Jane Jacobs is best known as a writer about cities and as a vigorous critic of urban planning. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that she should be read as a writer on economic development who focuses on cities as the principal sites of development. The recent upsurge of interest in...

Several years have passed since the failure of shock therapy to create a vibrant market economy in Russia. Some of the architects of the original plans have admitted that their strategies were naive, incomplete, or excessively ambitious. Others still insist there were no viable alternatives. In...

It is probably the most important issue in economics. How do economies grow? And for a few centuries, one traditional model has prevailed. Economies grow through specializing in industries, through division of labor, and through standardization. But one of the leading thinkers of our time, the...

This paper deals with Russia’s transition from communism to market economy which has been harder than anticipated just a decade ago. The rise in prosperity that the market economy had promised had not been materialised. But, in other transition countries from successes and failures, lessons...

This article outlines the “fundamental myth†about the structure of property rights in a capitalist economy, namely the idea that being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is part of a bundle of property rights known as the “ownership of the firm.†Residual...

I argue that math, like love, can cover a multitude of sins, and I use the neoclassical object of adoration, the Arrow-Debreu model, as the case in point. It is commonplace that the Arrow-Debreu (AD) model of general equilibrium does not describe the real world, but it is equally commonplace to...

The recent Enron-type scandals have reinvigorated the corporate governance debate. The purpose of this paper is to situate that debate in a much older and more fundamental debate about the organization of production. This paper presents a modern reconstruction of a property rights argument for...

This paper is a case study of what is recognized as one of the more successful projects in any country in the Europe and Central Asia region, not to mention in the poorest country of the region-Moldova. The ARIA project shows new ways to attack some of the most intractable problems of private...

Just as the two sides in the Cold War agreed that Capitalism and Communism were "the" two alternatives, so the two sides in the intellectual Great Debate agreed on a common framing of questions with the defenders of capitalism taking one side and Marxists taking the other. From the viewpoint of...