We formulate a simple necessary and sufficient condition of monotonicity of a consumer's demand function in terms of the first and second derivatives of the consumer's utility function.

Any legislative framework is likely to generate different institutions or norms of behavior which the legislator occasionally could have never foreseen. I suggested a general pattern, on which inefficient, if stable, norms or institutions called institutional traps would form.

If imperfect market institutions prevail in a country and inflation amounts to about 10% then efforts directed to further inflation decrease would probably hamper economic growth. To substantiate this thesis, I make references on opinions of well-known economists, discuss results of recent...

We suggest a dynamic game theoretic model to explain why resource abundance may lead to instability of democracy. Stationary Markov perfect equilibria of this game with four players – Politician, Oligarch, Autocrat and Public (voters) – are analyzed. Choosing a rate of resource rent tax,...

Different approaches to the formation of a National Innovation System (NIS) are discussed. In Russia, the current attempts of creating NIS resemble "shock therapy" whereas an interim institution strategy could be more fruitful. At the initial stage, such a strategy has to provide creation of...

There are two innovations in the paper as compared to the previous literature on democracy and growth. First, we consider not only the level of democracy, but also changes in this level in the 1970s-1990s as measured by increments of Freedom House political rights indices. Second, the...

We analyze data on sustainability of democratic regimes in resource rich countries and suggest a two-period model to explain why resource abundance may lead to instability of democracy in some countries, but does not create any difficulties for democratic system in other ones. Our central idea...

“Theory and Practice” of TA, which is referred to in the title of this journal “TATuP”, is usually addressed as a question of TA research. But science is more than research: the field of teaching requires just as much attention, both practically and theoretically. Therefore, a mere...

At the beginning of the 21st century there are new expectations and challenges towards Technology Assessment (TA). Among these there is a new awareness on TA issues in education, in particular at universities. While TA was mainly an activity at extra-universitarian research institutions for a...

Recent studies of processes of economic reforms testified that realization of liberal school recipes resulted in nonadequate losses. Basing on these studies,the author singles out a number of fundamental mistakes of the neoliberal conception. The neoliberals ignored costs of institutional...