R. Meager of University of New South Wales reviews “We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance” by Mara Kardas-Nelson. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores how microfinance, the practice of lending small amounts of money directly to people facing poverty, has impacted the lives of borrowers, highlighting the experiences of women in Sierra Leone who took out microfinance loans.”

This is a review article of the book The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, by Joel Mokyr, published in 2002.

The manufacturing sectors of developing countries have traditionally been relatively protected. They have also been subject to heavy regulation, much of which has favored large firms. Accordingly, it is often argued that in these countries: (1) markets tolerate inefficient firms, so cross-firm productivity dispersion is high; (2) small groups of entrenched oligopolists exploit monopoly power in product markets; and (3) many small firms are unable or unwilling to grow, so important scale economies go unexploited. Drawing on plant and firm level studies, I assess each of these conjectures and find none to be systematically supported. However, many open issues remain.

on the theory of state and local public finance is the seminal paper by Charles Tiebout (1956). Tiebout constructed a multijurisdictional model in which independent local governments offer a wide variety of expenditure and tax policies, and perfectly mobile consumers reveal their preferences for local public goods through their choice of residential community. He argued that, under such circumstances, local public service provision would be efficient. The Tiebout model has formed the basis of a vast number of subsequent articles in the state and local public finance literature and has also been very influential in urban and regional economics. The efficiency properties of various Tiebout-type models of local public good provision have been examined, and the role of politics in these models has been debated at length in this literature. Of more direct relevance to this paper, however, is the fact that although Tiebout had little to say directly about taxation (simply assuming the existence of head taxes), subsequent analyses have used adaptations of this model to examine the effects of local head taxes, land taxes, and property taxes. It is the literature on the efficiency and distributional effects of alternative local taxes that is the subject of this survey. 1