Restrictive policies aimed at reducing the likelihood of bank failures during recessions tend to increase the probability of a credit crunch. We examine whether this policy-dilemma is empirically observable, and whether policy-makers concentrate more on preventing bank failures or avoiding a credit crunch. We find that although capital-asset ratios in the total population of US banks in the 1990s are pro-cyclical, the most vulnerable banks (substantially undercapitalized ones) tend to increase their capital-asset ratios during recessions. These findings suggest that policy-makers are indeed experiencing a dilemma, and that they try to balance the relative probabilities of the two evils: they force the weakest banks to improve their capital-asset ratios while mitigating the risk of a credit crunch by accepting a reduction in the capital-asset ratios of less vulnerable banks.

Now that time has passed since the introduction of the euro as a commercial currency, it is possible to assess many arguments made in the abstract during the 1990s about European monetary union. This article shows that the euro zone still falls short as an optimal currency area in most respects. In particular, it undertakes an empirical analysis of the labour market and finds no progress toward flexibility or integration. These results challenge assertions of ‘endogenous currency area’ proponents that the euro area would become optimal ‘after the fact’, and that labour markets would serve as the principal avenue of adjustment. Instead, a ‘rigidity trap’ has developed in the euro area, consisting of relatively tight monetary policy, forced fiscal consolidation, and a risk of deflation in some economies. These conditions have compounded the difficulties of structural adjustment in European labour markets.

Policy scholars and the public alike are concerned not only with the actions policymakers take in the legislature but also with the money that enables policies to reach the legislative agenda. A significant portion of these funds come from individual donors. We examine how appeals from public policy organisations influence donation behaviour. Existing research studies the effectiveness of appeals in isolation, but few studies consider the competitive environment in which these appeals occur. With nearly 1.5 million nonprofit organisations in the United States, Americans face many competing appeals for their limited funds. We develop a theoretical account of the effects of competing appeals on donation behaviour and test our theory with a large experimental study across two Midwestern states. Our results suggest that negative emotional appeals, rather than increasing total donation behaviour, increase the proportion of donations directed towards the soliciting organisation. Furthermore, two competing appeals cancel out one another.

New Zealand moved further in neo-liberal tax reform than most other advanced economies over the last three decades. The article investigates this extreme case to address the question of what explains major neo-liberal economic reform. Comparing tax policy-making in two periods, the 1980s and 2008–10, we argue that neo-liberal tax reform in New Zealand is best understood as the product of “autonomous bureaucratic action”. That is, bureaucratic organisations within the state independently formulated the goals and ideas for reform, took an activist role in policy-making and strongly influenced the policy preferences of ministers. Moreover, responding to a criticism often raised against state-centred theories, we offer an explicit explanation of bureaucratic preferences. We argue that bureaucratic goals and ideas were a product of how particular structural features of the bureaucracy – organisation and training – made ministries more or less receptive to new ideas within the economics discipline.

The number of public policy conflicts has increased sharply in most western democracies, especially in the fields of planning, regional development, and environmental policy. Attempts have been made to find a way out through new forms of negotiation-based conflict resolution. Alternative Dispute Resolution raises high expectations as to its potential for reaching consensual solutions, to be achieved through extended participation, transparency, and procedural justice. However, success or failure of negotiations do not depend only on the procedure, but also on factors exogenous to it. The first section addresses the question: which exogenous factors affect the opportunities for an agreement in public policy negotiations and how do they exert their influence? Spatial representation of bargaining is used as an analytical framework. The second section shows how outside options, exogenous restrictions, and political directives for the negotiators affected the negotiation space and the final outcome in a case of environmental mediation in Germany.

This paper discusses the ethical barriers to development in economies whose institutions have not quite adjusted to the needs of capitalism. It is argued that at a given stage of market development, the market forces will either impose behaviours and moral codes which further sustain the development of capital markets or will be defeated. The defeat may lead a country back to pre-capitalist relations, behaviours and rules that will jeopardize any further development. In post-socialist economies, in particular, large sections of society are unprepared to apply the rules of advanced capitalist markets. Resistance to market becomes an obstacle to the building of institutional ethics and transparent markets. Only openness to foreign competition and foreign demand for higher ethical standards in business can help the adjustment of economic and legal institutions to the requirement of advanced markets. The Italian case offers an instructive example of contradiction between institutional backwardness and market dynamism in which the catalysing factor was foreign competition.

This article examines the patterns of policy change in the field of direct responses to unemployment in the UK. After discussing the nature of the policy area, the article proceeds to identify instances of policy innovation, persistence, succession and termination under the headings of Job Creation, Employment Subsidy, Training, and Youth. As this is a relatively new problem for British government there are several cases of policy innovation, but the most striking finding is of a high number of policy successions. Discussion is then focused upon the relevance of a range of factors which might explain the patterns of policy change deduced, suggesting that the most important of these have been (i) ‘symbolic pay offs’ of policy change; (ii) the in-built terminators in most special employment measures; (iii) the nature and strategic position of the unemployment policy community; (iv) changing cabinet objectives. It is concluded, despite the several problems of this form of analysis pin-pointed, that in this study programme changes were generally good indicators of policy change, providing a useful over-view of this important sphere of government policy.

Electoral institutions shape the incentives of governments to rely on distributive measures and to comply with international obligations because of the misalignment they may engender between the collective objectives of a government party and the individual objectives of its members in the legislature. We use this argument to explain the puzzle of unlawful state aid measures in the European Union (EU). Existing theories of EU compliance and implementation offer no convincing explanation to their persistence and patterns. Using data from 2000 to 2012, we find that an increase of district magnitude improves compliance. However, compliance decreases with higher magnitude where either party leaders have no control over the ballot rank or other electoral rules strengthen the incentives to search for a personal vote. We also provide evidence for the effects of electoral reforms on compliance. These results have implications for the broader literature on compliance with international regimes.

Public choice theory offers a conceptually important means of examining policy decisions and their social and economic consequences in the field of natural resources. Through a public choice analysis of France's ambitious program to nuclearize its electrical industry by the year 2000, I examine the origins, merits and deficiencies of French nuclear policy. Public choice theory's major assumptions – that a policy's costs and benefits are a function of resource abundance and level of development and that a resource's management is shaped by its character and availability – are largely valid. However, the need to reconcile competing social values and to distribute policy benefits fairly may be insufficiently accounted for by current public choice approaches, a fact exemplified by French experience with nuclear power.

Economists could profitably treat academic publishing as a lagging economic indicator. Just as the Tokyo stock market hit its peak in late 1989, books on Japan's economic sucess began to pour off the presses; they still thrive today despite the fact that in the intervening three years, the Tokyo market has dropped over 50 per cent. In a like manner,academics are suddenly blessed with a plethora of studies of the countries presumably following in Japan's successful economic wake - the new Asian NICs of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; plus the potential 'next NICs', Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia - just at the time that the world's investors are liquidating their holdings in these rather stagnant Asian markets and pouring them into the suddenly thriving economies of Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Brazil. Fortunately for scholars, the dividends paid by good books are less affected by the transitory events that create such wild swings in the equities markets. Good scholarship, like blue chip stock, generates high dividends regardless of the short-term performance of the ephemeral economic markets.

The choice facing British government about maintaining the status quo for sterling or joining the euro is a choice between long-term policy regimes. Short-term considerations such as the relative position of business cycles or the current level of the sterling-euro exchange rate have a bearing on the adjustment costs and the timing of entry. The article therefore examines the EMU framework versus the British framework for monetary policy; the performance of economic policy in Britain and in Euroland, and especially Germany as Euroland's main precursor; the relevance to the adjustment costs of membership to the Maastricht criteria and the Chancellor of the Exchequer's five economic tests for joining the euro; and whether or not Britain can qualify for joining EMU. The analysis is broadened to include supporting policies for monetary policy, especially fiscal, labour market and other structural policies where relevant.

This paper examines political influences over U.S monetary policy, analysed quarterly from 1953 to 2000. We use indicators of presidential and congressional ideology as predictors of actor preferences and as representative of overhead democracy. We also include several economic variables predicting percent change in the federal funds rate. While not surprised to find that economic conditions are important in explaining Fed decisionmaking, we also find that the theory of overhead democracy also contributes to the explanation. Initially, both presidential and congressional ideology are important but in a combined model, presidential variables wash out influence of congressional variables. Thus, we conclude that overhead democracy must be included in models predicting Fed decisionmaking.

Communism is vulgar capitalism; that is, the communist command economy is based on mistaken notions of how capitalism grew by exploiting workers. Command economies not capitalism fulfil Marx's predictions, collapsing because they are unproductive and immoral, basing economic choices on corrupted personal relations. Without competition, decision in command economies are unproductive through negative selection, and immoral, being based on corrupt personal relations. Each and every Marxist and neo-Marxist prediction about capitalism, from commodity fetishism to the alienation of the citizen from the state, comes true under communism. The explanation is straightforward: Marxist assumptions about the state and the economy are far more true for communist than for capitalist countries.

Strong climate policy is vital to tackling climate change, but even the best proposals can get watered down when lobbying occurs. This article analyses which interest groups lobby on EU climate policies and under which conditions these groups achieve their policy goals. We expect that both economic and political resources are important. Economic resources give groups the capacity to mobilise expertise, but an interest group’s success also depends on its congruence with public opinion, especially in a politicised area such as EU climate policy. To test our hypotheses, we focus on six EU climate policy issues for which we conducted expert surveys with lobbyists and a content analysis of 737 media statements in eight European news outlets, combined with Eurobarometer data. Our results show that interest groups with higher economic resources and with public opinion on their side are more likely to achieve their preferences on EU climate policy issues.

Governments are increasingly facilitating the roll-out of so-called “smart meters”, a technology for measuring energy consumption that are able to transmit and receive data using a form of electronic communication. However, implementation has been slow or even stalled. To identify some of the causes for this, the policy coordination perspective serves as a lens to unravel the different elements involved in smart meter implementation. The research adds the demand and supply dimension to account for market dynamics and public engagement challenges in the process. A case study of the UK finds that government efforts are challenged by the timely and coherent coordination of diverse stakeholders and regulatory measures.

The campaign in Britain to reduce official secrecy has had a number of broad and ill-defined objectives. This article argues that four basic values underpin demands for more open government: to promote more ethical conduct; to enhance executive accountability; to advance more informed policy-making; and to help individual citizens and groups advance particular rights and interests. This analytical framework is then applied to the three main strategies of open government that have so far been pursued. First, it is argued that the reform of Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act, while legally desirable, will not promote any of the above values. Second, a freedom of information act would principally satisfy the fourth objective, while providing more executive accountability on a pragmatic basis. Finally, an analysis of official publications released under the Croham Directive reveals that the British interpretation of open government, the discretionary release of consultative documents, has been designed and implemented to reinforce the dominant policy style of bureaucratic accommodation.

The reforms initiated in Central and Eastern European countries imply dramatic changes at social, economic and political level. The transition from a centrally planned to a market–based economic system requires profound reformation of all economic and social institutions, amongst them, in prominent place, the way social benefits are provided and financed. Social programs in these countries are challenged from two sides: Firstly, they have to provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable in society during economic transition in order to support the reform program in social and political terms; secondly, social programs have to be restructured in order to be financially sound, socially equitable and economically efficient in a more (or fully) market-oriented environment.

Intra-orgartisationally statistics are commonly perceived, both in government and in other organisations, as a tool of management. But the dominant function of statistics is to contribute to inter- and intra-organisational coordination. The value of statistics lies in their use as an instrument of self-management. The paper identifies an unacknowledged degree of participation by users in statistical systems and advocates an ought-to-know principle for the design of such systems. The ought-to-know principle should guide the distribution of statistics within governmental organisations and policy for statistical publication. Contributor and user organisations (e.g. local government and private firms) should play a greater part in deciding what statistics should be collected and how they should be distributed and could well share responsibility for meeting the costs.

How has public healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments for providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending for reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of healthcare equity and lower political corruption because the health sector is particularly susceptible to political spending. Our results, obtained using ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares estimations, suggest that higher spending targeted at reducing inequitable access to health has reduced COVID deaths. Consistent with the findings of others, our results indirectly suggest that health spending is necessary, but not sufficient unless accompanied by good governance and equitable access. Equitable health systems ease the effects of COVID presumably because they allow states to reach and treat people more effectively. Spending aimed at increasing health system capacity by increasing access thus seems a sound strategy for fighting the spread of disease, ultimately benefiting us all.

Recent research on morality policy has focused on policy change, morality framing and the presence of favourable cultural opportunity structures (COSs). The resulting literature describing various aspects of morality policy has failed to discuss the impact of multilevel dynamic in this field. This contribution examines gambling policy in Italy, applying a multilevel approach to detect the presence of favourable COSs, and whether policymakers frame policies morally. Italy offers a particularly fertile field for the study of morality policy, featuring a liberal national approach versus local restrictive policy. By applying a methodology based on semistructured interviews and secondary sources, we examine the national and local political spheres, demonstrating that morality framing, when detected, is more likely to be found at the local level where the influence of experts and interest groups on legislators may result in the transformation of a health policy based on paternalistic considerations.