Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government...

Paper presented at the International Conference on the Microbial Commons, Ghent, Belgium, June 12-13th, 2009

Paper Presented at INTERNATIONAL ADVANCED WORKSHOP ON INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRI-PRODUCTION AND ENVIRONMENT (AWICTSAE 2008), May 22-23 2008, Alexandroupolis, Greece

This paper was produced for the FAO Expert Meeting on How to Feed the World in 2050 (Rome, 24-26 June 2009).

This paper proposes an alternative approach for separating technical change from time-varying technical inefficiency. The approach uses the general index, developed by Baltagi and Griffin (1988), to model technical change along the production function, and a quadratic function of time trend, as...