Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms - by strengthening the ability to overcome obstacles in the political process...

We examine how democracies choose their amount of checks and balances (C&B). For this purpose, we consider a simple model of political competition with costly policy reforms. The cost of a marginal reform is determined endogenously at the constitutional phase-i.e. before policies are...

The paper discusses the current and potential role of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in anchoring economic reforms in the countries of the EU's Eastern Neighbourhood. It claims that it is too early to assess the success of the ENP in this sphere especially given that the actual progress...

Broadly speaking, institutional reformers decide about the sequencing of types of reforms, either addressing institutional quality or macroeconomic stability. This paper develops a dynamic population game, in which agents play a simple anonymous-exchange game of cooperating or defecting. Agents...

Der Reader ist aus einem Seminar über "The Social and Political Context of Structural Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa" in Bergen (Norwegen) im Oktober 1990 hervorgegangen. Seine Artikel diskutieren die sozialen und politischen Aus- und Rückwirkungen von Strukturanpassungspolitik, insbesondere...