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Several countries have experienced lengthy periods of government formation deadlock in recent years, as they have sought to form a new government. This study examines whether government formation deadlocks damage a country's economy. To do so, we analyze the case of Belgium, which took a record 541 days to create a post‐election government, following the June 2010 federal elections. Employing the synthetic control method, our results show that the Belgium economy did not suffer an economic toll; on the contrary, gross domestic product per capita growth was higher than would have otherwise been expected. As such, our evidence contradicts frequent claims that long periods of government formation deadlock negatively affect an economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Official donors have over the past decade pledged to enhance aid effectiveness by improving donor harmonization. To this effect, the European Union (EU) launched initiatives on a division of labor among its Member States. At the same time, the EU encourages Europe's subnational authorities to engage in their own development cooperation. This however seems to undermine the same harmonization effort. Belgium, characterized by multiple levels of government, illustrates that these two approaches to aid effectiveness-collective division of labor at the national level and decentralized cooperation at lower levels-are only partially compatible. In partner countries where both the federal Belgian and regional Flemish governments are active donors, Belgium's composite aid is poorly harmonized. A principal-agent framework helps to explain such selfish positioning. This article argues that a higher degree of complementarity and harmonization among Belgium's various authorities is feasible, albeit in forms that are specific to recipient country and context. As both donors are not so much competing in aid supply policies but rather in terms of supply management, such technical arguments may assist in lessening the political pressure to selfishly emphasize diversity over unity. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mobilises a strategic-relational approach to state spatial restructuring to overcome the weaknesses of the conventional 'New Regionalist' account in economic geography of the resurgence of the region as a strategic site for economic governance. Focusing on hegemonic projects and the shifting nexus of spatial dependencies and engagements through which these are reproduced, undermined and transformed, the role and geography of political agency in state spatial restructuring is highlighted. To illustrate this point, I analyse the construction of new regional state spaces in Belgium, paying particular attention to the hegemonic projects that create a social basis for particular state spaces, the construction of collective agency on different scales (Belgian-national and Flemish-regional) and the various ways in which these processes are informed by pre-existing state spatial and scalar selectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the regional and ethnic problems towards their general election of the House of the Representatives in Belgium, under the administration of Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene. It relates that Dehaene had announced that the coalition had achieved its goal in the country's economic stability and pursued the next election to be held in May 1995. Thus, there were five Regional and Community governments formed in addition to the national one under the new federal Belgium. Furthermore, the Flemish government adopted the christian-social/social-democrat coalition.

An overview of the literature on the party-policy link suggests a weak, non-existent or even perverse relationship between parties in government and governmental policies in Belgium. It is argued that this weak relationship could be due to the methodology applied in this type of research, i.e. the treatment of the party variable on a much too high level of aggregation. The relative strength of the coalition parties, the parties' general ideological profile on a specific moment, the relative strength of the factions within the parliamentary party and in the Cabinet are not taken into account. On the other hand, several organisational factors with regard to the relation between parties, parliamentary groups, ministers and the administration tend to facilitate the impact of parties on policies in Belgium. Interview data with ministers suggest that the policy variable also needs further disaggregation. In particular, the qualitative aspects of policies should be more closely investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New GNP estimates in current and constant prices for the Belgian economy in the interwar period are presented. The series are conceptually and methodologically consistent with the post-World War II data and cover both the income and expenditure approaches. The new estimates differ considerably from the data that have been published before, new light on our present understanding of Belgain economic growth in the 1920s and 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]