Andreas Kyriacou

• PhD Economics
• Professor at University of Girona

This article constructs new indicators of subnational disparities in life expectancy for up to 101 low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2000 to 2021, offering critical insights into health inequalities within countries. The findings reveal that subnational disparities in life expectancy are markedly higher in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to...

We review work that has linked economic inequality and culture to governance quality. We start with contributions that have considered the relationship between inequality and governance from a long‐run perspective. This historical perspective yields a range of insights and helps identify the deep drivers of specific cultural traits that relate to b...

We apply synthetic control methods to a crosscountry sample that includes up to 51 populist events ranging from 1928 to 2019, to explore the impact of populism on the rule of law. Populist governments are expected to undermine the rule of law because they seek to dismantle institutional constraints on their personalistic plebiscitarian rule. We fin...

In this article, we consider how decentralizing health spending to local governments affects health care access and quality. Based on data from forty-nine countries around the world from 1996 to 2015, we find that decentralizing health spending is inimical to timely and effective health care. We also explore the role of two specific channels throug...

In this article we consider the impact on health care access and quality when decentralizing health spending down to local governments, based on data from 49 countries around the world over the period 1996 to 2015. Our empirical results, after controlling for a range of potentially confounding variables, indicate that decentralizing health spending...

It has been asserted that clientelism today is weaker in countries that were endowed with impartial public administrations prior to the extension of suffrage because the presence of bureaucratic checks undermines clientelism as a viable political strategy. We empirically examine this claim based on a cross-section of up to 136 countries. While we d...

This article marshals empirical evidence from a cross-section of up to 87 countries to consider the impact of clientelism on fiscal redistribution in the form of direct taxes and public transfers. Clientelism may directly undermine fiscal redistribution towards poorer individuals because their political support is cheaper to buy, political patrons...

In this paper, we account for the direct and indirect effects of maternity leave entitlements on female labor force participation. We first explore theoretically the impact of maternity leave duration on female labor supply in the presence of fertility decisions. We assume that maternity leave duration affects female labor supply through two main c...

We revisit work that has indicated that the presence and strength of political budget cycles depend on a range of conditioning factors. We point to the importance of voter time preference and argue that, in relatively poorer countries, high discount rates will lead impatient voters to value immediate consumption due to fiscal expansions over the fu...

This article marshals empirical evidence from a cross-section of up to 86 countries to consider the assertion that clientelism will reduce income redistribution because it implies the weakness of programmatic politics, thus undermining the emergence of broad-based redistributive programs. To measure clientelism I turn to expert surveys capturing th...

We revisit work that has indicated that the presence and strength of Political Budget Cycles depends on a range of conditioning factors. We focus on the mediating effect of economic development. Our results, based on a sample of up to 67 developing and developed countries over the period 1995 to 2016, indicate that budget cycles emerge in countries...

In this article, we consider the impact on the quality of governance when assigning public procurement spending to local authorities. While fiscal decentralisation is generally expected to yield improvements in governance because it empowers better informed voters and public officials who can tailor policies to local needs, we hypothesise that the...

Individuals turn towards identifiable in-groups to reduce uncertainty in social interaction. By reducing existential uncertainty, economic development undermines the rationality of in-group bias and, as such, facilitates the emergence of generalized trust. Conversely, income inequality may undermine generalized trust because it makes social interac...

Governance matters for social welfare. Better governed countries are richer, happier, and have fewer social and environmental problems. Good governance implies that public sector agents act impartially. It manifests itself in the form of equality before the law, an independent and professional public administration, and the control of corruption....

Most work studying the impact of fiscal decentralization on the provision of public services has measured the latter by way of quantitative output indicators (for example, years of schooling or mortality rates) and the former based on aggregate decentralization indicators reflecting sub-central government spending or revenue as a percentage of tota...

In this article we analyze the efficiency of total transport investment in a sample of 34 countries over the period 1996 to 2010. We do so by way of Data Envelopment Analysis that evaluates countries according to their ability to achieve the maximum attainable infrastructure quantity and usage for a given investment volume. We find that the Central...

En este trabajo analizamos el comportamiento a lo largo del ciclo económico de diferentes partidas de gastos fiscales de tipo social en Uruguay durante el período 1988:1 a 2015:4. El estudio se organiza de la siguiente forma. En la sección 2 se realiza un análisis descriptivo de la normativa y composición que rige el actual del sistema de transfere...

In this article, we consider the impact of fiscal decentralization on government quality by way of disaggregated measures of the former. Specifically, we break down fiscal decentralization into sub-central expenditure on public procurement and compensation of public sector employees. We find that decentralizing public procurement is bad for governm...

This article analyses the redistributive efficiency of social transfers and direct taxation in a panel of 28 developed economies during the period 1995–2010. In order to explore how redistribution is achieved through these fiscal policies, a two-stage approach is applied. First, we evaluate their redistributive efficiency – the degree of redistribu...

Legislative checks give whoever wields them influence over policy making. Rational politicians should use that influence to make themselves better off in any way possible, whether in terms of policy benefits, private benefits, or both. Disincentives exist only to the extent that corrupt actors can be held accountable, which is problematic because t...

There are theoretical arguments supporting the view that regional income inequalities, the degree of fiscal decentralization and the quality of government are simultaneously determined. This article argues that existing empirical work has failed to deal adequately with this possibility. In light of this, it applies a simultaneous equation model, wh...

The construction sector, whether privately or publicly financed, is characterized by potentially large rents and government intervention making it vulnerable to corruption. Consistent with this, both case-study and survey evidence has been provided highlighting the problem of malfeasance in this sector. In this article, we test the proposition that...

While an individualist society prizes personal control, autonomy and individual accomplishments, a collectivist one puts a premium on loyalty and cohesion and imposes mutual obligations in the context of in-groups. It has been argued that, in contrast to collectivism, individualism will promote economic development directly by sharpening individual...

Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton (2009) have empirically examined how constitutional design and contemporaneous environmental factors can affect the survival of constitutions.However, little is known about the extent to which long-term factors may affect constitutional endurance. This work extends the epidemiological model developed by those authors to...

Legislative checks give whoever wields them influence over policy making. Rational politicians should use that influence to make themselves better off in any way possible, whether in terms of policy benefits, private benefits, or both. Disincentives exist only to the extent that corrupt actors can be held accountable, which is problematic because t...

We approach corruption and, more generally, government quality as an information problem. Neither voters nor anyone else can do anything about poor government quality if they do not know about it or cannot identify its source. In our view, information about misgovernance can, for the most part, be forthcoming from political parties. This focuses at...

At the individual level irrationality emerges when people fail to maximize a well ordered preference set or insofar as they entertain systematically biased beliefs about choice alternatives. Assuming that individuals have unbiased estimates of the price of irrationality, they will tend to behave more rationally as the private cost of irrational beh...

Ever since the launch of the European integration process, and in particular in the context of the Economic and Monetary Union, the European Union has endeavoured to facilitate economic convergence across Europe by providing funds to its poorer regions and countries. The main objective of this paper is to analyse whether the structural and cohesion...

A growing literature in the fields of economics and political science has identified the importance of culture for both economic development and good governance. In this article, we argue that a fundamental factor driving cultural traits conducive towards development and governance is inter-personal income inequality. Our empirical evidence from a...

In this article we test the hypothesis that secessionism reduces government quality because secessionist threats elicit a response from central governments concerned with the territorial integrity of the state and this, in turn, channels attention and resources away from necessary governance reforms. We consider the link between secessionism and go...

A growing body of work in economics has pointed towards the crucial importance of government quality for economic development. A major issue emerging in related empirical work has been the need to account for the confounding influence of other factors as well as the presence of reverse causality or the likelihood that development itself may facilit...

In this paper, we argue and provide empirical evidence to support the claim that higher income differences across regions increase the salience of interregional redistribution and, as a result, crowd out policies aiming towards improvements in government quality or efficiency. In the presence of greater regional disparities, the balance of politics...

Income inequalities across regions will tend to engender redistributive conflicts about the territorial distribution of resources. The salience of territorial redistribution in the context of regional inequalities is likely to mobilize support for regional parties in national elections since territorial redistribution is decided at the national lev...

In this paper we consider how government quality mediates the relationship between fiscal decentralization and regional disparities. Previous work has argued that fiscal decentralization has the potential to reduce income differences across regions but that this potential may not be realized because of governance problems associated with sub-nation...

Institutional quality has been increasingly identified as crucial for economic development. In line with previous work which has explored the determinants of good institutions, this paper examines the impact of economic and social inequalities between ethnic groups on government quality. I hypothesize that greater inequalities between groups will t...

We show that part of the international variation in employment laws is due to different beliefs about the impact of hard work as opposed to luck and connections on success. In societies where a greater proportion of people relate their life prospects to chance and connections, stronger employment protection is in place. The prevalence of such belie...

It has recently been argued that the regional segregation of ethnic or linguistic groups leads to lower government quality and that this is partly due to the negative effect of segregation on inter-group trust. In this paper I show that the relationship between ethnic segregation, trust and government quality is mediated by another dimension of reg...

We examine the impact of structural and cohesion funds on regional disparities within EU countries over the period 1995 – 2006. We find that structural funds have reduced regional disparities over this period. Our empirical estimates also suggest that the effect of structural funds on regional disparities is potentially reversed above some level of...

Using indicators of fiscal decentralization which control for intergovernmental transfers and grants, it is shown that decentralization has a positive impact on government quality but that this positive effect is mitigated in the presence of regional elections and multi-level government.

In this paper we apply both cross-section and panel analysis to the relationship between fiscal and political decentralization and government quality. We find that fiscal decentralization improves government quality but not if it is accompanied by political decentralization. The negative impact of political decentralization on the relationship betw...

The price of irrationality or belief manipulation varies as we move from small to large group settings. Individual members of large groups can more cheaply bias downwards their beliefs as to the immorality of their free-riding thereby circumventing internal moral constraints. The relative anonymity inherent to large number settings moreover reduces...

A bstract I integrate the notion of intrinsic motivation, applied to economics most notably by Frey (1997 ), into the logic of individual contributions toward collective goods as analyzed since Olson ([1965] 1971 ). This illuminates the many and various ways through which the intrinsic motivation to contribute toward such goods can be crowded out b...

In this paper we apply both cross-section and panel analysis to the relationship between fiscal and political decentralization and government quality. We find that fiscal decentralization has a positive impact. Moreover, political decentralization tends to reduce the positive impact of fiscal decentralization on the quality of government. This nega...

The decision to enter the European Union is based on a comparison of the costs of staying out and going it alone, and the costs of membership. The latter depend on the degree of preference heterogeneity between prospective members and the Union as well as the decision rules employed for “constitutional” decisions. The same calculus guides the decis...

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In this paper we focus on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government quality. In a sample of 29 developing and developed countries over the period 1984-1997, fiscal decentralization has a positive effect on institutional quality but this effect diminishes as countries become wealthier. Moreover, the positive effect of fiscal de...

In this paper we focus on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government quality. In a sample of 29 developing and developed countries over the period 1984-1997, fiscal decentralization has a positive effect on institutional quality but this effect diminishes as countries become wealthier. Moreover, the positive effect of fiscal de...

Accountability has been defined in the following terms: "A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B about A’s (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer punishment in the case of eventual misconduct" (Schedler, 1999, p.17). To help elucidate this definition consider the role of elections in promoting political a...

By allowing ethnic groups to organize areas important to them regardless of their geographic distribution, functional, overlapping and competing jurisdictions (FOCJ) have an important role to play in the management of ethnic conflict in plural societies. The functional devolution of powers which is intrinsic to FOCJ may be preferable to territorial...

This paper focuses on the relationship between institutions and ethnocentrism as discussed in the rational choice literature. The institutional environment can influence both the formation and the expression of ethnic tastes by rational individuals. Ethnocentrism is likely to be mitigated by, on the one hand, a private sector characterized by a wid...

The enlargement of the European Union generates socio-economic costs and benefits for the citizens of new members and as such it is bound to affect their perceived legitimacy of the whole enterprise. The legitimacy of EU accession is likely to be enhanced by the inclusion of compensatory transfers and transition periods in the terms of accession, b...

The enlargement of the European Union generates socio-economic costs and benefits for the citizens of new members and as such it is bound to affect their perceived legitimacy of the whole enterprise. The legitimacy of EU accession is likely to be enhanced by the inclusion of compensatory transfers and transition periods in the terms of accession, b...

This paper analyzes agreements between governments that determine the division of policy-making power between central and regional governments. Our analysis demonstrates that initial circumstances and political risks affect the degree of centralization that will be adopted, and that asymmetric forms of federalism are often consequences of ongoing n...

This paper examines the viability of inter-ethnic cooperation from the perspective afforded by the economic approach to institutional analysis. Four factors are seen to affect viability, namely the relative strength of each ethnic group in the non-cooperative setting, the perceived fairness of die terms of cooperation, die continuing influence of i...

This article examines the possible nature of a ‘just and lasting solution’ to the Cyprus Problem. Four factors are seen to affect the viability of a solution, namely, the relative capacity of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot sides to impose costs in the event of either withdrawing from inter‐ethnic co‐operation, the extent to which each party perceive...

Central to the constitutional provisions that make up the most recent framework agreement put forward by the United Nations for the resolution of the Cyprus problem is an ethnically based federal and bicameral system. This article examines the proposed system’s ability to enhance the viability of any solution to the Cyprus problem (measured by its...

Through its pre-accession policy for Cyprus, the European Union is seeking to contribute towards a solution to the Cyprus Problem by emphasizing the security and economic benefits that would be enjoyed by all Cypriots from EU membership and by attempting to wring concessions from both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot sides. After identifying this stra...

This comment replies to the assertion by Mller (1998) that a rational and self-interested individual faced with a thick veil of uncertainty may not, as a result, vote for a fair rule. It is argued that if such an individual is reasonably assumed to behave as if he/she were risk-averse then he/she is more likely to vote for such a rule.