Journal of Government and Economics最新文献

Political cycle and public spending: Evidence for the Colombian case with stochastic models 政治周期和公共支出：哥伦比亚案例的随机模型证据

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-09-01 Epub Date: 2026-09-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100186

Alexander Cotte-Poveda, Clara Ines Pardo-Martinez

{"title":"Political cycle and public spending: Evidence for the Colombian case with stochastic models","authors":"Alexander Cotte-Poveda, Clara Ines Pardo-Martinez","doi":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100186","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100186","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The political budget cycle literature examines how electoral incentives influence public expenditure decisions, potentially stimulating economic activity in the short run while creating fiscal imbalances and uncertainty over the longer term. This study analyzes the relationship between political cycles and public spending in Colombia using alternative stochastic frontier specifications to assess expenditure patterns during electoral periods. The results show that public spending increases with GDP, corruption control, political party affiliation, and ideology, while it decreases with inflation, unemployment, and fiscal deficits. Electoral variables provide evidence of spending cycles around election periods. Robustness analyses indicate that the estimated relationships remain unchanged across half-normal, exponential, robust, and truncated stochastic frontier models. The stability of coefficient signs, magnitudes, and statistical significance suggests that the results are driven by underlying economic and political determinants rather than by specific distributional assumptions regarding the inefficiency term. Accordingly, deviations from the estimated frontier are interpreted as departures from the expenditure benchmark observed among the best-performing governments in the sample rather than as evidence of absolute budgetary waste. Overall, the findings highlight the relevance of fiscal institutions and fiscal rules in limiting opportunistic spending behaviour during electoral periods and promoting long-term fiscal sustainability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100785,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Government and Economics","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149162225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The law of technological power displacement: Technological non-neutrality and the structural growth of power asymmetry in technological societies 技术权力位移规律：技术非中立性与技术社会中权力不对称的结构性增长

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-09-01 Epub Date: 2026-09-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100185

José María Lancho Rodríguez

{"title":"The law of technological power displacement: Technological non-neutrality and the structural growth of power asymmetry in technological societies","authors":"José María Lancho Rodríguez","doi":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100185","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100185","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Technological change is not neutral with respect to power. This paper derives a conditional law of technological power displacement: technology can shift power from citizens towards a public–corporate regulatory apparatus without deliberate intent or corporate monopoly. A three-equation dynamic model links relational disorder, self-reinforcing regulatory expansion, and regulators’ technical dependence on regulated actors. When technological complexity does not decrease and accumulated regulation facilitates further expansion, the ratio of regulatory expansion to effective democratic restoration rises monotonically. Once expansion outpaces restoration, the imbalance persists under unchanged conditions. Government is central to this process: its regulatory response expands institutional power while technical dependence can erode its capacity to restore democratic balance. A Spanish regulatory index (1978–2024) and an EU-27 panel (2000–2022) provide directional consistency checks. Open standards and technically independent regulators can slow displacement; preserving democratic balance requires changing the structural dynamics that technological deployment sets in motion.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100785,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Government and Economics","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149056409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Credible government commitments to trade policy certainty, agricultural transformation, and employment quality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from the WTO information technology agreement 可信政府对撒哈拉以南非洲地区贸易政策确定性、农业转型和就业质量的承诺：来自WTO信息技术协定的证据

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-09-01 Epub Date: 2026-09-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100187

Sèna Kimm Gnangnon

{"title":"Credible government commitments to trade policy certainty, agricultural transformation, and employment quality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from the WTO information technology agreement","authors":"Sèna Kimm Gnangnon","doi":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100187","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100187","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines how governments' commitment to trade policy certainty over information technology (IT) products relates to agricultural transformation and employment quality in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The analysis uses membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s Information Technology Agreement (ITA) as a proxy for governments' commitment to maintaining a stable and predictable trade policy environment for high-IT products. The results suggest that SSA countries could have achieved higher levels of agricultural transformation and better employment quality, reflected in lower vulnerable employment and working poverty rates and higher wage employment, if their governments had strengthened trade policy certainty over IT products, including through participation in the ITA. The findings further indicate that the high dependence of public revenue on trade taxes helps explain why many SSA governments have not joined the ITA. Consequently, reforms aimed at strengthening domestic revenue mobilization could provide governments with greater incentives to enhance trade policy certainty over high-IT products and thereby support agricultural transformation and improvements in employment quality.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100785,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Government and Economics","volume":"23 ","pages":"Article 100187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149162226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Corrigendum to “The law of technological power displacement: Technological non-neutrality and the structural growth of power asymmetry in technological societies” [Journal of Government and Economics 23 (2026) 100185] “技术权力置换规律：技术非中立性与技术社会中权力不对称的结构性增长”[j] .政府与经济研究，23(2026):100185。

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-09-01 Epub Date: 2026-10-11 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100188

José María Lancho Rodríguez

引用次数: 0

The political budget cycle of child and youth welfare expenditures 儿童和青年福利支出的政治预算周期

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-07-03 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100177

Till Nikolka

引用次数: 0

Why government grows old: A queuing theory of bureaucratic aging 为什么政府变老：官僚老化的排队论

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-07-31 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100181

Zhangkai Huang, Kun Lang

{"title":"Why government grows old: A queuing theory of bureaucratic aging","authors":"Zhangkai Huang, Kun Lang","doi":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100181","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100181","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We develop a queuing model to explain the endogenous aging of officials in hierarchical bureaucracies. We establish that any organization satisfying three conditions—a pyramidal hierarchy, seniority-based promotion, and a closed personnel structure—will inevitably experience personnel aging as an equilibrium outcome. The mechanism operates through the accumulation of waiting queues at each hierarchical level: as the organization matures, the supply of qualified candidates systematically exceeds available positions, lengthening waiting times and raising the average age of promoted officials. We test this mechanism using resume data on municipal Party secretaries in China from 1949 to 2020 and document steady rises in the average age of politicians during stable institutional periods. Simulations calibrated to the Chinese bureaucracy reproduce the observed rise in age and waiting times, and show that the system naturally evolves into a promotion bottleneck: early cohorts advance quickly, but as queues accumulate, later cohorts face progressively longer delays until most officials can be promoted only at the maximum allowable age. Our analysis suggests that bureaucratic aging is an inherent property of the internal dynamics of hierarchical organizations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100785,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Government and Economics","volume":"22 ","pages":"Article 100181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148739107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Effects of government indebtedness on productivity dynamics: Long-run evidence from an emerging economy 政府负债对生产率动态的影响：来自新兴经济体的长期证据

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-07-24 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100180

Ricardo Ramalhete Moreira

引用次数: 0

Trust, government and trade policy decisions: Evidence from Citizen Juries in the UK 信任、政府和贸易政策决定：来自英国公民陪审团的证据

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-06-16 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100176

Maria Savona, Alice Livingston-Ortolani, L Alan Winters

{"title":"Trust, government and trade policy decisions: Evidence from Citizen Juries in the UK","authors":"Maria Savona, Alice Livingston-Ortolani, L Alan Winters","doi":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100176","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jge.2026.100176","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper explores public attitudes towards trade policy in the UK through a series of Citizen Juries. Unlike experimental survey-based approaches to trade policy preferences, this study qualitatively analyses deliberative discussions to gain insights into public perceptions, reasoning, and preferences regarding trade policy decision-making. The paper focuses on trust in trade policy making. Five juries, geographically representative of their localities across the UK, deliberated on four trade-off scenarios encompassing workers' rights, sectoral balancing, digital trade, and food/environmental standards. The public believes firmly that the government should make trade policy decisions, less out of trust than a lack of alternatives. Across all scenarios, participants acknowledge the important role of experts in informing trade policy decisions, both independent experts (e.g., academics, researchers) and sectoral experts (e.g., workers, business representatives). This desire for expert input reflects the public's recognition of their own limited knowledge and the complexity of trade issues. While participants generally did not advocate for direct public decision-making on trade policy, they consistently expressed a strong desire for greater public consultation, transparency and accountability. This research also underscores the importance of addressing public distrust in government and business to foster a more inclusive and legitimate trade policy process.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100785,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Government and Economics","volume":"22 ","pages":"Article 100176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148531192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Global trade: Navigating diversity of cultures and market sizes 全球贸易：驾驭文化和市场规模的多样性

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-06-01 Epub Date: 2026-07-07 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100179

Len-Kuo Hu

引用次数: 0

Does governmental activism affect firm leverage? Evidence from India 政府行动主义会影响企业杠杆吗？来自印度的证据

Journal of Government and Economics Pub Date : 2026-03-01 Epub Date: 2026-03-17 DOI: 10.1016/j.jge.2026.100170

Saibal Ghosh

引用次数: 0