Do institutional quality and capital account openness affect capital flow? Evidence from Asian bond markets

The size of the public sector is an important tool in public governance. Public sector size may fuel both economic growth and political influence over the economy.
By compiling and processing data from different sources of public accounts the paper aims at mapping the development of key financial indicators for the Norwegian central government sector during the transition period from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. The data enable us to give measures of the size of the public sector alone and compared to the overall economy.
It is found that the sector started its continuous growth before politicians deliberately started to increase the sector’s size of the total economy. The paper also finds that an increase of the public sector often, but not always, reflects political economy regimes. Persistent growth in public finances as a tool for economic policy making did not take place before the introduction of the social-democratic regime in 1935.
The paper also concludes that economic growth started before the growth in the public sector, suggesting that public sector growth might as well be a result of economic growth or vice versa.

The main goal of the article is to analyze the role and influence of economic freedom on macroeconomic stability. For this purpose, the authors used the integrated index of economic freedom, calculated by the Heritage Foundation and Democracy Index. It is noted that this index indicator was calculated by the experts from the World Bank using the index of voice and accountability. In the paper, the authors used the multinational panel dataset for 11 countries of the EU for the purpose of checking the correlation between economic freedom, democracy and macroeconomic stability. It should be highlighted that the abovementioned 11 countries are related by the fluctuation of economic growth during the transformation process (1996–2016) from communist party to the democracy and political pluralism. In addition, the authors proposed to add the indicators of political stability and trade openness, which allowed to take into account implementation of flexible macroeconomic instruments, including monetary policy, which towards increasing the economic growth, employment and financial development of the countries. The findings are directed received using the regression equation with fixed and random effects showed the high level of correspondence of the model used with the original observations. Despite the chosen approach to estimate the macroeconomic stability, the findings showed that there is a positive and statistically significant impact of economic freedom and democracy on macroeconomic stability.

The paper presents a study, which describes the current governance model of the electricity sector in Lithuania. Electricity and energy production and distribution is highly regulated worldwide. This is also true in Lithuania, where the electricity sector is highly politically prominent, and policy is highly centralized. There are geopolitical concerns towards Russia, which is an important supplier of electricity, and Lithuania’s grid is highly integrated with that of Russia. In addition, Lithuania is a small country dominated by a small number of large state-owned producers and has no regional administrations. Lithuania rhetorically has adopted increased citizen participation as a strategic policy goal. The study investigates how far the rhetorics are followed up by policy planning, implementation, and development of new governance modes. The authors base the study on interviews with 19 experts and regulation analysis. The study found that regulation process is transparent, but this causes lower public interest and consequently lower citizen participation. Existing stakeholder involvement at the policy level is highly arbitrary and favorable to large electricity producers. As production is set to decentralize, this has the potential to overburden the regulatory system and cause conflict between different producers.