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Deficits in fiscal and current account balances in a large number of countries reveal interesting implications of the causal relationship between internal and external imbalances. Empirical evidence about the occurrence of so-called twin deficits or twin surpluses provides crucial information about the validity of an intertemporal approach. However, most recent dynamic cyclical changes during the crisis period revealed many questions about the direct interconnection between macroeconomic performance and twin imbalances. In the paper we observe substantial features of twin imbalances in European transition economies. Event study (identification of large fiscal and current account changes and their parallel occurrence) and vector auto-regression methods will be employed to examine key aspects of twin imbalances. Our results suggest that current account deteriorations were predominately associated with negative public investment and savings balances (fiscal deficits), while current account improvements were predominately associated with positive private investment and savings balances, confirming empirical evidence about twin deficits in European transition economies.

Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) every year produces peace setting scores of many countries over the globe. The peace index score (PIS) and its ranking are fabricated by involvement of numerous recognised variables. The internal and external violence factors and their intensity regulate the strength of such scores. The present study deliberates such peace scores and rank of the countries in terms of regional variation and income class specifications. The study uses alteration of rank over three consecutive years and the growth of the PIS to elucidate the disparities over the region and income classification. The study recognised that income classification of countries smoothly elucidates the rank differences in terms of peace scores, but regional variation wise enlightenment remains misnomer. Further, this study contemplates four violence indicators and their growth over three years to describe the non-conformities of peace score between the countries. Studies acknowledged that inter-correlation between the peace growth scores and also between the growth of violence indicators is the significant factor to comprehend the peace score behaviour. Over the years, studies confirm that high-income countries are able to improve their PIS though there has large levels of inconsistency among countries. Among the regional specification, studies perceive that countries around the globe improved their peace score during 2018–2019, rather than 2019–2020.

In this study, various acts including regulations of public financial management, fiscal responsibility, and state budget in the selected six countries were subjected to different readability tests, and an international comparison was made. The fiscal responsibility act of six countries – Turkey, the UK, India, Australia, Canada, and Pakistan – were included in the study and analyzed. Each country was analyzed under its official language. Since English is an official language of all of the countries except for Turkey, the authors have evaluated the fiscal responsibility acts of these countries using the following readability tests: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning-Fog, and Dale-Chall. Additionally, Public Financial Management and Control Law No. 5018 approved in Turkey was analyzed by the Ateşman Readability Test which was uniquely designed for Turkish grammar rules. The acts discussed in the study were analyzed not only as a whole but also in parts and subsections. According to the results of the study, the levels of readability of the existing laws in most of the selected countries are very difficult to understand for a university graduate. However, when the readability level of the British Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act tested as parts and subsections and a whole, it was rated at a level a university student could understand. This study analyses the readability and intelligibility of acts related to fiscal responsibility and the state budget in six selected countries, adopting Anglo-Saxon public administration model and making an inter-country evaluation. Since it is important that citizens have enough information about legislation for a citizen-oriented understanding, a legislation system that is understood by the larger part of the society is essential.

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand, colonial governments experimented with other ways to anchor their paper monies to real values in the economy. These mechanisms included tax-redemption, land-backed loans, sinking funds, interest-bearing notes, and legal tender laws. I assess and explain the structure and performance of these mechanisms. This was monetary experimentation on a grand scale.

Did the expansion of democratic institutions play a role in determining central government spending behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries? The link between democracy and increased central government spending is well established for the post-Second World War period, but has never been explored during the first “wave of democracy” and its subsequent reversal, that is 1870–1938. The main contribution of this paper is the compilation of a dataset covering 24 countries over this period to begin to address this question. Utilizing various descriptive techniques, including panel data regressions, we explore correlations between central government spending and the institutional characteristics of regimes. We find that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that democracies have a broader need for legitimization than autocracies as various measures of democracy are associated with higher central government spending. Our results indicate that the extension of franchise had a slight positive impact on central government spending levels, as did a few of the other democracy variables. We also find that early liberal democracies spent less and monarchies more than other regimes; debt increases spending; and participation in the Gold Standard reduced government spending substantially.

During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in “emergency economic” policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical limitations of emergency economic responses. We argue that these responses fail to take into consideration the practical conditions of politics, thereby making them unsuitable to remedy the problems of a crisis. Lastly, we provide a preliminary analysis of the consequences resulting from emergency economic policies initiated in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

This chapter discusses the “seigniorage argument” in favor of public money issuance, according to which public finances could be improved if the state more fully exercised the privilege of money creation, which is, today, largely shared with private banks. This point was made in the 1930s by several proponents of the “100% money” reform scheme, such as Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, Lauchlin Currie of Harvard and Irving Fisher of Yale, who called for a full-reserve requirement in lawful money behind checking deposits. One of their claims was that, by returning all seigniorage profit to the state, such reform would allow a significant reduction of the national debt. In academic debates, however, following a criticism first made by Albert G. Hart of the University of Chicago in 1935, this argument has generally been discarded as wholly illusory. Hart argued that, because the state, under a 100% system, would be likely to pay the banks a subsidy for managing checking accounts, no substantial debt reduction could possibly be expected to follow. The 100% money proponents never answered Hart’s criticism, whose conclusion has often been considered as definitive in the literature. However, a detailed study of the subject reveals that Hart’s analysis itself appears to be questionable on at least two grounds: the first pertains to the sources of the seigniorage benefit, the other to its distribution. This chapter concludes that the “seigniorage argument” of the 100% money authors may not have been entirely unfounded.