State Fragility and International Development Cooperation

Over the past few years addressing state fragility in the third world has become an important priority in international development cooperation. However, it seems that the international donor community has so far not been able to develop adequate instruments for dealing with the problems posed by state failure. We see two reasons for this: (i) there is growing recognition within the donor community that the lack of absorptive capacity, or bad economic policies in the partner country can actually make aid counterproductive, even harmful; and (ii) it is very difficult to manage effective development cooperation with weak governments. Channelling aid through NGOs, or giving limited aid in the form of capacity-building is clearly not sufficient to solve the problems fragile states face.

State subsidy and moral hazard in corporate financing

This paper investigates the impact of state subsidy on the behavior of the entrepreneur under asymmetric information. Several authors formulated concerns about state intervention as it can aggravate moral hazard in corporate financing. In the seminal paper of Holmström and Tirole (1997) a two-player moral hazard model is presented with an entrepreneur initiating a risky scalable project and a private investor (e.g. bank or venture capitalist) providing outside financing. The novelty of our research is that this basic moral hazard model is extended to the case of positive externalities and to three players by introducing the state subsidizing the project. It is shown that in the optimum, state subsidy does not harm, but improves the incentives of the entrepreneur to make efforts for the success of the project; hence in effect state intervention reduces moral hazard. Consequently, state subsidy increases social welfare which is defined as the sum of private and public net benefits. Also, the exact form of the state subsidy (ex-ante/ex-post, conditional/unconditional, refundable/nonrefundable) is irrelevant in respect of the optimal size and the total welfare effect of the project. Moreover, in case of nonrefundable subsidies state does not crowd out private investors; but on the contrary, by providing additional capital it boosts private financing. In case of refundable subsidies some crowding effects may occur depending on the subsidy form and the parameters.

Minsk and Budapest, the two capital cities. Selected studies of post-socialist urban geography and ecological problems of urban areas

The official cooperation between the Hungarian and the Belarusian geography began to be outlined in a sunny afternoon of June 2010 in the Minsk building of the Geographic Faculty of the Belarusian State University, four years ago. Then we reviewed the potential frames of cooperation with Professor Ekaterina Antipova. It was supported by the academican Károly Kocsis, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, director of the Geographical Research Institute, and we could also win the support of the dean Ivan Pirozhnik and the academician Vladimir Loginov from the Belarusian State University and the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, respectively. This informal cooperation became official in the autumn of 2010 in the frame of the Academic Mobility Agreement Project between the Hungarian and the Belarusian academies of sciences. Since then several publications have appeared about Hungary and Belarus in the geographic journals of both countries, however, this is the first, long awaited, significant common publication. Besides the project-based co-operations like e. g. the EastMig (www.eastmig.mtafki.hu) and the ReSEP-CEE (www.mtafki.hu/ReSEP_CEE_Be.html) supported by the Visegrad Fund, a vivid student exchange program was also launched from the autumn of 2010 between the Geographic Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Geographic Faculty of the Belarusian State University with the scholarship program of the Visegrad Fund. Later the Department of Economic Geography of the Corvinus University of Budapest, headed by István Tózsa became also an active partner of the cooperation. The publishing expenses of this book are also fully financed by the Department of Economic Geography.

Tax morale and tax evasion: Social preferences and bounded rationality

We study a family of models of tax evasion, where a flat-rate tax finances only the provision of public goods, neglecting audits and wage differences. We focus on the comparison of two modeling approaches. The first is based on optimizing agents, who are endowed with social preferences, their utility being the sum of private consumption and moral utility. The second approach involves agents acting according to simple heuristics. We find that while we encounter the traditionally shaped Laffer-curve in the optimizing model, the heuristics models exhibit (linearly) increasing Laffercurves. This difference is related to a peculiar type of behavior emerging within the heuristics based approach: a number of agents lurk in a moral state of limbo, alternating between altruism and selfishness.

Adómorál és adócsalás - társadalmi preferenciák és korlátozott racionalitás = Tax morale and tax system: social preferences and bounded rationality

Az adócsalásnak egy olyan modellcsaládját vizsgáljuk, ahol az egykulcsos adó kizárólag a közjavakat finanszírozza. Két megközelítés összehasonlítására összpontosítunk. Az elsőben minden dolgozó jövedelme azonos, és ebből minden évben annyit vall be, amennyi maximalizálja a nála maradó jövedelemből fedezhető fogyasztás nyújtotta hasznosság és a jövedelembevallásból fakadó hasznosság összegét. A második hasznosság három tényező szorzata: a dolgozó exogén adómorálja, a környezetében előző évben megfigyelt átlagos jövedelembevallás és saját bevallásából fakadó endogén hasznossága. A második megközelítésben az ágensek egyszerű heurisztikus szabályok szerint cselekszenek. Míg az optimalizáló modellben hagyományos Laffer-görbékkel találkozunk, addig a heurisztikán alapuló modellekben (lineárisan) növekvő Laffer-görbék jönnek létre. E különbség oka, hogy a heurisztikán alapuló modellben egy sajátos viselkedésfajta jelentkezik: számos ágens ingatag helyzetbe kerül, amelyben altruizmus és önzés között ingadozik. ________ The authors study a family of models of tax evasion, where a flat-rate tax only finances the provision of public goods and audits and wage differences are ne-glected. The paper focuses on comparing two modelling approaches. The first is based on optimizing agents, endowed with social preferences, their utility being the sum of private consumption and moral utility. The second approach involves agents acting according to simple heuristics. While the traditionally shaped Laffer curves are encountered in the optimizing model, the heuristics models exhibit (linearly) increasing Laffer curves. This difference is related to a peculiar type of behaviour: within the agent-based approach lurk a number of agents in a moral state of limbo, alternating between altruism and selfishness.