The essay is based on the knowledge that institutional quality may influence economic performance. From this viewpoint, it is possible to demonstrate that under certain circumstances, governmental policy is able to increase economic efficiency and performance by creating, maintaining, and...

Economists have used cross-national regression analysis to argue that postcommunist economic failure is the result of inadequate adherence liberal economic policies. Sociologists have relied on case study data to show that postcommunist economic failure is the outcome of too close adherence to...

A fundamental question about the determinants of civil conflict is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development. This paper takes a new approach to provide an answer by using micro-data based on surveys of revolutionary tastes of 130,000 people living in 61 nations...

Property rights, whose security is often threatened by civil conflict, are a necessary condition for the establishment of a market economy. Yet a fundamental and unresolved empirical question is whether the lack of political and civil freedoms is one of the root causes of greater insecurity....

This paper uses a formal model to analyze the effects of political economic competition between states on economic performance and the size and composition of the public sector. Great economies of scale in warfare and even distributions of military capability among the contestants generate...

“Sustainable prosperity” denotes an economy that generates stable and equitable growth for a large and growing middle class. From the 1940s into the 1970s, the United States appeared to be on a trajectory of sustainable prosperity, especially for white-male members of the U.S. labor force....

The article analyzes the relationship between government policies and social capital development. Policies that promote capital flows and domestic capital development, human development, and gross domestic capital formation positively influence social capital, while those that contribute to...

The Author investigates the problem of mutual influence and dependence'sbetween estimates of quality of “economic” institutions, indicators of monetary stability, and growth rates in representative group of different economies - developed, developing and transitional (Selected Economies) at...

The past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the economic analysis of networks. This chapter is concerned with the role played by labor and credit networks in shaping economic activity in developing countries. The problem of identifying network effects on economic outcomes is first...