Less Government—More Wealth? On the Macroeconomics of a Smaller Public Sector in Europe

In this paper, we analyze the reactions of European economies to a fiscal policy strategy aiming at diminishing the public sector. Within the framework of the MSG3 model, a macroeconomic model of the world economy, we perform several simulation experiments to explore the effects of reducing government expenditures permanently in different phases of the business cycle. For this purpose, we combine the fiscal contraction with negative and positive, Euro Area-wide and global, supply and demand shocks. It turns out that adverse Keynesian effects on output and employment tend to be mostly weak and short-lived, whereas long-run effects on output and employment are favorable. Due to these long-run effects, the fiscal contraction policy raises welfare as measured by an asymmetric quadratic objective function. The size of these welfare effects depends on the initial situation in a non-trivial manner.     

Financial liberalization,financial sector development and growth: Evidence from Malaysia

The objective of this paper is to examine whether financial development leads to economic growth or vice versa in the small open economy of Malaysia. Using time series data from 1960 to 2001, we conduct cointegration and causality tests to assess the finance-growth link by taking the real interest rate and financial repression into account. The empirical evidence suggests that financial liberalization, through removing the repressionist policies, has a favorable effect in stimulating financial sector development. Financial depth and economic development are positively related; but contrary to the conventional findings, our results support Robinson's view that output growth leads to higher financial depth in the long-run.     

Sustainable travel writing? Exploring the ethical dilemmas of twenty-first-century travel writers

There is a paucity of academic literature on travel writing that examines travel writers and their perceived influence on sustainability. This article addresses this lacuna by exploring how travel writers understand their responsibilities and reflects on ethics in their profession, particularly in how foreign destinations and cultures are portrayed. This is significant because some travel writers have been accused of contributing to what interviewees called the “Lonely Planet Syndrome”, the notion that writing about a place will introduce and encourage mass tourism, changing the original state of the place for the worse. In this qualitative, phenomenological study, data were collected from 23 in-depth interviews with twenty-first-century travel writers and analysed using an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Findings suggest that while some interviewees expressed anxiety about their perceived accountability to mediate foreign cultures responsibly, others embraced their role as a cultural mediator. They cared about local cultures and wanted to write in responsible ways by supporting more sustainable outcomes, reflected in the themes of cross-cultural understanding, socio-cultural and environmental advocacy and promoting benefits of tourism to communities. Future studies could include exploring the role of travel editors, travel writers’ professional knowledge and the growing role of travel blogs.     

The Dutch East-India Company and accounting for social capital at the dawn of modern capitalism 1602–1623

Capitalism’s profound effect on society has encouraged economic and accounting historians to hypothesise about the importance of double entry bookkeeping to its development. According to Sombart the continual reinvestment of the profits earned depended on the existence of a capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping that would allow investors and managers to measure the return on investments as a means of making rational business decisions. More recently, with particular reference to the English East-India Company Bryer has argued that the adoption of the capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping was essential to resolving the social conflict between investing capitalist classes that arose with the rise of industrial capitalism in England in the late 17th and 18th centuries by providing the means to calculate the rate of return on socialised capital. This paper widens the historical context of these debates to The Netherlands in the early 17th century by examining accounting practices of the Dutch East-India Company, the epitome of modern capitalism in motives, organization and funding. It establishes that, although the 17th century Dutch were pre-eminent in Europe in their knowledge of the capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping, at no time during the period covered by the first charter (1602–1623) of the Dutch East-India Company, or thereafter, did the domestic operations of the Company use this form of bookkeeping across all chambers. This meant that the investors did not have the necessary information that would have allowed them to calculate the return on their investments. Indeed, the Company’s investors neither expected nor demanded information to calculate the return on their investments and, hence, double-entry bookkeeping was not a necessary condition for Dutch capitalism in the manner suggested by Sombart, Weber and Bryer. Instead, the form which capitalism developed in The Netherlands recognised the social and economic impact of its unique geography which produced a society characterised by a monetary economy, a long tradition of joint ownership, and a free market for assets and capital rights.     

Public–private partnerships for nature-based tourist attractions: the failure of Seal Rocks

In 1998, the Seal Rocks Sea Life Centre opened on Phillip Island, Australia. It was a public–private partnership, with a privately funded tourist attraction built on a government-owned protected area. Almost immediately it was beset by problems and court action found in favour of the private developer, who was awarded $A37 million in damages, with ownership of the centre returning to the state. This article fills a gap in the literature examining public–private partnerships by considering this failed venture. It is a qualitative case study, analysing the 2003 appeal court judgement in the case and newspaper accounts from 1995 to 2004. Our findings highlight that deficiencies with the drafting of commercial contracts for public–private partnerships may limit the environmental and economic benefits that are being sought by governments through these arrangements. In this case, the application of a “best efforts” clause was critical, as it required that priority was given to the commercial success of the project over environmental and planning concerns. Furthermore, the development was a centralised decision made by the state government, affording very little input from local parks management and community stakeholders. Such a court finding has important ramifications for future developments of partnership agreements in nature-based tourism.     

Dynamic Adjustment to Regional Integration: Europe 1992 and NAFTA

Recent research on the gains to trade liberalization, especially in a number of papers by Richard Baldwin, suggests that the static gains to trade liberalization that many economists attempt to measure may be dwarfed by the dynamic gains. One source of these dynamic gains is through capital accumulation. A similar argument can be made regarding the consequences of regional integration. As distortions are removed the effects of aggregate output through dynamic adjustments are likely to be larger than simple static calculations suggest. This paper focuses on the issue of the dynamic gains to regional integration for two recent episodes, European integration known as Europe 1992, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The paper provides empirical results on the size and nature of global and regional adjustments to these two examples of regional integration. J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 1994, 8(4), pp. 422–453. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia; and Brookings Institution, Washington, DC 20036.