Opposition Party Behavior and Minority Government Support

Opposition parties in minority governments are partly responsible for government stability without being able to neglect their accountability to the electorate, a dilemma that, as this book shows, has many electoral as well as policy advantages for opposition parties. This book’s analysis of opposition behavior in the Swedish Riksdag (1991–2018) sheds light on the rationality of minority governments from an opposition perspective: receiving political influence without jeopardizing one's party profile. The author studies oppositional behavior in Swedish minority governments using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Governance: A Source to Increase Tax Revenue in Pakistan

Improved governance in any economy indicates government stability, secured law and order, and minimum internal and external conflicts. A higher level of governance may demonstrate the healthy performance of economic activities and tax revenue collection. Hence, it is vital to investigate the relationship between governance and tax revenue collection in any developing country. Therefore, we aim to investigate the impact of governance on tax revenue in Pakistan using control variables inflation and industrial value-added. The Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) cointegration technique is utilized to find the long- and short-run effects of hypothesized variables on the tax revenue using a period 1976–2019. After employing a cointegration on the hypothesized model, the results expose that government stability, law and order, and internal and external conflicts leave a positive and significant impact on tax revenue in the long and short run. Hence, it is concluded that governance is an essential source in expanding tax revenue in Pakistan. Moreover, industrial value-added and inflation also show positive effects on the tax revenue. On the grounds of these results, it is proposed that the government should make serious efforts to improve governance and industrial activities for better tax revenue collection.

Trade openness, institutions and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

This research investigates the interactive effect of trade openness and the institutional quality on economic growth in sub-Sahara Africa. The sample consists of 38 sub-Saharan African countries and covers the period 1986-2015. Pooled OLS, fixed effect, and Dynamic GMM were used as estimation techniques. The empirical section used a nonlinear growth regression specification that interacts trade openness with law and order, bureaucratic quality, corruption, government stability, and democratic accountability. The study found that corruption, government stability, law and order, and bureaucratic quality as institutional quality variables harm economic growth. The interaction of trade openness and institutional quality variables positively impacted economic growth. It is an indication that trade openness better impacted economic growth in the presence of high-quality institutional variables.

Money Laundering and Institutional Quality

Money laundering is considered an illegitimate global phenomenon that deteriorates any country's economic stability. The main objective of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between money laundering and institutional quality by considering several variables such as government stability, corruption, bureaucracy quality, law and order, and democratic accountability. The study investigates these relationships by using panel quantile regression. The findings suggest a significant relationship between good governance and money laundering and a significant negative relationship between government stability and illicit financial flows. In order to eradicate or control money laundering, governments need to be stable, and institutions should operate under favorable conditions. However, if money launderers manage to infiltrate these institutions with bribery and corruption, then it becomes incredibly difficult to stop the planned crimes like money laundering.

It’s a matter of confidence. Institutions, government stability and economic outcomes

In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that possible transmission channels are legislative cohesion and (the absence of) selection.