems: the appropriate degree of progression, the balance between different taxes, the equity-efficiency trade-off etc .. Though at times considered as abstract and of little use in policy design, the issues it addresses are real ones and very much on the agenda of many countries. As usual in scientific debate, criticisms have contributed to the correct understanding of the theoretical problems involved and made clear that, at the present state of the art, definitive conclusions may be premature. A first well-taken criticism addresses the assumption, underlying optimal taxation models, of a competitive economy with perfect information on the part of individual agents and full market clearing. Once we leave the Arrow-Debreu world, it is no longer necessarily the case that taxes and transfers introduce distortions on otherwise efficient allocations.

The papers in Governance, Decentralization and Reform in China, India and Russia, which were presented at a ZEF conference in May 1999, deal with three critical aspects of governance in China, India, and Russia: political reforms at the local level; fiscal reforms in intergovernmental relations; and legal reforms. The volume collects contributions from 24 outstanding economists, political scientists and legal specialists including Vito Tanzi, Daniel Treisman, Pranab Bardham, Jean Dreze, Katharina Pistor and Kathryn Hendley. Distorted economic and political incentive structures, capture of the state by powerful elites and inoperative legal systems are factors that have greatly complicated the political economy of reform in these three large countries with heterogeneous populations. Addressing these political and institutional issues is essential to designing good policies. One particular goal of this volume is to bring together new analytical insights and empirical evidence on governance, a new and growing field of research. The volume is divided into three parts: fiscal federalism; decentralization and provision of local public goods; and legal reforms. Part I discusses the role of incentives in fiscal federalism. The papers analyze the effects of different revenue-sharing mechanisms between different levels of government, in particular the effects on regional growth and inequality and the incentives that local politicians may have to provide public goods depending on fiscal arrangements with the central government. In adapting their governance structures, all three countries have been striving for increased decentralization. But the theoretical literature suggests that, in a decentralized setting, second-best solutions must prevail: it is not possible to ensure incentive compatibility simultaneously with optimal allocation of resources and a balanced budget in providing public goods. Part II discusses taxation and public expenditure management both as a political and as a budgetary process. Two questions which the papers address are: Does participation of stakeholders and accountability of public authorities improve economic and social outcomes? Does better governance in the provision of basic goods such as health care and education improve equity? While decentralization is often seen as a way to improve the quality of public services, rule-based governance is viewed as a safeguard against the arbitrariness of public officials and weaknesses in law enforcement. The five papers in Part III focus on the rule of law; the role of the judicial system in establishing a rule-based economy; and the effectiveness of legal institutions during the transition from socialism to a market economy. They present overviews of current legal reform issues in the three countries and discuss various conceptual approaches to addressing legal reform issues.

The launch of European Monetary Union (EMU) marked the beginning of a new era, and its establishment has proved an impressive success at the technical, legal, and procedural level. After all, EMU has accelerated economic and political integration in the European Union and tied the economies of the Member States closer together. However, the performance of the euro, high unemployment rates, uneven output and investment growth, and the issue of structural reforms that have yet to be tackled have raised questions about the performance of EMU in practice. There is a general consensus on the justification for economic policy coordination. The existing literature on economic policy coordination, however, seems far from able to provide robust conclusions about how to organize the necessary interaction of institutions and policies. Therefore, there seems to be a case for re-examining the subject under the new framework set by EMU. The objective of such a reassessment is to enhance the understanding of what type of coordination and what institutional setting for policy coordination can be expected to be most favorable. Challenges for Economic Policy Coordination within European Monetary Union provides an intellectually stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate.