Números Publicados

The effect of decentralisation on regional economic growth is a hotly debated topic. In theory, decentralisation should entail welfare benefits by bringing government closer to the people. In practice, the benefits of decentralisation have been hard to prove. A problem is that the quality of regional governments is often lacking, or at least varies widely across different regions. Hence, regional governments may not be capable of delivering public goods in an efficient and accountable manner.

The link between economic growth and the size of the public sector has fuelled one of the most wide-ranging debates in economic literature and the empirical evidence is far from conclusive. With different techniques that encompass both country-to-country causality analysis with VAR models and standard and grouped panels, we study this relationship for a sample of 25 countries from the 1960s

The available literature on the relationship between taxation and economic growth is mixed, although some consensus exists on the negative effects of some taxes on growth. In this paper we study the relationship between taxation and growth for the European Union in 2004−2016 through a quantile regression approach to detect different patterns along the distribution.

New empirical evidence is presented on the impact of public debt on economic growth. To that end, we employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach using annual data from both central and peripheral countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) for the 1961-2015 period. In particular, we allow for different endogenously (data-based) regimes in the parameter relating the public debt variable to the real growth rate.