For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington's preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom. Since 1995, the Index has brought Smith's theories about liberty, prosperity and...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

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...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...

This paper analyzes optimal foreign aid policy in a neoclassical frameworkwith a conflict of interest between the donor and the recipient government.Aid conditionality is modelled as a limited enforceable contract. We defineconditional aid policy to be self-enforcing if, at any point in time,...

Since the 1980s a fundamental change of the social and economic systemin the People´s Republic of China (PRC) and in the Republic of SouthAfrica (SA) has taken place. In the development and transformation process, entrepreneurship plays an important role, and its promotion is one of the most...

During the last two decades West Bengal has led the rest of the country with regard to agricultural performance andimplementation of panchayat institutions. But these developments have begun to level out. At the same time the state hasfallen behind in other sectors – industry, higher education...

Nobuko Inagawa has written an excellent paper on the relevance of Japanese experiences for a successful integration of Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) into the world economy. Talking about the case of Japan is particularly interesting - and potentially controversial - compared...