Portuguese Economic Journal, 2005, Volume 4, Nº 3
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- Endogenous fertility and modified Pareto-optimalityPublication . Lang, GüntherIn a world of endogenous fertility, where the number of descendants is an integral part of the economic allocation, the traditional concept of Pareto- optimality cannot be applied any longer: the number of individuals to be present on earth may vary between any two allocations we wish to compare. Therefore, the concept needs to be modified in order to give new life to the discussion of economic efficiency. This work introduces a straightforward variation of the Pareto-principle and characterizes the optimality of economic allocations according to this concept. It is shown that some of the well-known traditional results on intertemporal optimality do no longer hold. In particular, lump-sum tax instruments (or the rearrangement of initial endowments) are no longer a sufficient tool to achieve efficiency.
- Government deficits, consumption, and the price levelPublication . Annicchiarico, Barbara; Marini, GiancarloThis paper investigates the dynamics of the price level in a continuous time monetary version of the Yaari-Blanchard overlapping generations model with capital accumulation. It is shown that there is an interaction between fiscal disci- pline and price stability when the government budget is intertemporally balanced. Relevant implications are that high debt and slow adjustment adversely affect both prices and capital accumulation.
- Understanding the election results in Portugal : A spatial econometrics point of viewPublication . Caleiro, António; Guerreiro, GertrudesThe great majority of the theoretical analyses about electoral cycles has considered the national space as the territory of interest when studying the economic consequences of an electoralist behaviour by the central government. This fact, in conjunction to the nature of the data most commonly available, has lead many authors to empirical studies that test the evidence of electoral cycles mostly at a national level. Given that the election results for the main parties, at least in Portugal, clearly reflect some spatial localisation we find rather intriguing to verify that so very few of those empirical studies use spatial econometrics techniques. The main objective of the paper is to detect empirical evidence supporting the existence of a link between voters’ ideology and the 2002 election results obtained by the two main parties in Portugal. The confrontation of the spatial econometric results with the ones obtained ignoring the spatial localisation of the data shows that, in order to better understand the election results, space must be taken into account.