Governance of tax courts

Introduction to the symposium on the empirics of judicial institutions

“…Although many supranational institutions such as the World Bank or the European Commission (via the Council of Europe's European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, CEPEJ) strongly believe upon the role of judicial system in fostering economic growth, there is a substantial lack of evidence supporting the theoretical claims and functional to draw robust policy implications. In these respect, sometime the trivial conclusion of simply throwing some more judges into the system as a blank cheque for fostering judicial productivity or for solving courts' congestion witnesses the scant knowledge on judicial systems, on what is in its black box and what are its inner relationship with the adjudication system with the other institutions (for a critical viewpoint see Ippoliti and Ramello, 2018). In most of cases today the judiciary or better its performance enters empirical studies as a right-hand variable, without a great knowledge of what the variable used means.…”