Reforms and Collective Action in a Clientelist System: Greece during the Mitsotakis Administration (1990–93)

Economic reforms face a collective action problem: they trigger the reaction of groups that expect significant losses, while the government must forge a support coalition among those who anticipate gains. This problem may exhibit a distinct pattern in a clientelist system, when the affected groups are client groups attached to political party networks. The case of the Mitsotakis government in Greece (1990–93) illustrates that collective reaction to reforms that hurt client groups affects primarily the internal structure of the clientelist parties, their alliance with client groups and, thereby, their relative capacity for political mobilisation. This pattern makes certain types of economic reform, such as privatisation and structural reforms, particularly risky for governments in a clientelist system

The long-run behaviour of the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures : a panel data approach

This paper examines the Prebisch and Singer hypothesis using a panel of twenty-four commodity prices from 1900 to 2010. The modelling approach stems from the need to meet two key concerns: (i) the presence of cross-sectional dependence among commodity prices; and (ii) the identification of potential structural breaks. To address these concerns, the Hadri and Rao (Oxf Bull Econ Stat 70:245–269, 2008) test is employed. The findings suggest that all commodity prices exhibit a structural break whose location differs across series, and that support for the Prebisch and Singer hypothesis is mixed. Once the breaks are removed from the underlying series, the persistence of commodity price shocks is shorter than that obtained in other studies using alternative methodologies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio