Lijphart (1997) endorses compulsory voting as a means to increase voter turnout. Considering the likely effects of the role of information (including its costs) on the decision to vote and taking an expressive view of voting, however, compels us to investigate two unexamined claims by such advocates: (i) that individuals are transformed by forcing them to vote, and (ii) that a compulsory electoral outcome is a more accurate reflection of community preferences.We argue that compelling those who are not particularly interested in, or informed about, the political process to vote increases the proportion of random votes and we show that under simple majority rule, compulsory voting may violate the Pareto principle; the less popular candidate is more likely to be elected. Our results cast doubt on the ”miracle of aggregation“ argument, which optimistically concludes that as long as uninformed votes are not systematically biased, they will have no effect on voting outcomes. We also briefly consider how information cascades can exacerbate this problem. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006

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The entrepreneur is shorthand for uncertainty, imperfect information, and the unknown. He operates in the shadowy world of intuition, ignorance, and disequilibrium. As a functional agent, he is completely outside the scope of modern orthodox economic analysis because entrepreneurial issues are irrelevant and, more important, inadmissible, in the deterministic, tightly interlocking theoretical environment that is modern microeconomic theory (Barreto 1989, p. 137).

This article constructs tourism satellite accounts (TSAs) for Ireland and provides a simple matrix representation of how TSAs estimate value added, domestic product and employment. The authors calculate how much tourism has contributed, directly and in total, to Irish value added, domestic product and employment. They find that TSA-measured domestic tourism consumption in Ireland is over five times the traditional official estimate and that tourism indirectly contributes around a further 50% of its direct contribution to Irish GDP. As such, tourism is found to be Ireland's second largest 'industry' in terms of gross value added and that it is Ireland's largest employer. The analysis shows why tourism policies based on traditional estimates of the tourism industry are likely to be misguided.