Publications

Ratings Agencies take notice of deteriorating finances Debt ratings agencies may not have the power they used to possess before the 2008 global financial crisis, but they still carry influence.…

Slower is safer. In 1973, Pierre Messmer, the then French prime minister imposed a 120 km/h speed limit on motorways. The decision was motivated by the desire to save fuel…

Since the Agreement on Agriculture of the World Trade Organization (WTO) came into force in 1995, global trade patterns have changed, but a number of distortions have remained. For example,…

Wealth taxes have played a minor role in the tax systems of the OECD bloc: they have declined from about 7.9% of total tax revenues in the mid-1960s to about…

The bridge between Sicily and the Italian mainland is probably the longest living project in the world. According to some historians, it dates back to the Romans. The idea had…

WP 2023-03. Executive Summary We designed a Survey Experiment (SE) to study the attitudes of the Italians towards wealth, income and consumptions taxes. In particular, we interviewed a sample of…

Introduction How resilient is the global banking system? Are banks’ capital buffers now much larger than they were going into the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8, as authorities claim? The…

The template created after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 to shield taxpayers from direct bailouts of failed banks has already folded – authorities dare not use it. The template…

On December 13, 2022, delegates from forty-nine African countries and the African Union traveled to the United States to attend the US-Africa Leaders Summit. Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Sudan…

WP 2023-02. Executive Summary We argue to look at the polity with the very same vista with which modern economics looks at markets, as the polity is nothing but the…