No abstract

No abstract

We survey the theoretical literature on privatization and efficiency by tracing its evolution from the applications of agency theory to recent contributions in the field of political economy. The former extend the theory of regulation with incomplete information to address privatization issues, comparing state-owned enterprises with private regulated firms. The benefits of privatization may derive either from the constraints it places on malevolent agents or from the impossibility of commitment by a benevolent government because of incomplete contracts. Contributions dealing with political economy issues separate privatization from restructuring decisions. They either explore bargaining between managers and politicians or analyse the impact of privatization shaped by political preferences on efficiency. The theoretical results regarding the relation between privatization and efficiency do not lead to any definitive conclusion. Privatization may increase productive efficiency when restructuring takes place whereas its effects on allocative efficiency still remain uncertain.

What are the determinants of individual attitudes on food? Focusing on EU citizens, we provide a first systematic answer to this question by using the 2010 Eurobarometer Special Survey on risk perception. Since respondents are asked about various features of food consumption, we check to what extent a specific demographic or socioeconomic variable is differentially correlated with those features. We find that women show an higher risk aversion than men, given their attention on freshness, calories and safety. The same holds for more educated, higher income individuals and respondents living with children. Occupational status does not play a relevant role in food preferences, except for prices. We deal with potential response bias by using as dependent variable the difference between each response on a given food attribute and the average response on the other ones. We also perform a principal component analysis to identify the underlying patterns which drive individual responses.

No abstract

Political variables play a crucial role in shaping tax systems and tax reforms in Europe. This paper presents new evidence on the relationship between political factors and tax design in European countries. For the period 1995-2012, we find that, when the country's ruling coalition is left-wing, income taxes become more relevant. Moreover, when the largest government party is more powerful, the share of property taxes over GDP increases, while the number of seats held by the second government party is positively associated with the level of consumption taxes over GDP. We also find that a more powerful government is associated with a lower top tax rate of the personal income tax (PIT). Building upon this evidence, we review the main arguments developed by the empirical political economy literature on taxation and discuss the role of political factors in fundamental issues of taxation: redistribution and progressivity; tax design and its impact on growth; tax complexity; tax administration; tax competition; and the need for tax reforms.

We present an empirical model of wealth transfer taxation in the revenue systems of the G7 countries -Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U. K. and the U. S. -over the period from 1965 to 2009. Our model emphasizes the influences of population aging and of the stock of household wealth in an explanation of the past and likely future of this tax source. Simulations with the model using U.N. demographic projections and projections of household wealth suggest that even in France and Germany where reliance on wealth transfer taxation has been increasing for part of the period studied, wealth transfer taxes can be expected to wither away as population aging deepens over the next three decades. Our results indicate that recent tax designs that rely upon the taxation of wealth transfers to preserve equity in the face of declining taxation of capital incomes may be, in this respect, politically infeasible for the foreseeable future. We conclude by using the case of wealth transfer taxation to raise the general question of the extent to which the consistency of a proposed reform with expected political equilibria ought to play a role in the design of a normative policy blueprint.

No abstract