The Syrian economy is currently undertaking a set of measures to introduce market oriented reforms aimed to change the past system of central planning and to adopt socially oriented rules. The envisaged reforms are supposed to bring efficiency of economic activities, to withdraw the state from...

This paper examines the current state of economic reforms in India and the phenomenon of policy paralysis leading to almost complete lack of progress on reforms. It studies the qualitative aspects of reforms in India over the last couple of decades and explains how these have changed over time....

In the 1990s, Argentina became known as a paradigm of neo-liberal policies. President Carlos Menem was lauded for his ideological zeal in implementing radical economic reforms. Yet, how much of his behavior was motivated by ideology? How much of it was spurred by political necessity? We argue...

In this paper we derive the correct solution of optimal closure of the state sector studied in Section 6.4 of Aghion and Blanchard (1994). Aghion and Blanchard only present an 'approximate' solution which entails a constant unemployment rate in what they call a turnpike approximation. We show...