This paper is a case study of what is recognized as one of the more successful projects in any country in the Europe and Central Asia region, not to mention in the poorest country of the region-Moldova. The ARIA project shows new ways to attack some of the most intractable problems of private...

Just as the two sides in the Cold War agreed that Capitalism and Communism were "the" two alternatives, so the two sides in the intellectual Great Debate agreed on a common framing of questions with the defenders of capitalism taking one side and Marxists taking the other. From the viewpoint of...

Tis only as the shades of night are falling that the Owl of Minerva spreads her mighty wings and takes to flight. (Hegel) The paper “Whence Reform?” by the Polish economists Marek Dabrowski, Stanislaw Gomulka, and Jacek Rostowski (DGR) is a welcome and revealing commentary on what is called...

This article outlines the “fundamental myth†about the structure of property rights in a capitalist economy, namely the idea that being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is part of a bundle of property rights known as the “ownership of the firm.†Residual...

A theory of property needs to give an account of the whole lifecycle of a property right: How it is initiated, transferred, and terminated. Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and almost completely neglected the question of initiation and termination of property in normal...

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) implicitly uses a specific mathematical construction, the group of differences using pairs of unsigned numbers ('T-accounts'). That construction was only formulated abstractly in mathematics in the nineteenth century, even though DEB had been used in the business...

I argue that math, like love, can cover a multitude of sins, and I use the neoclassical object of adoration, the Arrow-Debreu model, as the case in point. It is commonplace that the Arrow-Debreu (AD) model of general equilibrium does not describe the real world, but it is equally commonplace to...

The recent Enron-type scandals have reinvigorated the corporate governance debate. The purpose of this paper is to situate that debate in a much older and more fundamental debate about the organization of production. This paper presents a modern reconstruction of a property rights argument for...

This paper shows that implicit assumptions about the numeraire good in the Kaldor–Hicks efficiency–equity analysis involve a “same-yardstick” fallacy (a fallacy pointed out by Paul Samuelson in another context). These results have negative implications for cost-benefit analysis, the...

A decade has passed since the privatization debates concerning Russia and the other transition economies. This note reviews literature on two issues: the overall institutional change strategy, and the alternatives to and arguments against voucher privatization. The alternative is a strategy of...