The political economy of Ludwig von Mises and Frederic Bastiat has been largely ignored even by their admirers. We argue that Mises' and Bastiat's views in this area were both original and insightful. While traditional public choice generally maintains that democracy fails because voters' views...

The paradigm of NPM, like its forerunners, has been trying to answer the same question for almost twenty years: how to implement policies, strategies, programs and projects, using the market-type mechanisms, so that the institutions of the state could achieve the desired results. The praises and...

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

This paper describes an alternative way (other than taxation) to eliminate poverty and unemployment from the world. This is done by creating a single money worldwide, and letting each government subsidize the economy of each country, through acting as a non-profit venture capital subsidizer, by...

This paper presents results concerning the nonlinear analysis of the mean annual value temperature time series corresponding to the Earth’s global climate for the time period of 713 – 2004. The nonlinear analysis consists of the application of several filtering methods, the estimation of...

Using cross-country data, this paper investigates how governance influenced views regarding the security of nuclear energy after the Fukushima accident in Japan. Key findings are: (1) citizens are less likely to agree that nuclear power plants are properly secured against accidents with the...

Using cross-country data, this paper examines the influence of government transparency on changing views regarding nuclear energy before and after Japan’s natural and nuclear disasters of 2011. It was observed that in the majority of countries the rate of favoring nuclear energy declined after...

Literature on natural hazards typically perceives disasters to be acts of God (or nature) while restricting the examination of their causes to biophysical and geographical explanations. This paper takes a different approach; first, it argues that disasters are socially constructed and, second,...

Whether individuals vote strategically is one of the most important questions at the intersection of economics and political science. Exploiting a flaw in the German electoral system by which a party may gain seats by receiving fewer votes, this paper documents patterns of strategic voting in a...

This paper formulates a simple mathematical framework for the selection of an optimum "relative unanimity” collective decision rule. The approach is first to identify the benefits of moving from a rule of simple majority towards a rule of full unanimity. Then, the costs of moving from simple...