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This comprehensive and thought-provoking Handbook reviews public sector economics from pluralist perspectives that either complement or reach beyond mainstream views. The book takes a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, drawing on economic elements in the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, history and law. The expert contributors present new methodological approaches across these disciplines in five distinct sections: 'Revisiting the Theoretical Foundations' compares and contrasts Austrians, Marxists, public choice theorists and Keynesians, 'Revisiting the Values' is concerned with justice, welfare, religions and civil rights, 'Beyond Rationalistic Rational Choice' includes chapters devoted to memory, information and group motivation, The final sections on 'Optimal Government and Government Failure' and 'Public Economics of Public Bads' deal with competition among governments, their suboptimal size, regulation, corruption, the informal economy, cognitive dissonance, rent seeking, the UN and criminal cycles. Academics, researchers and students with an interest in economics --particularly public sector economics and Austrian economics --and public policy will find this Handbook to be an invaluable reference tool

In recent years there has been a growth in work on the organization of the firm. The same period has also seen a corresponding rise in literature dealing with the organization of the multinational firm, but the two literatures have developed quite separately, even though insights from each have much to offer the other. This unique collection of essays from respected academics aims to bridge this gap, addressing questions of the theory of the firm and international business.The material is presented in three sections:* The first section deals with theoretical issues underpinning multinational

In this paper we argue that the various discussions of the regional location behaviour of the multinational firm by the different fields of analysis which deal with these issues are all rather at a tangent to each other. Only economic geography and regional economics discuss firm-location behaviour at the subnational regional level, whereas international trade theory and traditional international business analysis focus only on firm locations at the level of a country. Where subnational regional locations have recently been discussed in international business analysis, this has been done primarily by incorporating the Porter 'clusters' literature. However, by adopting a transactions-costs approach, we show that such a 'clusters' concept is unable to distinguish between whether a multinational enterprise should or should not locate in a particular region. In addition, we use this approach to point to directions of research fruitful for reconciling these various different traditions of location analysis.

ABSTRACT In the international business literature location behavior has traditionally been analyzed usingDunning's (1977) OLI framework, which focuses on the nature, role, and behavior of multinational enterprise (MNE). In this paper it is argued that this approach is now no longer appropriate for discussing the spatial behavior of MNEs, because of the fundamental changes which have taken place either in MNE organization or in the global and institutional environment for foreign direct investment (FDI). At the same time, the paper argues that current location theory from regional economics and economic geography is also largely unsuitable for discussing these issues, such that the spatial behavior of the MNE provides a set of difficult challenges to location analysts. There appears to have been some response to these issues from the international business and management literature, most notably the Porter literature on clusters. However, it is also argued here that this literature provides few, if any, real answers to the problems set by the geographical behavior of the MNE. It is concluded that a fusion of traditional economic geography approaches with a focus on the information and organizational aspects of the firm and the region under consideration may be a way forward for both theory and empirical analysis.

In this paper, we analyze how parties form electoral coalitions in multiparty systems with mixed systems of representation. We stress that these electoral systems are created in the attempt to balance governance & representation by assigning a portion of the legislature's seats on the basis of plurality (PL) & the remaining seats on proportional (PR) basis. This is operationalized through double-ballot-voting: a PL ballot for the allocation of the seats won by the candidates in single-member-college races & a PR ballot for the proportional allocation of the remaining seats among the competing parties. The aim of the paper is to formulate a general theory to describe the electoral incentives that mixed electoral rules provide to political agents in multiparty systems. Italian 1994 & 1996 national elections are used as a case study to test the validity of our theory. 10 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 60 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.]