Despite the growing public debate on fiscal surprise during election periods in jurisdictions where the democratic dispensation is young, comprehensive empirical works to this effect in the case of Africa are hard to find. This study, therefore, sought to contribute to the debate on two counts....

Industrialization has long been seen as the answer to underdevelopment and poverty. First this led countries to follow protectionist import substitution policies but as these failed developing countries have opened up to trade and FDI and tried to follow strategies of export driven...

This paper investigates the role of personal relationships for doing business in the Greater Pearl River Delta, China. First, it discusses the interplay of formal and informal (relationship-based) institutions from the point of view of institutional economics, with a focus on economies with weak...

A common finding in the empirical civil war literature is that population size and per capita income are highly significant predictors of civil war incidence and onset. This paper shows that the common finding of population size and per capita income having a significant average effect on civil...

Innovation is the major driver of economic growth and development. To analyze innovation processes the restriction of a framework suited to the analysis of innovation towards the industrial sphere of an economy is not sufficient because of the important co-evolutionary dimensions of innovation....

While people in democracies can vote their government out when they are discontent with its policies, those in dictatorships cannot do so. They can only attempt to expel the dictator via mass protests or revolutions. Based on a general cause-and-effect mechanism, the author analyzes whether such...

Combining different new approaches to human behavior in neuroeconomics, the cognitive sciences and institutional economics, this paper sketches the fundamentals of a naturalistic theory of economic order. In this endeavour, the argument follows the track laid down by Hayek's comprehensive...

We introduce the notion of a stone age equilibrium to study societies in which property rights are absent, bilateral exchange is either coercive or voluntary, and relative strength governs power relations in coercive exchange. We stress the importance of free disposal of goods which allows for...

Most post-communist economies are characterized by an initial collapse in aggregate output. Blanchard and Kremer (1997) and Roland and Verdier (1997) have recently modelled supply side distortions, disorganization in the links of production, that can lead to a short-term output contraction after...

We provide evidence that a history of democracy at the local level is associated with contemporary democracy at the national level. Auxiliary estimates show that a tradition of local democracy is also associated with attitudes that favor democracy, with better quality institutions, and higher...