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In Okun's (1975) extended essay “Equality and Efficiency — The Big Trade‐Off”, reference is made to the leaky bucket experiment in the context of tax and transfer programmes. Money is carried from the rich to the poor in a bucket which leaks. This idea gives eloquent expression to the concept of efficiency loss in the use of the fiscal system to reduce inequality.

Drawing attention to the significant number of unsuccessful (abandoned) cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions in recent years, the purpose of this paper is to analyze three litigated cross-border inbound acquisitions that associated with an emerging economy – India, such as Vodafone-Hutchison and Bharti Airtel-MTN deals in the telecommunications industry, and Vedanta-Cairn India deal in the oil and gas exploration industry. The study intends to explore how do institutional and political environments in the host country affect the completion likelihood of cross-border acquisition negotiations.

Nested within the interdisciplinary framework, the study adopts a legitimate method in qualitative research, that is, case study method, and performs a unit of analysis and cross-case analysis of sample cases.

The critical analysis suggests that government officials’ erratic nature and ruling political party intervention have detrimental effects on the success of Indian-hosted cross-border deals with higher bid value, listed target firm, cash payment, and stronger government control in the target industry. The findings emerge from the cross-case analysis of sample cases contribute to the Lucas paradox – why does not capital flow from rich to poor countries and interdisciplinary M&A literature on the completion likelihood of international takeovers.

The findings have several implications for multinational managers who typically involve in cross-border negotiations. The causes and consequences of sample cases would help develop economy firms who intend to invest in emerging economies. The study also offers some implications of M&A for telecommunications and extractive industries.

Although a huge amount of extant research investigates why M&A fail to create value to the shareholders during the public announcement and post-merger stages, there is a significant dearth of research on the causes and consequences of delayed or abandoned national and international deals. The paper fills this knowledge gap by discussing an in-depth cross-case analysis of Indian-hosted cross-border acquisitions.

Curbing (without banning) potentially environmentally‐damaging activities that have global, rather than local, effects raises challenges analogous to those faced by a community lacking legislative powers that has to restrict access to a common pasture in order to make its use sustainable. A local community achieves autonomy in a matter such as this by consensual cooperation. In the absence of a world coercive authority, global environmental problems (in which a measure of world autonomy is needed) have to be met similarly by consensual co‐operation among governments. The conditions under which local consensual cooperation have been observed to be successful may also be relevant to global consensual cooperation. In particular there must be clear rules, and devices for interpreting them; they must be acceptable to all parties; and monitoring of compliance is crucial. Even in such cases of quasi‐voluntary compliance, graduated sanctions for infringement, or analogous arrangements, are quite likely to play a vital part. In an international regime for reducing greenhouse‐gas emissions, it is essential that rules should be devised that will appeal as fair and practically tolerable to opinion in both rich and poor countries and to both high and low per capita emitters. This will rule out a regime of uniform percentage reductions without balancing compensation. It will also rule out a regime based on equal per capita claims to engage in the restricted activity. It is desirable that the rules also act to make the allocation of the reductions in the potentially damaging activity efficient. This will favour rules under which financial signals reflecting marginal costs or benefits play some part in the allocation of any target aggregates. It will probably be essential, given prevalent views of justice and differing valuations of environmental goals between rich and poor nations, that the arrangements involve transfers of resources from richer, higher‐per‐capita polluting countries to poorer, lower per capita polluting countries. Nevertheless, reducing emissions sufficiently through a system of tradable quotas summing to the targeted total of emissions – which might seem to meet both this requirement and the need for efficient marginal incentives – has, in its simple form in which the quotas issued are proportional to countries’ populations, little chance of being acceptable to rich, high‐emitter nations. An attempt is made to explore solutions to these dilemmas, leading on from the arrangements made under the Kyoto protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of intergenerational and international sharing of longevity and growth risks. Current research on worldwide demographic changes highlights the importance of longevity risk on financial markets and the need to devise optimal hedging vehicles.

The paper presents a potential financial innovation between two countries at different stages of economic development and with different long‐term challenges. This 30‐year‐long swap is structured in such a way to capture the different timing of needed funds of the two countries and the funding capabilities of each generation: the more developed economy requires funds in the future to cover expenses for its ageing population, while the developing economy needs funds today to pay for educational, technological, and other infrastructural services. To price the swap, the paper applies an exponential‐utility‐based pricing method and defines an interval of prices allowing a contract to be agreed upon.

Via the exponential‐utility‐based pricing method, the paper shows how the bid‐ask spread varies with respect to the governments' risk and time preferences.

The paper is believed to be the first to illustrate the structuring and pricing of a long‐term longevity swap between two countries at different stages of economic development and to discuss practical challenges derivative structures would face if they were to implement such a strategy.

Federal systems are often more sophisticated than assumed in the literature. In many cases, at least three tiers of government are involved in federal decision making. The purpose of this paper is to cast some light on this increasingly important issue in fiscal federalism.

In a model with three tiers of government, the author analyzes corrective policies in the presence of fiscal externalities generated by federal redistribution.

The author identifies an additional qualitative incentive effect, particularly for intermediate governments. They behave strategically to attract additional redistribution funds from outside, though still using corrective policies to provide investment incentives toward their own regions. The results also suggest that differently from the USA the federal system of the EU may lead to inefficiently low regional investment.

The presented model is a first step toward analyzing strategic behavior and the effect of corrective policies in more complicated federal set ups with three tiers of government involved. This is relevant for federal structures such as Germany or the USA, as well as for government interactions at the international level.

Some economic commentators claim that inequality of wealth or income reduces economic development and growth of GDP. But this is counterintuitive, since economic breakthroughs usually occur by dint of great effort, or discovery, or invention, which brings great wealth to those responsible (think Bill Gates). Nor is this thesis supported by a proper interpretation of the facts of the matter, despite the contentions of several authors in this regard. Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini (1994) (hence, PT) have an interesting thesis. It is that inequality is harmful for economic growth. That is, ceteris paribus, the more equal is the income or wealth distribution, the better are a country's prospects for economic development.

Whether welfare provision should be broad-based or selectively targeted at the poor is one of the most common themes in social policy discourse. However, empirical evidence concerning people's preferences about these distributive justice principles is very limited. The current paper aims to bridge this gap, by analyzing Europeans' opinions about a hypothetical transformation of the welfare state that would provide social transfers and services only to people on low incomes.

The analysis draws on data from the 2016 European Social Survey and covers 21 countries. In order to understand what would motivate people to support the complete means testing of welfare provision, we use multilevel models with individual-level and contextual predictors.

The results show that the upper and middle classes are the most opposed to the idea, presumably as they would be the net losers from such a reform. Furthermore, our results indicate that more-egalitarian people show a higher level of support for means testing, even though the political left has traditionally promoted universalism. Some key characteristics of the welfare state also matter: People are more likely to endorse complete means testing in countries with less-generous provision and a higher incidence of poverty. However, the extent to which the existing welfare state relies on means testing has no influence on people's opinions about implementing a fully means-tested welfare model.

Some of the key findings are likely to be of interest to activists advocating on behalf of the poor and the socially vulnerable. Although it is generally assumed that universal provision is the best strategy to address the needs of disadvantaged people, our results suggest that from an electoral point of view, targeting within universalism may be a more appealing welfare strategy.

This paper details one of the very few studies to examine preferences for means-tested welfare provision in a comparative context. In addition, one of the contextual variables used in the analysis – the proportion of means-tested social benefits out of the total expenditure on social benefits – is unique to this study.

Taking departure in the premise that donor and recipient priorities differ with regard to the marginal costs and benefits associated with attacking global environmental externalities, and hence the relative importance attached to the global environment, this paper seeks to scrutinize specific global environmental transfer mechanisms in the light of proposed definitions of global environmental assistance and global environmental compensation. It is argued that most global environmental transfer mechanisms possess distinct compensatory elements, and that additionality of these transfers is essential in order to ensure that existing development assistance is not crowded out. Specifically, this should be achieved either directly through separation of funds for global environmental and local developmental purposes or indirectly through increased considerations for local development objectives directly in global environmental transfer design.

This paper reviews one of the crucial issues in the recent growth literature concerning the hypothesis of cross country convergence of levels and growth rates of income per capita implied by the neo‐classical growth model, both in the Solow‐Swan and Rampsey‐Cass‐Koopmans versions. The alternative endogenous growth models, consistent with permanent income inequality, are considered. Convergence to a common income level versus divergence is discussed from a theoretical point of view. Then, empirical tests of the convergence property are presented. What emerges is that Barro type regressions and their findings about “conditional” convergence are questionable and cannot be used to give a definitive response on this issue.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of transfers as a means to overcome inefficiencies in the provision of impure public goods. The paper employs the example of international conditional transfers targeted to overcome suboptimal low climate protection efforts by influencing the abatement technology choice of countries.

The paper applies the Lancastrian characteristics approach and conduct numerical simulations for divergent degrees of substitutability between different characteristics. The paper takes into account climate‐protection benefits (global pollution reduction) as well as co‐benefits (local pollution reduction) of climate protection activities.

The analysis shows that individual country solution can be improved upon by making transfers from the richer countries to the poorer ones, if the latter have a lower relative preference for the global public goods (global pollution reduction) than the former. The magnitudes of such transfers will depend on the relative benefits of the global and local pollutants in the two countries. The authors also investigated the dependency of the potential for transfers on the degree of complementarity between global and local pollution characteristics. With a “Cobb Douglas” type of function used here the elasticity of substitution between the two is of course one. With a zero degree of substitutability the adjustment to a lower level of the global public good in fact starts to happen at a lower per capita income level. The scope for conditional transfers is still there, although the gains can be slightly smaller than when adjustment on the “global pollution characteristic – local pollution characteristic” margin is possible.

This paper is a contribution to the literature on impure public goods. In particular, the authors examine the role of international transfers in obtaining an efficient global allocation of resources in the presence of such public goods. To date the analysis of impure public goods has not examined the case of a continuum of technologies where an efficient solution requires conditional transfers, i.e. payments from one country to another to undertake a different supply of global and local public goods than the second country would wish to undertake.