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This paper investigates the impact of corruption on tax revenues. Drawing on Italian regional data that distinguish between corruption crimes in which public officers play an active role (active corruption) and crimes in which there is collusion between the public officers and their private counterparts (passive corruption), the paper shows that only active corruption harms tax revenues. We argue that active corruption alters the incentives for honest taxpayers, leading to inefficiencies and a greater distance between citizens and public authorities, because it generates uncooperative public administration and reduces the perceived fairness of public systems. The estimates confirm the hypothesis and the results call for greater attention to be paid to the quality of public administration.

The paper aims to investigate the existence of a trade-off between financial market confidence and national government budget dynamics in the Eurozone. By comparing two indexes, the hypothesis of the existence of a constraint between credit default swaps and public deficits from 2009:I to 2014:I is tested. The results support the conclusion that – during the period of the Euro crisis – fiscal discipline was associated with decreasing confidence, and vice versa. The estimates identify a phenomenon whose prior is not set, suggesting that the decrease in financial market confidence comes with fiscal retrenchments, but also that fiscal retrenchments combine, other things being equal, with financial distress. The inability of financial markets to determine coherent behaviour in regard to fiscal stance provides grounds for thought on the need for common policy actions in the Eurozone.

By relying on WVS data and using multilevel mixed modeling, the paper tests the hypothesis that access to larger flows of information about government fiscal accounts and financial transactions increases citizens’ willingness to pay taxes. By supporting such an hypothesis, our analysis suggests that in the presence of more information, the implicit contract between the government and taxpayers displays less stringent incentives and participation constraints and causes part of the contract, namely tax morale, to be enhanced. This finding supports the implementation of fiscal transparency policies, whose possible design is discussed.

When rent extraction and monitoring failures affects the citizens-government relationship (Lederman et al., [4]), room for corruption emerges. The symposium welcomes researchers from different disciplines, from public administration to management and accounting research, economics and political science, sociological and organization studies, public policy, and beyond. International organizations such as the IMF and Transparency International emphasize the importance of adopting stricter anti-corruption measures to strengthen governance during COVID-19 emergency. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Public Organization Review is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After the appearance of the first COVID-19 cases and deaths, countries’ responses were enacted at different points in time. This paper explores the factors behind the timeliness of travel restriction policies at the onset of the pandemic. Using instrumental variable techniques on a sample of 149 countries, our empirical exercise shows that while urban population and political stability are conducive to a prompt activation of a government’s lockdown policy after initial cases, a country’s wealth and the rule of law may produce an opposite effect. When the time from first deaths is considered, the presence of a female leader, net migration levels, voice and accountability, and political stability are associated with a quicker launch of a domestic travel restriction policy, while democracy and a country’s wealth may represent an obstacle to an immediate policy activation.

Recent studies highlight that economic expectations are a crucial determinant of citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). This article relies on a cross-sectional analysis of European survey data collected in the aftermath of COVID-19 disease to investigate the relationship between citizens’ expectations about future economic prospects and their SWD. Our findings support the idea that citizens’ expectations about future economic prospects are correlated with SWD. Furthermore, they reveal that perceived conditions of material wellbeing moderate this relationship.

This paper aims at investigating whether the inscriptions in the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) sites influence tourism attractiveness. An empirical analysis, based on dynamic panel data methodology, was implemented to study the effect of WHL cultural and natural properties inclusion on international tourist arrivals in Italian provinces in the 2000–2014 time span. Results suggest that being awarded with a World Heritage recognition, together with the province’s wealth, environmental habits and the openness to external markets, may influence attractiveness, confirming a tourism-enhancing role of the List, beyond the simple heritage preservation.

By using data extracted from the political manifestos released by national political parties from 27 European Union countries over the 1990–2012 period, we estimate non-linear econometric models whose aim is to understand the determinants of cross-country political concern for the ‘stability culture’. This expression describes an economic policy perspective based on the aims of providing price stability, fiscally disciplined budgets and rules and procedures that favour public expenditure ceilings. Our findings reveal that parties' commitment to the ‘stability culture’ is determined by their ideological background and by the national macroeconomic situation in the pre-electoral year.

The investigation of the determinants of fiscal transparency has been mostly performed on cross-sectional data, and it has produced mixed results. This paper improves the existing literature by performing a static and dynamic panel analysis of the effect of a set of political variables on the level of fiscal transparency in 36 democratic countries. By using a recent measure of fiscal transparency based on IMF Governance Finance Statistics and available from 2003 to 2013, we find strong links between political environments and the dynamics of fiscal disclosure. Our results show that government control over the legislature exerts some negative effect on fiscal transparency, while the effect of government ideology is shown to be at least fragile. Furthermore we find that legislature fragmentation exerts a negative effect on fiscal transparency, which suggests that competition within the parliaments does not increase fiscal transparency, but instead it induces governments to react by reducing accessibility to information.

The promotion of a sustainable development and the safeguard of citizens? wellbeing through the international cooperation is one of the fundamental scope of many multilateral environmental agreements. In particular, the Parties who ratified the Aarhus Convention recognized the importance of an ample environmental protection for human well-being of present and future generations. They also stated that the right of everyone is to live in an environment appropriate to their own health. Therefore, the pursuit of happiness and well-being cannot represent a secondary objective in environmental decision-making (United Nations, 2011; Tofallis, 2019). Providing that environmental factors affect human well-being (MacKerron and Mourato, 2013), an interesting question may concern the actions that policy makers can take to promote a safer environment and, as a consequence, to improve the quality of life of the citizens. The answer to this question may offer important policy implications for controlling pollution and environmental degradation that generate negative externalities. The linkage between environmental degradation and well-being has been explained as both a relational and environmental failure of market societies. The capacity to generate growth is negatively affected by mass dissatisfaction in rich societies deriving from an excessive depletion of environmental and social assets, as growth does not necessarily lead to happiness (Bartolini, 2007, p. 351). Hence, public spending on environmental protection responds to a worsening in the quality of life caused by overexploitation of natural resources and aims to restore happiness by providing a more sustainable community development. The role of public expenditure is thus to provide those goods like environmental protection and pollution abatement which, by securing a more sustainable future, may increase the citizens? well-being. The aim of our paper is to study the long-run relationship between per capita environmental protection expenditure (EPE) and happiness at the European level. To our knowledge, this link remains unexplored. We use a dynamic panel heterogeneity analysis through an autoregressive distributed lag model estimated by the dynamic fixed effect, the mean group and the pooled mean group estimators. The sample covers 19 countries in the period 1997-2016. Our results highlight the existence of a direct long-run equilibrium between happiness and environmental protection expenditure. The policy implication suggested by our findings is that government expenditure on environmental protection may not only offer a solution to market failure but, by increasing happiness, could also improve the quality of social life.

This paper analyzes the role of fiscal transparency as a determinant of foreign direct investment (FDI) attractiveness. It proposes an empirical test based on a panel regression analysis on data from 72 countries in the 2006–2015 time span. The evidence supports the idea that countries characterized by higher levels of budget openness attract more FDI inflows. In more detail, a higher degree of transparency during the phase of budget execution is associated with increases of FDI inflows, even when the sample is restricted to non-OECD countries and low and lower-middle-income countries. The positive effect is robust to several different specifications and is found to be additional to the one of general government transparency. Moreover, we also show that the role played by fiscal transparency in attracting FDI is independent of other close institutional determinants like control of corruption and regulatory quality.

Fiscal residuum has often been used as an index of the territorial balance between taxes paid and benefits received from the policies of different tiers of government. Its standard calculation, however, conflates what of the residuum is due to the need of financing public spending and what is due to the redistributive aims of government levels. This paper introduces a decomposition that isolates these two elements. The empirical evidence for Italy in the period 2003–15 shows that differences in fiscal residua between the northern and the southern regions are smaller than usually calculated. A clear difference, instead, emerges in special statute regions.

Using cross-country data from the Citizenship database of the 2004 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and relying on multilevel mixed-effects modeling, we investigate the link between government transparency and citizens’ external political efficacy. Results indicate that transparency enhances the perception of institutions’ responsiveness to citizens’ actions, but also highlight that this effect is mediated by citizens’ level of education. In particular, while for better educated people the magnitude of government transparency’s effect on citizens’ external efficacy is substantial, the same effect is negligible for less educated citizens who appear to be “lost in transparency.”

Fiscal transparency is considered an essential feature of public financial management and is supposed to provide beneficial governance effects such as reducing corruption. This paper adds to recent empirical literature that specifically investigates the impact of fiscal information disclosure on corruption. Country-level evidence provided by previous studies is exclusively based on cross-sectional econometric analyses, while the present contribution relies on a wide-ranging, country-level dataset of 116 countries that cover a ten-year time span (2003–2012), and on dynamic panel data estimates. These innovations in terms of data and methods provide new, robust empirical support to the claim that fiscal transparency is negatively correlated with corruption.

This paper explores some reasons why the alignment between governance and technology in infrastructures may be unstable or not easy to achieve. Focusing on the electricity industry, we claim that the decentralization of governance – an essential step towards a decentralized technical coordination - may be hampered by if deregulation magnifies behavioural uncertainties and asset specificities; and that in a technically decentralized system, political demand for centralized coordination may arise if the players are able to collude and lobby, and if such practices lead to higher electricity rates and lower efficiency. Our claims are supported by insights coming from approaches as diverse as transaction cost economics, the competence-based view of the firm, and political economy.

In cultural tourism two trade-offs are present: a traditional one describing preservation and valorisation effects and a second one about the different levels of quality that can be experienced during a visit. The latter emerged recently over a renewed popularity of the "lone traveller", the flâneur, who searches for the Aura (Benjamin, 1936) away from crowded museums where globalization of tastes may turn them in a sort of "fast food" places. The aim of this work is to describe possible types of visitors and their related economic effects (mostly the crowding out). The various dimensions to the value of heritage in contemporary societies (community values versus the rule of fashion, Musgrave, 1956) will also be discussed. The conclusions drawn here will suggest that the trade offs arising among different types of visitors, make more complex the management of cultural sites, as well as much more problematic the current debate on the relationship between democracy and opportunities for cultural experiences.