The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of economic informality and its application in the rural context of developing and transitional economies, applying Keith Hart's (1987) notion of informality as a 'remedial concept'. Some remedy is needed to make sense of the many 'palpable...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Even the sharpest problem focus cannot help but sharpen the problem. Thus, the key to our understanding of alternatives to capitalism and alternative forms of capitalism is not in the on-going problematization of the dominance of the economic principle. Rather, the question addressed in the...

Lodged within the Internet's increasingly commercialized webs there exists a thriving subculture that has developed an economy all its own. Specifically, a modern gift economy, a consistent and internally rational structure of actively anti-economic behavior that presents an interesting...

People are shown to be “more (less) trusting as others are on average more (less) trusting” in a binary-choice-with-social-interactions model that is estimated using cross-section data from more than sixty countries, with mean trust as an explanatory variable. These endogenous effects...

The present study is part of a much larger study that examined the ethics of bribery and the ethics of tax evasion from a variety of perspectives. Data were taken from the most recent Wave of the World Values Survey. Data were collected in 82 countries. Participants were asked how frequently...

This chapter discusses and summarizes the Rothbard-Block Theory of Bribery. Basically, their theory takes the position that bribery is ethical if no one’s rights are violated. Rothbard and Block distinguish between commercial bribery and the bribing of government officials. In the case of a...

The present study addresses the question, “How serious is tax evasion?” In order to arrive at an answer, it was necessary to compare the seriousness of tax evasion to that of other selected acts. World Values Survey data for Greece were used to compare tax evasion to 18 other moral issues....

The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between the praxeology of L. von Mises and the theory of action of Alfred Schütz. Because of the importance that Mises’ theory has had on economics it is interesting to highlight the coincidences and synergies which exist between the...

This paper argues that the usual framing of discussions of money, monetary policy, and fiscal policy plays into the hands of conservatives.That framing is also largely consistent with the conventional view of the economy and of society more generally. To put it the way that economists usually...