Public expenditures on HIV prevention, treatment, care, and support services in Iran, 2004

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Natural resource windfalls and efficiency of local government expenditures: evidence from Peru

We study the role of natural resource windfalls in explaining the efficiency of public expenditures. Using a rich dataset of expenditures and public good provision for 1,836 municipalities in Peru for period 2001-2010, we estimate a non-monotonic relationship between the efficiency of public good provision and the level of natural resource transfers. Local governments that were extremely favored by the boom of mineral prices were more efficient in using fiscal windfalls whereas those benefited with modest transfers were more inefficient. These results can be explained by the increase in political competition associated with the boom. However, the fact that increases in efficiency were related to reductions in public good provision casts doubts about the beneficial effects of political competition in promoting efficiency.

British working-class household composition, labour supply, and commercial leisure participation during the 1930s

The early twentieth century constituted the heyday of the ‘breadwinner–homemaker’ household, characterized by a high degree of intra-household functional specialization between paid and domestic work according to age, gender, and marital status. This article examines the links between formal workforce participation and access to resources for individualized discretionary spending in British working-class households during the late 1930s, via an analysis of household leisure expenditures. Leisure spending is particularly salient to intra-household resource allocation, as it constitutes one of the most highly prioritized areas of individualized expenditure, especially for young, single people. Using a database compiled from surviving returns to the Ministry of Labour's national 1937/8 working-class expenditure survey, we examine leisure participation rates for over 600 households, using a detailed set of commercial leisure activities together with other relevant variables. We find that the employment status of family members other than the male breadwinner was a key factor influencing their access to commercial leisure. Our analysis thus supports the view that the breadwinner–homemaker household was characterized by strong power imbalances that concentrated resources—especially for individualized expenditures—in the hands of those family members who engaged in paid labour.

Demonstrating distinction at ‘the lowest edge of the black-coated class’: the family expenditures of Edwardian railway clerks

Families at the bottom end of the Edwardian white-collar income spectrum demonstrated middle-class status through observable consumption, at the cost of squeezing other expenditures, including ‘necessities’. This had negative economic impacts, lowering living standards due to inefficiently high budget shares for positional goods. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, we examine how railway clerks sought to demonstrate ‘distinction’ from manual workers through certain conspicuous expenditures and how this strategy was progressively undermined by falling real incomes over the Edwardian period.

PDA, Ebooks, Print Books Usage and Expenditures: Knowledge Ecosystem Remix

This article presents data-rich findings of a comprehensive follow-up study on the patron-driven/demand-driven ebook acquisitions (DDA) plan chronicled in two prior articles from the DDA ebook plan's October 2011 inception. Into the third fiscal year, print vs. ebook usage preferences have begun to emerge, and the results broken out by discipline are presented.

A note on policy, the composition of public expenditures and economic growth

In this article we study the growth and welfare effects of fiscal and monetary policies in economies where public investment is part of the productive process we present four different models that share the same technology with public infrastructure as a separate argument of the production function. We show that growth is maximized at positive levels of income tax and inflation. However, unless there are no transfers or public goods in the economy, maximization of growth does not imply welfare maximization we show that the optimal tax rate is greater than the rate that maximizes growth and the optimal rate of money creation is below the growth maximizing rate. With public infrastructure in the production function we no longer obtain superneutrality in the Sidrausky model.