To mark the 50th anniversary of the journal Public Sector Economics (PSE), the Institute of Public Finance's 2026 annual conference will be devoted to a perspective on the evolution of the discipline since the mid-1970s and a discussion of where public finance research and practice may head in the future. The conference will take place in Zagreb, Croatia, on 23 October 2026.
The programme will feature keynote lectures, paper presentations, and a panel on the future of public sector economics research and practice.
We invite historical, theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented submissions from all branches of public sector economics and related disciplines, including other social sciences.
Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- Government and market failure in perspective, size of the public sector in perspective
- Evolution of tax systems and individual taxes – achievements of optimal taxation, missed opportunities, remaining gaps
- Evolution of social insurance systems, current tensions and sustainability challenges, political economy of reforms
- Interplay of public and private sector in health care, long-term care, education, R&D, culture
- Perspectives on old and new economic roles of the public sector – public investment, climate change mitigation, defence sector, economic and social infrastructure, new industrial policy
- Macro fiscal policy then and now – and its likely future
- Development of empirical methodology, causal identification methods, big data and machine learning, combination of microsimulations and administrative data, insights from behavioural economics
- Modernisation of public sector practices – data and service delivery digitisation, modernisation of tax administration, potential and risks of AI in the public sector
- Institutional developments – spread of fiscal transparency, accountability, responsibility, citizen participation, civil service reforms.
When the Institute of Public Finance launched the predecessor of the PSE journal in 1976, capitalism was in its deepest crisis since the Great Depression, and socialist economies entered a long period of decline that presaged their disintegration in 1989. On both sides, the public sector had expanded beyond the limits of economic sustainability and government failure was omnipresent. A change in the scope and financing of the public sector was inevitable, but the extent of its transformation surprised everyone.
Since then, we have witnessed a major overhaul of tax systems (lower income tax rates, introduction of the VAT), privatisation of state enterprises, withdrawal of the state from many public services and outsourcing of others, efficiency-driven reshaping of social insurance systems, the spread of transparency and service delivery norms, and more recently, a digital transformation of government practices. And despite its initial retreat, the state expanded into new areas as the society confronted challenges such as climate change, population ageing, and, lately, global security threats.
Many aspects of this transformation were covered in the past ten PSE annual conferences. But many were not, and we have not had the opportunity to take a longer-term perspective on the development of the public sector.