In recent decades the new institutional economics has redrawn attention to the significance of state sponsored and regulated institutions, organisations, laws, rules, customs and culturally conditioned behaviour for the promotion of long term economic development (Menard and Shirley, 2005)....

In Deutschland fand keynesianische Wirtschaftspolitikihre Ausformulierung im „Stabilitäts- undWachstumsgesetz“ von 1967. Mit diesem prozesspolitischenGrundgesetz (K. Schiller) sollte dieaktive Rolle des Staates für eine stabile wirtschaftlicheEntwicklung festgeschrieben werden....

The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...

This article examines the hypothesis that in the “Third Reich”, bureaucratic agencies engaged in economic policies competed with each other. First, a model of competition is constructed whose predictions are then compared with actual political processes in Nazi Germany. This shows that the...

Economics has always had two connected faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith's eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill's nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the...

This paper discusses some aspects of the changing relationship between thestudy of economic history and development economics. Forty years ago thesubjects seemed to be quite closely linked in the sense that senior figuresstraddled both areas, the development history of the advanced countries...

The task of economic planning in the new nation of Nigeria in theearly 1960s tested the limits of economic technologies: its recipesfor development, its possibilities of measurement, and fromdifferences in political economy. These dimensions of the problembeset not only the Nigerian politicians...

How and whether judges should be held accountable is a key issue in the design of a legalsystem. Thirty-seven of the forty-eight continental states use some method of judicial selectionwhich involves a direct role for citizens in selecting or re-appointing the judiciary. We identifytwo...

This paper uses data on elected village councils in South India to examinethe political economy of public resource allocation. We find that the patternof policy-making reflects politicians' self-interest. Elected councillors benefit from improved personal access to public resources. In addition,...

This paper studies determinants of MPs expense claims in Parlia-ment using the data released under the freedom of information act in2004. Using a multiple regression framework, we correlate expenseswith three sets of variables: constituency characteristics, party a¢ l-iation and individual...