Iowa Department of Elder Affairs Legislative Update, March 31, 2006, Vol. 2, no. 12

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs provides a brief summation of a Departmental program or other important Departmental information in each Legislative Update. The Legislative Update is produced for informational and educational purposes only.

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs Legislative Update, April 7, 2006, Vol. 2, no. 13

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs provides a brief summation of a Departmental program or other important Departmental information in each Legislative Update. The Legislative Update is produced for informational and educational purposes only.

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs Legislative Update, April 18, 2006, Vol. 2, no. 14

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs provides a brief summation of a Departmental program or other important Departmental information in each Legislative Update. The Legislative Update is produced for informational and educational purposes only.

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs Legislative Update, April 21, 2006, Vol. 2, no. 15

Iowa Department of Elder Affairs provides a brief summation of a Departmental program or other important Departmental information in each Legislative Update. The Legislative Update is produced for informational and educational purposes only.

The political cost of reforms

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politiciansperceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters.To do so, it proposes a model of elections where political ability is ex-ante unknownand investment in reforms is unobservable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politiciansmake too little reforms in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reappointment probability. Although in a rational expectation equilibrium voters cannotbe fooled and hence reelection does not depend on reforms, the strategy of underinvesting in reforms is nonetheless sustained by out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Contrary tothe conventional wisdom, uncertainty makes reforms more politically viable and may,under some conditions, increase social welfare. The model is then used to study howpolitical rewards can be set so as to maximize social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of this theory are consistentwith a number of empirical regularities on the determinants of reforms and reelection.They are also consistent with a new stylized fact documented in this paper: economicuncertainty is associated to more reforms in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

The effects of structural reforms on productivity and profitability enhancing reallocation: Evidence from Colombia

Estimates for the U.S. suggest that at least in some sectors productivity enhancing reallocationis the dominant factor in accounting for producitivity growth. An open question, particularlyrelevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. Itmay be that imperfect competition or other barriers to competitive environments imply that thereallocation process is not fully e?cient in these countries. Using a unique plant-levellongitudinal dataset for Colombia for the period 1982-1998, we explore these issues byexamining the interaction between market allocation, and productivity and profitability.Moreover, given the important trade, labor and financial market reforms in Colombia during theearly 1990's, we explore whether and how the contribution of reallocation changed over theperiod of study. Our data permit measurement of plant-level quantities and prices. Takingadvantage of the rich structure of our price data, we propose a sequential mehodology to estimateproductivity and demand shocks at the plant level. First, we estimate total factor productivity(TFP) with plant-level physical output data, where we use downstream demand to instrumentinputs. We then turn to estimating demand shocks and mark-ups with plant-level price data, usingTFP to instrument for output in the inversedemand equation. We examine the evolution of thedistributions of TFP and demand shocks in response to the market reforms in the 1990's. We findthat market reforms are associated with rising overall productivity that is largely driven byreallocation away from low- and towards highproductivity businesses. In addition, we find thatthe allocation of activity across businesses is less driven by demand factors after reforms. Wefind that the increase in aggregate productivity post-reform is entirely accounted for by theimproved allocation of activity.

Employment consequences of restrictive permanent contracts: Evidence from Spanish labor market reforms

Temporary employment contracts allowing unrestricted dismissals wereintroduced in Spain in 1984 and quickly came to account for most new jobs.As a result, temporary employment increased from around 10% in themid-eighties to more than 30% in the early nineties. In 1997, however,the Spanish government attempted to reduce the incidence of temporaryemployment by reducing payroll taxes and dismissal costs for permanentcontracts. In this paper, we use individual data from the Spanish LaborForce Survey to estimate the effects of reduced payroll taxes anddismissal costs on the distribution of employment and worker flows. Weexploit the fact that recent reforms apply only to certain demographicgroups to set up a natural experiment research design that can be usedto study the effects of contract regulations. Our results show that thereduction of payroll taxes and dismissal costs increased the employmentof young workers on permanent contracts, although the effects for youngwomen are not always significant. Results for older workers showinsignificant effects. The results suggest a moderately elastic responseof permanent employment to non-wage labor costs for young men. We alsofind positive effects on the transitions from unemployment and temporaryemployment into permanent employment for young and older workers, althoughthe effects for older workers are not always significant. On the otherhand, transitions from permanent employment to non-employment increasedonly for older men, suggesting that the reform had little effect ondismissals.

Incentives and pharmaceutical reimbursement reforms in Spain

The aim of this paper is to assess whether cost-containment has beenaffected by recent pharmaceutical reimbursement reforms that have beenintroduced in the Spanish health care system over the period 1996-2002,under the conservative Popular Party government. Four main reimbursementpolicies can be observed in the Spanish pharmaceutical market after1996, each of them largely unintegrated with the other three. First, asecond supplementary negative list of excluded pharmaceutical productswas introduced in 1998. Second, a reference pricing system wasintroduced in December 2000, with annual updating and enlargement.Third, the pharmacies payment system has moved from the traditionalset margin on the consumer price to a margin that varies according tothe consumer price of the product, the generic status of the product,and the volume of sales by pharmacies. And fourth, general agreementsbetween the government and the industry have been reached with costcontainment objectives. In the final section of this paper we presentan overall assessment of the impact of these pharmaceuticalreimbursement policies on the behaviour of the agents in thepharmaceutical market.

The semi-presidential system of Cape Verde: the relationship between the executive and the legislative powers = O sistema semi-presidencialista caboverdiano: a relação entre os poderes executivo e legislativo

e article analyses the relationship established between the executive and legislative powers in the Cape Verdean government system where researchers seek to understand it, taking into account their theoretical and constitutional setting practice. It should be noted the prominence of the debate and studies undertaken to understand how the scienti c academy seeks to eradicate this problem. Two issues are relevant in this debate: the rst reporting to the theoretical and constitutional con guration of Cape Verdean government system and the other to its policy and legislative practice. Keywords: Cape Verde. Semi-presidential System. Systems of Government. Legislative and Executive Powers.

Final Report: Legislative Property Tax Study Committee, January 2009

The Committee was authorized to meet three days during the 2007 Legislative Interim and two days during the 2008 Legislative Interim. The Committee met on September 12, 2007; November 7, 2007; December 5, 2007; November 14, 2008; and January 7, 2009, at the State Capitol, Des Moines, Iowa. In 2008, the Committee retained consultants from the Institute for Public Policy at George Washington University to study property taxation and other forms of revenue generation used by local governments in Iowa and other states.

Tax reforms and inequality: theoretical and empirical implications

In this paper we examine the effect of tax policy on the relationship between inequality and growth in a two-sector non-scale model. With non-scale models, the longrun equilibrium growth rate is determined by technological parameters and it is independent of macroeconomic policy instruments. However, this fact does not imply that fiscal policy is unimportant for long-run economic performance. It indeed has important effects on the different levels of key economic variables such as per capita stock of capital and output. Hence, although the economy grows at the same rate across steady states, the bases for economic growth may be different.The model has three essential features. First, we explicitly model skill accumulation, second, we introduce government finance into the production function, and we introduce an income tax to mirror the fiscal events of the 1980¿s and 1990¿s in the US. The fact that the non-scale model is associated with higher order dynamics enables it to replicate the distinctly non-linear nature of inequality in the US with relative ease. The results derived in this paper attract attention to the fact that the non-scale growth model does not only fit the US data well for the long-run (Jones, 1995b) but also that it possesses unique abilities in explaining short term fluctuations of the economy. It is shown that during transition the response of the relative simulated wage to changes in the tax code is rather non-monotonic, quite in accordance to the US inequality pattern in the 1980¿s and early 1990¿s.More specifically, we have analyzed in detail the dynamics following the simulation of an isolated tax decrease and an isolated tax increase. So, after a tax decrease the skill premium follows a lower trajectory than the one it would follow without a tax decrease. Hence we are able to reduce inequality for several periods after the fiscal shock. On the contrary, following a tax increase, the evolution of the skill premium remains above the trajectory carried on by the skill premium under a situation with no tax increase. Consequently, a tax increase would imply a higher level of inequality in the economy

A theoretical and practical study on linear reforms of dual taxes

[cat] En aquest treball extenem les reformes lineals introduïdes per Pfähler (1984) al cas d’impostos duals. Estudiem l’efecte relatiu que els retalls lineals duals d’un impost dual tenen sobre la distribució de la desigualtat -es pot fer un estudi simètric per al cas d’augments d’impostos-. Tambe introduïm mesures del grau de progressivitat d’impostos duals i mostrem que estan connectades amb el criteri de dominació de Lorenz. Addicionalment, estudiem l’elasticitat de la càrrega fiscal de cadascuna de les reformes proposades. Finalment, gràcies a un model de microsimulació i una gran base de dades que conté informació sobre l’IRPF espanyol de l’any 2004, 1) comparem l’efecte que diferents reformes tindrien sobre l’impost dual espanyol i 2) estudiem quina redistribució de la riquesa va suposar la reforma dual de l’IRPF (Llei ’35/2006’) respecte l’anterior impost.

Reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy and agriculture in Finland

Selostus: Euroopan unionin yhteisen maatalouspolitiikan uudistaminen ja Suomen maatalous

Tax reforms and inequality: theoretical and empirical implications

In this paper we examine the effect of tax policy on the relationship between inequality and growth in a two-sector non-scale model. With non-scale models, the longrun equilibrium growth rate is determined by technological parameters and it is independent of macroeconomic policy instruments. However, this fact does not imply that fiscal policy is unimportant for long-run economic performance. It indeed has important effects on the different levels of key economic variables such as per capita stock of capital and output. Hence, although the economy grows at the same rate across steady states, the bases for economic growth may be different.The model has three essential features. First, we explicitly model skill accumulation, second, we introduce government finance into the production function, and we introduce an income tax to mirror the fiscal events of the 1980¿s and 1990¿s in the US. The fact that the non-scale model is associated with higher order dynamics enables it to replicate the distinctly non-linear nature of inequality in the US with relative ease. The results derived in this paper attract attention to the fact that the non-scale growth model does not only fit the US data well for the long-run (Jones, 1995b) but also that it possesses unique abilities in explaining short term fluctuations of the economy. It is shown that during transition the response of the relative simulated wage to changes in the tax code is rather non-monotonic, quite in accordance to the US inequality pattern in the 1980¿s and early 1990¿s.More specifically, we have analyzed in detail the dynamics following the simulation of an isolated tax decrease and an isolated tax increase. So, after a tax decrease the skill premium follows a lower trajectory than the one it would follow without a tax decrease. Hence we are able to reduce inequality for several periods after the fiscal shock. On the contrary, following a tax increase, the evolution of the skill premium remains above the trajectory carried on by the skill premium under a situation with no tax increase. Consequently, a tax increase would imply a higher level of inequality in the economy