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In 'The law of selection in the public economy as compared to the market economy', Professor Francesco Forte (1982) – contemporary doyen of the Scienza delle finanze tradition – extended an invitation to consider the public economy by means of evolutionary principles of selection. Not many replied to Professor Forte's invitation. This article is a delayed response to the invitation. Through a parallel with a metaphor from Lewis Carroll, it proposes the Political Red Queen hypothesis: politicians work to stay in power by weakening the evolutionary pressure under which they would otherwise naturally operate. A Political Red Queen exerts effort – runs, in the language of Carroll's original Red Queen metaphor – to make policy, promulgate laws, supply public and merit goods, and so on with the prime objective to survive by reducing the uncertainty linked to maintaining a political role. A Political Red Queen thus works to weaken 'natural' political selection. The Political Red Queen hypothesis is shown to hold, mutatis mutandis, for both democratic and non-democratic political environments. It can be viewed as incorporating a positive public choice nexus between politics-as-exchange and politics-as-power.

This is the Editorial presenting the relaunch of the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice in partnership with Bristol University Press. The editorial defines the aims and scope of the relaunched journal as well as summarizes its previous history.

Questo lavoro si propone di dare conto delle misure di corruzione e di trasparenza attualmente elaborate, evidenziandone l'importanxa ai fini della comprensione completa dei fenomeni della corruzione e della trasparenza, dell'elaborazione di modelli di analisi e dell'individuazione di politiche di contrasto efficaci.

This paper has two goals. 1) To evaluate the sustainability of Italian public deficits according to the methodology developed by Trehan and Walsh (1988, 1991) and Bohn (2004); 2) To analyze how the determinants of debt creation evolved in the years following the Maastricht Treaty and how this evolution shaped the development of the Italian public finances. The analysis is carried out in three steps; first we estimate and compare the stochastic properties of the main indicators of the Italian budget performance to test for sustainability; second, we confront the results of a cointegration-vector error correction model on two sample periods: a ?pre Maastricht? (1950-1991) and a ?post Maastricht? (1950-2002), to identify the main determinants of public deficits, according to the theoretical literature and the dynamic relationship between each of them and the dependent variable; third, we use the results of these estimates to specify a dummy variable model that evaluates how Italian fiscal policy reacted to changes in these determinants in the 1950-2002 sample. We conclude that a) In this period Italian public finances failed the sustainability test; b) Debt creation is much more sensitive now than before 1991 to external constraints, chiefly the numerical rules imposed by the Maastricht Treaty itself, institutional factors, such as the budget approval rules and the relative political power of the Minister for the Economy.

The paper assesses the relative explanatory power of the Keynesian, the optimal finance, the contingent liability, & several public choice theories of the determinants of public deficits on Italian 1950-1998 data. A vector error correction model suggests that deficits are sensitive to unemployment levels, interest groups' preferences (especially the elderly), government fragmentation, changes in the degree of stringency of budget rules, & external economic constraints. Data instead provide a weak or no support to the hypotheses that deficits respond to output growth & electoral events. The implications of the optimal finance & of the contingent liability theory are rejected as well. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 29 References. Adapted from the source document.

The paper compares the appropriateness & explanatory power of marginal tax rates, average tax rates, & tax progressivity as measures of the impact of taxation on growth. Data are organized as a panel of 25 industrialized countries from 1970-1998. Contrary to previous empirical research, but consistent with theory, we find that marginal effective tax rates & tax progressivity have a negative influence on economic growth. This negative correlation turns out to be robust after controlling for state & policy variables. Average tax rates, on the other hand, seem not to affect output dynamics. 3 Tables, 30 References. Adapted from the source document.

International audience ; This paper empirically examines which type of fiscal levies are environmental taxes, by analyzing how governments actually use them. The theoretical literature is polarized between two alternative interpretations of environmental taxes: the Pigouvian and the Leviathan hypotheses, each leading to alternative testable hypotheses. We test them on a sample where the analysts' discretionary evaluations are minimal, the EU-28 countries that committed themselves to correcting a negative environmental externality, the greenhouse gas emissions, by 2020. The estimates lend support to the strict Pigouvian hypothesis, while the Leviathan hypothesis appears less consistent with the data.