The empirical relationship between government spending and private investment is examined, using a panel of 14 OECD countries. The evidence suggests the existence of a significant crowding-in effect of private investment by public investment, through the positive impact of infrastructure on private investment productivity. Moreover, government consumption appears to crowd out private investment. The implications of these results are of foremost importance when it comes to fiscal consolidation. Deficit reductions engineered through cuts in public investment could severely impinge on private capital accumulation and growth prospects.

In this paper we apply the meta-regression technique to survey the empirical literature on the economic incidence of labour taxes and social security contributions. In particular, we focus on the effects of taxation on wages to test the conventional view that employees bear the burden due to lower net wages. Based on 52 empirical papers, we find that economic institutions, the tax wedge definition, and the temporal focus significantly affect the results. In the long run, workers bear between two thirds of the tax burden in Continental and Anglo-Saxon economies, and nearly 90 % in the Nordic economies. However, despite the numerous set of controlling variables, a significant part of the variability of the empirical literature remains unexplained.

Are private firms more efficient than public ones? Does privatisation improve performance? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to disentangle the impact of ownership and competition upon business performance. This paper presents empirical evidence relating to the hypothesis that public ownership and competition are determinants of firms' productivity. It concludes that public ownership has a significant negative effect on productivity and also that privatisation has a positive impact on efficiency. Furthermore, increased competition is found to have a positive effect on productivity. These results are interpreted as confirming that privatisation is effective as a means of increasing firms' efficiency, at least in a non-regulated and relatively competitive sector, such as manufacturing. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

We examine the empirical relationship between public investment and per capita income growth in the Spanish regions over 1965-1997. Using a neoclassical growth model with public and human capital, a convergence equation is derived and estimated using panel data techniques. Besides providing evidence of conditional convergence, the results show a non-positive effect of productive-public investment on the rate of regional economic growth. The impact of public investment in education and health is not clear. Robustness checks addressing potential endogeneity and specification problems reaffirm our results. It is concluded that there are no simple recipes for effective regional investment policies. * We are grateful to Javier Rodero and participants at the International Symposium on Economic Modelling, at the VII Encuentro de Economia Publica, at the 49 th Meeting of the North American Regional Science Association, at the XXVIII reunion de Estudios Regionales, at the XXVII Simposio de Analisis Economico, two anonymous referees, and the editor Dan Rickman for their suggestions. Thanks are also due to A.J. Sanchez and E. Ruiz for their research assistance. All remaining errors are ours.