The Bohr radius of the nn-dimensional polydisk is equivalent to log⁡nn\sqrt{\frac{\log n}{n}}

We show that the Bohr radius of the polydisk $\mathbb D^n$ behaves asymptotically as $\sqrt{(\log n)/n}$. Our argument is based on a new interpolative approach to the Bohnenblust--Hille inequalities which allows us to prove that the polynomial Bohnenblust--Hille inequality is subexponential.Comment: The introduction was expanded and some misprints correcte

Social enterprise support policies: distinctions and challenges

This chapter examines the support infrastructure for a specific segment of the SME market, namely social enterprises. The first section briefly examines the different definitions of social enterprise found in different countries. There is a spectrum of types of organisations ranging from commercial enterprises with social objectives, to voluntary or community sector organisations that have an element of trading activity. The second section discusses the rationales for public sector interest in support, examining how this differs between countries and over time. Particular attention is given to the emergence of social enterprise policies in the UK. The third section examines the different types of support that are commonly provided. This includes: encouraging social entrepreneurship and attitudes to starting a social enterprise; training and advisory services for start ups and for those wanting to grow or survive; social investment and finance; social enterprises and public sector procurement; and the transfer of public assets to social enterprise organisations. The final section examines the challenges of evaluating the effectiveness of these policies. Since social enterprises provide a combination of social, environmental and financial objectives, evaluation measures have to address both economic benefits and broader social value

A note on time discretion and the welfare cost of lump-sum taxation

The lump-sum tax is broadly regarded by standard optimal tax theory as the only non-distortionary tax instrument; any other tax instrument distorts relative prices and thus creates a deadweight loss. This paper discusses an unintended effect of lump-sum taxation that can be considered a distortion of the time endowment. Whenever this tax exceeds the amount of non-labor income, it reduces the taxpayer’s ability to freely allocate her time endowment. As long as the taxpayer assigns a positive value to time discretion, then the lump-sum tax creates a welfare cost that has not been identified in the literature. The welfare cost of the lump-sum tax could plausibly be greater than the traditional measure of deadweight loss of an equal yield labor income tax, which does not affect time discretion. Since the lump-sum tax does not unambiguously lead to a greater welfare level, we can conclude that it is not a proper efficiency standard at low levels of non-labor income. The same argument can be used to call for caution in the use of taxes based on the value of assets that are not the source of income flows, like owner-occupied property taxes and some types of wealth taxes. At low levels of non-labor income, these tax instruments will also have a negative effect on time discretion.\u2

Time-saving Goods, Time Inequalities, and Optimal Taxation

Time-saving goods are defined as market goods that reduce home labor requirements (e.g. restaurants; washing machines). Assuming that time savings are costly, this paper shows that lower-income individuals can purchase fewer time savings and enjoy less leisure time. Commodity tax rates affecting low-income individuals should depend more on time savings, and less on the classic Corlett and Hague rule. The related literature suggests to impose lower tax rates on goods that require less home labor. This paper shows that goods that offer greater time savings with respect to their more affordable substitutes should also receive favorable tax treatment

Two Essays on Public Economics: The Consequences of Fiscal Decentralization on Poverty and Inequality, and The Second Best Solution to The Public Expenditures’ Problem

This dissertation consists of two independent essays on public economics. The first essay studies the consequences of fiscal decentralization on poverty and income inequalities. This essay describes the possible channels through which fiscal decentralization might affect poverty and income inequalities, and carries out an empirical analysis with data of a large number of countries at different stages of development, for the period 1971-2000. Fiscal decentralization is found to have significant effects on poverty and income inequalities. These findings are important because they suggest, contrary to the traditional public finance theory, that sub-national governments can play an important role in the reduction of poverty and income inequalities. The second essay studies the second best solution to the public expenditures’ problem in the presence of a proportional labor income tax. By allowing the tax base to vary with the taxpayers’ behavioral responses to taxation, we derive the “effective” budget constraint faced by the government, which describes the set of affordable combinations of public and private goods. We show that the optimal solution to the government problem corresponds to the point of tangency between the effective budget constraint and the highest attainable social indifference curve. The traditional normative prescription for public expenditures under a second-best scenario does not satisfy this condition, and therefore it provides a suboptimal solution. Finally, we use the same analytical framework in order to explain the flypaper effect, an empirical regularity that has for long challenged the conventional theory

A net welfare benefit approach to optimal taxation

This paper challenges the widespread notion that the labor income tax is an inherently distortionary tax instrument. Optimal tax theory considers the lump-sum tax as the only efficient or non-distortionary tax instrument. This conclusion depends on two (often implicit) assumptions: one is that the economy is operating at the optimal welfare maximizing solution, where the marginal cost of tax revenue is equal to its marginal benefit; and the other that public expenditure has no effect on taxpayers’ budget constraints. However, for a government program to be worthwhile, total benefit must be greater than total cost, and it is easy to find examples where budget constraints are affected by public expenditure. This paper shows that, when the two assumptions are relaxed, the combined use of labor income and lump-sum taxes may allow a representative taxpayer to reach greater levels of welfare than the use of a lump-sum tax alone

New ethnic minority business communities in Britain: challenges of diversity and informality for the UK business and policy frameworks.

Ethnic minority entrepreneurship in Britain is no longer mainly associated with established ethnic minority groups, notably, South Asian and Afro-Caribbean, but rather immigrant entrepreneurs are increasingly evident from the world over. This phenomenon, which is a product of the increasingly complex socio-economic geography that is emerging in many British cities as a result of globalisation, mass migration and the so called ‘diversification of diversity’, is particularly evident in the global ‘ethnic supermarket’ that is contemporary London. Yet, the phenomenon constitutes something of a challenge for mainstream business support organisations. The paper will therefore seek to address this challenge by exploring (a) the current understanding of the nature of entrepreneurship among new and emerging ethnic minority business communities; and (b) the relationship between such enterprise activity and the UK institutional business framework. The aim is to provide a basis for the development of policy strategies that can effectively engage with these groups, particularly with respect to the current interest in the possibilities for enabling transition from informal into formal enterprise activity

'Social enterprise spin-outs': an institutional analysis of their emergence and potential

The recent phenomenon of public sector ‘social enterprise spin-outs’ is examined in order to critically assess their nature and innovative potential as providers of public services. The study utilises a theoretical model of institutional creation and change which incorporates key characteristics of ‘corporate spin-outs’ and ‘university spin-outs’ to facilitate the examination of their public sector counterparts, drawing on interview evidence from 30 newly-established social enterprise providers of health and care services in England. A main contribution of the paper is to provide a conceptual framework which sheds light on the strengths and potential vulnerabilities of social enterprise spin-outs as novel organisations that span the public, private and civil society sectors

Changing funding realities for charities and social enterprises: responses to the big society agenda and austerity in the East of England

This ESRC/RAKE/ISBE/Barclays funded project led by CEEDR and The Guild explored the changing circumstances in which voluntary and community organisations (VCOs), charities and social enterprises operate in relation to the government’s Big Society agenda. VCOs and charities are expected to move from a grant culture to one of earning income through trading, particularly to deliver public services, thus adopting the social enterprise ‘business’ model. The main research question addressed by this study were: To what extent are charities and social enterprises engaging with and responding to the Big Society and what are the implications of this engagement, or the lack of it? To what extent are VCOs and charities making this transition to public service delivery social enterprises and what is the nature of the processes involved? The qualitative research approach embraced by the study consisted of interviews with organisations operating in the health and social care sector and key stakeholders in the roll out of the Big Society in the East of England