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Myopia involves giving disproportionate weight to outcomes that occur close to the present. Myopia in people's evaluations of political outcomes and proposals threatens effective policymaking. It can lead to inefficient spending just before elections, cause inaction on important future policy challenges, and create incentives for government interventions aimed at boosting short-term performance at the expense of long-term welfare. But, are people generally myopic? Existing evidence comes mostly from studies that disregard either the future or collective outcomes. Political science characterizes people as myopic based on how they retrospectively evaluate collective outcomes, such as the state of the economy. Behavioral economics and psychology find that people make myopic choices involving future individual outcomes, such as money or personal health. To characterize myopia more generally, we offer two innovations: First, we adapt measurement approaches from behavioral economics and psychology to precisely gauge myopia over politically relevant collective outcomes. Second, we estimate myopia using the same approach for collective political outcomes in both past and future. We conduct two surveys on three different samples (including a large probability-based sample) asking respondents to evaluate national conditions randomly described as past or future while holding constant the domain, information about conditions, and the elicitation method. Results show that prospective evaluations are significantly less myopic than retrospective evaluations. People are often not myopic at all when looking to the future. This surprising pattern calls for more research to probe its robustness and spell out how low prospective myopia might lead to forward-looking policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The parliamentary institution is the nation’s highest legislative body in a democratic system, where it enacts, amends, and approves federal laws, examines government policies and approves government spending. However, in Malaysia, during the Barisan Nasional (BN) era, this institution was frequently criticised due to its numerous flaws. Among them were executive control over parliamentary institutions, disregard for the opposition’s role and unequal development provision between government and opposition parliamentarians. Therefore, during the 14th General Election (GE14) campaign, Pakatan Harapan (PH) promised to implement parliamentary reforms, and that pledge carried PH to victory in the GE14. This article utilised the concept of institutional reform as a tool of analytics to discuss parliamentary institutional reforms during the PH’s governmental term from 2018 to 2020. The primary sources of this study were interviews and secondary sources, which were obtained through books, journals and newspapers. This article argues that the PH government has successfully implemented several parliamentary institutional reforms in only 22 months. The reforms were the reform of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the establishment of more parliamentary select committees, the restructuring of constituency development funds for members of parliament (MPs) and the appointment of non-partisan speakers. All these reforms have benefited Malaysia’s parliamentary institutions by increasing the role of the opposition, allocating fair constituency development funds to parliamentarians and improving the parliamentary image. Nevertheless, comprehensive reforms were not implemented because the PH government was ousted from power at the end of February 2020 because of the actions of several PH MPs who defected from the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the authors discuss the key role played by tax lawyer Stanley S. Surrey in the promotion of the concept of tax expenditures in the U.S. and other countries and the tax policy process. Also cited are Surrey's role in promoting professionalism and integrity in the U.S. Treasury's Office of Tax Policy (OTP), and other taxation topics like economic income, consumption, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

The re-assessment of energy – economy nexus in developing economies like India is necessitated by the constant evolution of their growth path and sectoral progression. This sectoral level examination is intended to find new evidence for the dependence of economic growth on the electricity sector in India. Using annual data of per capita real GDP and sectoral level consumption of electricity from 1971 to 2019, the combined co-integration test and Frequency domain causality approaches are employed. The estimated results show the negative impact of agricultural sector electricity consumption on growth, whereas both the Industrial and service sector enhances the production. In addition, the results of the Frequency domain causality approach support the Growth hypothesis for the study period in India, as Uni-directional causality from three sectors to economic growth were found at least in a frequency of short run to medium run. The sustainability of the growth-enhancing role of electricity consumption will depend on more sector-specific energy policies and public spending on energy infrastructure development than bland subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The austerity policies implemented in Spain during the years of the «great recession» (2008-2014) have had diverse effects on the socio-economic and vital conditions of children, young people and the elderly. In particular, the agenda of public policies and social spending applied during the crisis increased inequality between these social groups, privileging the interests of the adult population and the elderly, and calling into question7 the principle of inter-generational solidarity on which our familistic welfare system. In this article we describe this phenomenon and highlight the dominant narratives formulated by the main political actors when defining the rules of eligibility of the beneficiaries of public policies and attending to the specific needs of each age group. The statistical and documentary evidence collected points to the convenience of reflecting on the foundations of the inter-generational pact that organizes the redistribution of public resources in our country and that must ensure the sustainability of our social protection system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of the Triple Planetary Crisis concerning climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, the global community is in dire need of quantitative, data-based approaches to inform its response and guide its path towards a sustainable and equitable future. Government spending and fiscal policy are key levers in shaping this response. In order to assess the potential for using machine learning to inform policymakers' and governments' decision-making and spending allocation decisions based on environmental outcomes, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) collaborated to produce a joint pilot study. The study uses official development assistance data (ODA) to train machine learning models to predict deforestation rates in six different countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Solomon Islands, and Zambia. Initial modelling results were promising and the approach could prove to be a valuable asset to policymakers by enabling scenario analysis, where hypothetical budgets or spending allocations can be run through models trained on historical data to give insight on potential impacts on environmental indicators. Future research could be expanded to a pilot study with a national government using disaggregated budget data instead of ODA as model inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A corpus of research on the effect of exposure to income inequality on citizens' economic policy preferences renders inconclusive results. At the same time, a distinct body of work demonstrates that ethnic fragmentation within a polity reduces government spending, presumably due to opposition among the public to spending believed to benefit stigmatized ethnic minorities. Focusing on the American context, this short article ties these two bodies of work together by arguing that the effect of routine exposure to income inequality should depend on the racial composition of the have-nots, with citizens being most likely to support liberal economic policies in the face of pronounced inequality only when potential beneficiaries are not a highly stigmatized minority group, such as Black Americans. Using geocoded survey data, we find that exposure to local economic inequality is only systematically associated with increased support for liberal economic policies when the respective have-nots are not Black. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax policies and public spending reflect the taking and giving powers of the government. However, when thinking about these, the taking powers of government are perceived as the most prominent. Why is the government's relationship with society seemingly asymmetric in that give and take? What leads to these perceptions? This article's starting point is instability in corporate income taxes and government expenditure arrears as two features of poor fiscal governance associated with lower corporate investment in the market economy. The article then focuses on the political and technical relationships comprising budgetary governance and proposes feasible policy options. These policy options aim toward a path of corporate income tax stability and timely government payments through better balancing the give and take involved in running the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces White identity as an understudied concept in Canadian politics and compares how White settlers' ingroup attachments and their outgroup attitudes—specifically, White settlers' anti-Indigenous attitudes—shape Canadian politics. We find that White identity is associated with greater support for government spending on policies that disproportionately benefit White Canadians, such as pensions, whereas Indigenous resentment is associated with greater opposition toward government spending on policies that are often perceived as disproportionately benefiting Indigenous peoples, such as welfare. In Canada outside Quebec, both White identity and anti-Indigenous attitudes are associated with voting Conservative. In Quebec, White identity mobilizes support for the Bloc Québécois, while White settlers' negative attitudes toward Indigenous peoples are not associated with vote choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Canadian federal government departments and agencies are required to conduct a "neutral assessment" of their evaluation function every five years. Such assessments should focus on the capacity of the evaluation units to produce high‐quality evaluation reports which serve the needs of organizational decision‐makers. Our study sought to analyze neutral assessment reports produced over a ten‐year period. Overall, our review suggests that the neutral assessments consistently conform with central‐agency requirements as well as indicate evolving evaluation capacity and utilization. We provide recommendations for improving the function and its impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing fiscal policy from the perspective of feminist economics means examining gender equality policies, both in terms of tax revenue and other sources of fund (indebtedness), as well as redistribution and public spending. Finding out the number of resources assigned to these policies, their macroeconomic impact, and their temporality (longevity) is extremely essential. In this paper, we will analyse public expenditure in the budgets of Latin American countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The budget proposals tabled for the region focus on employment generation through the creation of care centres, with policies that focus on both redistribution of income and redistribution of care work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global warming is one of the most discussed topics today by society, due to its consequences for humanity, and drought is one of its results. That said, the present article analyzed the drought impact on the health dimension of Firjan Index of Municipal Development in Northeast of Brazil, during the period between 2005 and 2016. In order to achieve this result, it was used the conceptual approaches of drought, public spending, and municipal development. As methodology, this paper selected a quantitative method by using a Panel Data econometric model composed by the dependent variable IFDM_SAUDE; drought as the independent variable of interest; public spending, population and time as variables of control. To generate the indicator drought, it was used the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), created by McKee, Doesken and Kleist (1993). Thus, it was concluded that drought, public spending and time were 95% relevant regarding municipal development index with a positive impact and population with a negative impact, evidencing that the larger volume of public spending towards a policy of drought effects mitigation, the best results for municipal development in health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study empirically investigates whether targeted government spending and environmental policies promote green growth, as measured by greenhouse gas productivity. Government spending for pollution abatement (GEPA) represents non-market environmental policies encompassing both enforcement regulations and stakeholder incentives, while policy dummy represents province specific targeted environmental policies. Using panel data from 1995 to 2020 across ten provinces of Canada, an empirical model based on STIRPAT has been developed and estimated, addressing various econometric issues to ensure the robustness and consistency of the results. The findings confirm that both GEPA and targeted environmental policies are crucial determinants in achieving green growth. Additionally, variables such as business sector expenditures for R&D, the share of renewable energy, per capita GDP, and population also contribute to green growth. These results highlight the importance of the stick-and-carrot approach as a key strategy and policy tool for sustainable development. The implications of these findings extend beyond Canada and hold valuable lessons for emerging and developing countries that predominantly rely on command-and-control regulations without adequate support. To effectively address the challenge of achieving green growth, a coordinated approach that combines targeted government spending and environmental policies, supported by innovation and renewable energy exploration, is essential. Overall, this study's findings have significant implications for environmental sustainability on a global scale. [Display omitted] • Examines the effect of targeted government spending and environmental policies on green growth in Canada. • Uses greenhouse gas productivity as an index of green growth. • Estimates the empirical model developed addressing advanced econometric issues related to panel data for 1995–2020. • Controls renewable energy, innovation, per capita income, population. • Have significant implications for environmental sustainability on a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on the public-private relationship in the EU is a timely exercise at a time when the recovery plan and the Conference on the Future of Europe are being launched at the same time. A new stage in its open constituent process, following the method of concrete steps for the construction of the indispensable European Federation, to put it in the language of the 1950 Schuman Declaration. In this case, the pandemic has acted as a catalyst, faithful to the Monnet method, succession of crises as drivers of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholarship on U.S. distributive politics either focuses on the abilities of individual representatives and senators to bring home the bacon or highlights the role the president plays in influencing funding decisions. Little attention is paid to collective efforts in Congress involved in securing grants-in-aid to states. In this paper, we assess how characteristics of House and Senate state delegations affect the collective efforts of a state's federal officeholders to secure statewide funds. In both the House and Senate, we find that partisan cohesion in a state delegation predicts more federal funds to states. In particular, states receive more funds when larger shares of their delegations are members of a chamber's majority party. Moreover, we find that the importance of majority party status is increasing over time. These results have important implications for the U.S. federal system and distributive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of age in the elderly population on electoral politics in a rapidly aging Korean society by using the results of a survey conducted after the 21st general elections. In particular, we empirically analyze the perception of senior voters on policy salience as well as on the expansion of government spending on senior welfare programs as part of a debate on silver democracy, which forecasts a senior-dominated representative democracy as the impact of senior citizens on elections increases concomitant with their growing numbers. Our results demonstrate that voter age is not an important factor affecting policy preference, and that support for the expansion of government spending on welfare policies for the elderly does not exhibit a statistically significant correlation with age. Yet, according to a cluster analysis of senior voters, four clusters we identified could be clearly divided along the income and ideology dimensions. Finally, this paper provides five possible explanations for why age seems to have no impact on voters' reaction to the expansion of government spending on welfare programs or senior welfare policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes towards social spending and the welfare state have been characterised by one of the longest standing and widest gender gaps. Past research suggests that parenthood deepens this divide further. Yet, the exact relationship between parenthood and support for social policies – and the gendered nature of this process – has been difficult to establish because it can vary across welfare policy areas and the age of the children, which past studies, relying on cross‐sectional data, has found difficult to unravel. Using panel data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine individual level changes in fathers' and mothers' views towards specific welfare state policies. We find that individuals' support for social spending fluctuates at different stages of parenthood, and that mothers' demands differ from fathers' in relation to care related but not in terms of educational spending. This implies that parents are not a homogeneous group that parties could target with uniform electoral pledges. As a result, building widespread electoral support for expanding a broad range of social investment policies is likely to be challenging in a context where, first and foremost, self‐interest appears to drive (or depress) individuals' support for specific welfare state policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to formulate a critical review to the State actions about its international obligations in the area of social rights, in particular about minimum vital right. This concept, for its recent creation, still contains dilemmas concerning the means to realize it of the best way. The methods of abstraction and concretion and documentary techniques have been used. The results show a dissociation between the purpose of the minimum vital right and the assistance-based practices for which a significant amount of the public spending is destined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic policy includes a set of policies that are homogeneous each of them to achieve the general objectives of the state such as fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rate policy and trade policy. The research problem revolves around identifying the reality of fiscal policy in Japan, and its contribution to the GDP in Japan through analyzing the data for the study period 1981, 2015. Results indicated that Japan achieved the highest average in the value of public revenue in the period from 2001, 2015. The results of the standard analysis of the data also revealed that public spending is the most important determinant of increasing the size of the gross domestic product in Japan. The research recommends using of a fiscal policy by activating the public spending tool for use in building an infrastructure that works to increase the volume of investment and from it to positively affect growth rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tries to understand whether, in budgetary terms, the prison system is effective or not. A study in this sense is of fundamental importance for good practices in politics/criminal area, since efficient investments presuppose the perception of the deficiencies that are intended to cure. First, it seeks to elucidate the mechanisms of the public budget, as well as some particularities relating to its non-binding. Second, there is a brief history of the public budget, specific emphasis on the system of the National Penitentiary Fund and the topic of its contingency. It uses the deductive methodology, descriptive and exploratory qualitative research, as well as the documentary analysis of the indices presented by the government at the national level. In this way, it will be possible to fulfill the main objective of the study that is to evaluate, in economic terms, the prison system is feasible, clarifying, showing numbers, the current state of the art in Brazil. Our conclusion is that the policy of public spending and prisons has no symmetry, and that imprisonment is ineffective in fighting crime. Given the numbers, it is possible to affirm that the budget deficit of the prison system is practically irrecoverable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries' overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctions lead to reduced disaster preparedness spending and, as a result, increase the scale of economic and human losses generated by natural disasters in sanctioned countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of crisis, whether economic or social, the achievements of marginalized parts of society are questioned by different agents in the context of social interactions. In Brazil, the debate around efficiency and austerity in public spending tries to legitimize a perverse narrative that treats reparation policies as assistentialism and calls into question the consolidation of citizens' rights. Therefore, it is relevant to carry out studies that stimulate reflections on this theme, with a view to supporting discussions in the area of Public Policies. This article aims to identify and understand structural elements that interfere in the process of affirmative public policies in the Brazilian State, evidencing historical, social and political reasons. It is a theoretical essay that runs through the concepts of race, class, public policy and affirmative policies in the Brazilian context, based on the State and Society literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is aimed at analyzing the theoretical aspects supporting the development of Cuban industrial companies, assisted by the Ministry of industry, as part of the updating of the Cuban Economic Model. This is a qualitative research. The historical and logical methods, the analysis and synthesis, the analysis of documents and the systemic approach were used. The documents approved by the Party Congresses and the New Republic Constitution as well as the national and international bibliography concerning the topic were studied. The characteristics and evolution of the companies' improvement were systematized, the precepts to be integrated in the industrial business management were defined and the correspondence between the precepts and the internationally recognized concepts was validated. Concluding, the economic growth required for updating the Cuban economic model demands modernizing the industrial business system and determining the existing gaps to get the desired state approved by the 7th congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy‐specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: the methodological standard is to apply time‐series cross‐section regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly change annually. Thus, the number of observations is artificially inflated, leading to incorrect estimates. While this problem has recently been acknowledged, it has not been convincingly resolved. This article proposes mixed‐effects models (also known as 'multilevel models' or 'hierarchical models') as a solution, which allows decomposing variance into different levels and permits complex cross‐classification data structures. It is argued that mixed‐effects models combine the strengths of existing methodological approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. Empirically, partisan effects on total and on disaggregated expenditure in 23 OECD countries in the period 1960–2012 are studied using several measures of party preferences and revealing several substantially relevant findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do constitutional rules that mandate a balanced budget promote fiscal discipline? Although such rules are at the heart of austerity debates across the world, we know surprisingly little about their consequences. We leverage original data on constitutional budget provisions and analyze their effect on governments' primary budget balances. We find that constitutional rules that require balanced budgets are robustly associated with fiscal discipline. The constitutional effect remains even after controlling for statutory balanced-budget rules. Furthermore, the effect strengthens as constitutions become more difficult to amend and under conditions of borderline solvency—two implications consistent with a constitutional impact. The results will be surprising to those who appreciate both the strong pressures against fiscal discipline and the creativity of governments in devising strategies to evade spending limits. These findings provide a reference point for policy debates surrounding financial crises in many national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the view that inequality reduces turnout, political participation among low-income voters is higher in democracies with high levels of inequality and intermediate levels of state capacity. We address this puzzle by analyzing the link between political mobilization and spending decisions at different levels of inequality and state capacity. Under high inequality and low levels of capacity, parties find it optimal to mobilize low-income voters via targeted goods. Yet, as capacity increases, targeted mobilization becomes a less effective strategy for voters' mobilization. To evaluate the implications of this argument we exploit a quasi-natural experiment, the anticorruption audits by the Brazilian government. We show that an exogenous increase in monitoring effort by the state breaks the equilibrium around high participation of the poor and leads to a reduction in turnout, a reduction in the provision of targeted goods, and a decline in the likelihood of reelection by incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade‐offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to "top off" categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda‐setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue was originally founded upon a symposium, "Global migration in a changing UK", held on the 10th of May 2017, at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, discussing how the changing nature of global migration is shaping the local economy, culture and society of Manchester, an emerging global city within the UK. Global migration is currently a highly politicized issue (Porter & Russell, [19]) and the political context of the UK has led to a fall in migration numbers (Syal & O'Carroll, [29]), bucking global trends. Studies of the migration-development nexus have focussed heavily upon narrow transnationalism, with many celebrating the progressive consequences of migrant transnationalism, in terms of both the social mobility of migrants and the "development" of sending societies. As French (and European) citizens, these migrants, benefiting from rights of free movement set intra-EU migrants aside from other migrants subjected to (often-restrictive) migration policies. [Extracted from the article]

Public support for environmental protection has evinced declines in recent years that are widely attributed to growing antipathy among self-identified Republicans. Fractures in what was long considered broad and enduring support for the environment in the United States have called attention to the broader socio-political context in which individual opinion on the environment is formed, and especially the role of political parties and their leaders in shaping opinion. Empirical analyses of environmental support, however, remain strongly focused on individual-level correlates of support. We apply recent methodological advances in age-period-cohort models to scrutinize changes in Americans' willingness to pay more for environmental protection between 1973 and 2014. Analyses distinguish the importance of individual traits, such as political identification, from cohort and especially period-based fluctuations that result from changing economic and political conditions. Individual-level covariate results are reflective of previous research on environmental opinion (e.g. age is negatively and education positively associated with environmental support). We further find that political context across time periods matters as much as, and interacts with, individual political affiliation to influence support for the environment. Americans of all political stripes demonstrate decreases in support for environmental spending during Democratic presidential administrations and during difficult economic times. Declines during Democratic presidencies are especially pronounced among Republicans. Analyses also highlight parallels between the high levels of political polarization in environmental support found at the end of the Obama Presidency and the end of the Carter era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on welfare state development in federal states has claimed that interstate competition induces a race to the bottom with regard to social expenditure. While existing research has focused on the impact of migration inflows of poor households on states with high provision of social expenditure, it has remained silent with regard to migration outflows. In this article, I argue that migration outflows are associated with increased social expenditure if eligibility restrictions for social benefits between states are relaxed. Facing outflows of workers and the unemployed, low-spending states respond with increases in social expenditure to retain a sufficient workforce and counteract rising wage levels. As a result, states with higher levels of outward migration are catching up with more generous states instead of engaging in a race to the bottom. To support my claim, I use a time-series cross-sectional data set of Swiss cantons covering the period 1930–75. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]