The rollback of the state and the redistribution initiated during the Reagan-Thatcher period in the US and Britain has resulted in these countries being the least egalitarian in the OECD, with wages increasingly de-coupled from productivity growth and gains accruing to top CEOs. The view that...

The public choice-school has explained why policy- making is generally disappointing and frequently against the very interest of the public at large. The economics profession has put forward two kinds of allegedly free-market remedies. On the one hand, the mainstream view underscores the need...

Rising urban and environmental demand for water has created growing pressure to re-allocate water from traditional agricultural uses. The evolution of water markets has been more complicated than those for other resources. In this paper, we first explain these differences by examining water...

In the last few years, a body of ideas based on political economy theory has been built up by North and Weingast, Olson, Przeworski, and Acemoglu and Robinson. One theme that emerges from this literature concerns the transition to democracy: why would dominant elites give up oligarchic power?...

We compare some of the policies that have been attempted in Europe (UK/Scotland) and Israel over the past fifteen years to elaborate a new Systems Evolutionary (SE) framework for rethinking VC policy and related ITP. We argue that this perspective is useful for both real world (‘positive’)...

The aim of this paper is to argue in favor of theoretically well-founded empirical examinations on how economic freedom affects economic performance, which is not the case, as we argue, in most of the huge empirical literature developed after the construction of various indexes of economic...

The paper constructs the first series of nominal and real effective exchange rates of the Bulgarian Lev from its establishment in 1879 until 1939. The dynamics of both indicators during the Classical Gold Standard fits the general picture of exchange rate development of other European countries...

In this article we start from the well-known contribution of the Austrian school with respect to the problem of knowledge and its role in inter- individual coordination. Focusing on two authors of this school - his founding father Carl Menger and Friedrich von Wieser, we show that the y both...

This paper explores the new market-mediating mechanisms linking SU invention on the one hand and economic growth on the other. Two such mechanisms come to our mind under venture capitalism (of which venture capitalism is directly involved only in the first): 1) a systemic rather than haphazard...

The Gregorian revolution introduced the rule of law in the West and created necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for growth to take off. This paper analyzes some of the consequences provoked by the evolution in the notion of the rule of law – from being based upon God-given natural law to...