One of the defining characteristics of early European colonial endeavours within the Americas is the discursive practice through which Indigenous peoples were transformed into ideological subjects whose proprietary rights and powers to be self-determining were subordinated to those of settler peoples. In this thesis, it is argued that a similar process of misrepresentation and disenfranchisement occurs when it is suggested that the material and financial poverty plaguing many rural First Nations can be eradicated through their direct and extensive involvement in natural resource extraction industries based on capital driven market economies. As is shown by the author’s participatory research conducted with members of Skownan Anishinaabek First Nation involved in local food production practices, the key to overcoming cycles of dependency is not simply the monetary benefit engendered by economic development projects. Rather it is the degree to which community members recognize their own nationhood oriented value systems and governance principles within the formation and management of these initiatives. The thesis concludes with an examination of one such community led enterprise in Skownan, which ultimately coincides with the political aims of the Indigenous food sovereignty movement.

Exhaustible resource rents are an important taxable base in many countries, with revenue sharing often part of the scheme. In some cases large shares are retained for the central government. Generally, the discussions of exhaustible resource taxation consider assignment of resource rent tax base and revenue sharing from the limited perspectives of efficiency and stability. Tax assignment and sharing arrangements are assumed to have a neutral effect on investment of resource rents in long-lived public goods. We attempt to demonstrate that this may not be the case, specifically looking at the question of whether rent assignment is neutral to effects on investment of rents in long-lived public goods, a normative policy objective, and under what conditions it occurs. We test the theoretical propositions with data from the Russian Federation to derive empirical results. The results from the Russian Federation point toward an important dimension of rent tax assignment in a federation. They results show that ceteris paribus, higher share of rent for the federation may lead to lower investment in long-lived public goods and may be constrained by stability. Another argument has been made for reconsidering rent tax assignment using assertive ethnic identity as a manifestation strong ownership claims. Communities with strongly valued identities value ownership over land and exhaustible resource endowments in their areas. This may be the case especially if ethnic identity is important to the resource owning community. The empirical results show that a decrease in the regional share of rent resulted in a fall in investments in the republics and regions with strong ethnic identity. Republics among the producing regions have historical claims to a distinct identity and may have a preference for preserving their identity. This preference is manifested as higher levels of rent investment. Following this line of argument, it can be concluded that rent assignment, through rent tax or revenue assignment, should favor producing regions within the range of stability in a federation, if the objective is achieving higher investment in long-lived public goods.

The competitive federalist system facilitated state leadership and the diffusion of innovative policies that addressed climate change and energy issues in the absence of comprehensive federal action at the start of the twenty-first century. In a competitive federalist system state governments and their politicians challenge one another horizontally and the federal government vertically for legislative credit and functional authority on relevant policy issues. What drove state-level climate and clean energy leadership from 2001 to 2012? This dissertation develops three competitive federalism-based hypotheses for analysis: (H1) A national, bipartisan network of ambitious, entrepreneurial governors drove climate and clean energy policy innovation from 2001 to 2012; (H2) the State Energy Program Recovery Act resources reduced the policy adoption gap between early enactors and laggards in clean energy financing and regulation; (H3) and justification for climate and clean energy activities in the states shifted from environmental to economic rationales from 2001 to 2012 (Figure ES1). While competitive federalism theory has centered on both fiscal and ideological considerations driving innovation in the policy environment, the experience of climate change policymaking and clean energy actions at the state level during the period under consideration reveals a clear partisan divide in policymaking within this domain.

Il fine di questa tesi e’ offrire un contributo per la compresione di due problemi presenti nella letteratura di political economy, il primo dal punto di vista teoretico, il secondo attraverso un’analisi econometrica. Questi due temi sono come i sistemi politici reagiscono rispetto alla scarsita’ di offerta di “buoni” politici, e se i trasferimenti intergovernativi sono influenzati dai fini politici ed elettorali del governo centrale. L’analisi teorica fornisce alcune intuizioni relative alle ragioni per cui osserviamo politici di bravura molto variabile, e quali meccanismi potrebbero invece migliorare la qualita’ della classe politica. L’analisi empirica invece si concentra su un altro problema conseguente all’interazione tra le sfere politica ed economica. I trasferimenti intergovernativi tra Stato centrale e amministrazioni locali e’ stato oggetto di grande attenzione nella letteratura economica. Le ragioni di efficienza ed equita’ che rendono ragione dei trasferimenti intergovernativi sono state esplorate a lungo. Questa tesi si focalizza invece sulle cause di “political economy” di questi finanziamenti. Si e’ infatti tentato di verificare se l’allineamento politico tra sindaci e primo ministro determini o meno la quantita’ di fondi afferenti ad un comune. / This thesis aims to offer a contribution to the understanding of two problems present in the literature on political economy, one from a game theoretical perspective, and the other through an econometric analysis. These two issues are how polities cope with the scarce supply of ‘good’ politicians, and whether intergovernmental grants are affected by the political and electoral goals of politicians in central government. The theoretical analysis attempts to give some insights into the reasons why we observe politicians of very different valence in office, and what are the mechanism that could enhance the quality of the political class. The empirical analysis instead focuses on another problem found in the interaction between the political and the economic spheres. Economic literature extensively described the rationale behind intergovernmental grants, how for example they can help solving externalities between local governments, or contribute to a more equitable distribution of resources among areas of the same country. The political economy literature focuses instead on establishing and testing the less noble sources of intergovernmental grants and the political and electoral strategic reasons that might drive the decisions of the central government regarding the allocation of resources between localities. The first and primary aim of my analysis in that chapter is to verify if political alignment between mayors and prime ministers over time determines the size of grants received by municipalities.

The transition from an industrial to a global knowledge-based economy has put universities in the spotlight of public policies as the new drivers of innovation and sustained economic growth. Consequently, societal expectations towards the academic community have changed and so has, under the influence of neo-liberal ideas, the public governance of higher education. This is particularly true in federalist systems, such as Germany, Australia and the European Union, where the roles of each government level in governing the higher education sector had to be renegotiated and clarified. In Canada, however, despite repeated recommendations by policymakers, scholars and international organisations, the respective responsibilities have not yet been clarified and, to date, there are still no mechanisms to coordinate the post-secondary education policies of the federal and provincial governments. This paper inquires into the reasons for this exception. In the academic literature, this has generally been explained in terms of Canada’s uniqueness with respect to its federalist system and the decentralized higher education sector. We attempt to go beyond this traditional federalism, state-centered approach, which is predominant in the Canadian higher education literature. Instead, based on interviews and official documents and inspired by the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), we shall be looking at the belief systems of the major actors in the policy process and the degree of coordination among them. Our analysis comes to the conclusion that, on the one hand, proponents of a pan-Canadian approach are divided over their fundamental beliefs regarding the compatibility of inclusiveness and excellence. Some argue that the federal government must legislate common standards to ensure equal opportunities for all Canadians. Others propose a New Governance-inspired approach to create a differentiated and competitive university sector that meets the demands of the global knowledge-based economy more efficiently. On the other hand, even though the provinces differ in their beliefs regarding the equal opportunity versus economic efficiency debate, they share the same strong belief with respect to the role of the federal government. According to this view, post-secondary education is exclusively a provincial responsibility and the role of the federal government is solely to help them ‘fix the problems’. Moreover, contrary to the proponents of more intergovernmental collaboration, the provinces have successfully strengthened the coordination among themselves to block further perceived federal intrusions into provincial jurisdiction. We come to the conclusion that the absence of intergovernmental mechanisms to govern post-secondary education is a consequence of the diverging belief systems and the establishment of formal coordination structures among the provinces to block – as they perceive - further federal intrusions. Also, there is less of a sense of urgency to act compared to, say, health care. Finally, remembering the near-separation of Quebec in 1995, there is very little appetite to reopen the constitutional debates. Therefore, based on our analysis, we argue that contrary to suggestions by some higher education scholars, the establishment of intergovernmental coordinating mechanisms appears unlikely in the near future.

This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child’s longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios – one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R&D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.