The paper argues that introduction of сontractual savings for housing (CSH) - bausparkassen and building and loan cooperatives - is an essential institutional stage in the process of mass mortgage market formation. An attempt to skip over it is a costly mistake and almost doomed to failure....

The article develops the innovation pause hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the current crisis can be explained by the exhaustion of possibilities of existing general purpose technologies and by the delay of new ones, combined with overoptimistic expectations due to a long period of...

Maintaining today’s global imbalances would help overcome the major disproportion of our times — income gap between developed and developing countries. This gap was widening for 500 years, since the XVI century, and only now, in recent 60 years, there are some signs that this gap is starting...

Why have many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies which are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of countries of Central Europe? First, optimal policies are context dependent, they are specific...

The specifics of private education is considered in the article. The author points out that the most relevant characteristic of this system in post-industrial society is its independence. Only independent private education can offer a non-standard approach allowing to individualize the process...