Sub-Saharan Africa has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last fifty years yet economic development has remained elusive. In many countries absolute poverty has increased and life expectancy has declined. Karol Boudreaux and Paul Aligica argue that the results of...

This paper is an exploratory comparative analysis of the spread of the flat tax in postcommunist Eastern Europe. The paper reviews the flat tax as a public policy prescription, discusses the various arguments that underpin its potential reception, introduces and applies a synthetic comparative...

It is common for scholars to describe institutions as “rules of the game.” This description entails a separation between a society and its rules. Social change thus results as societies amend their framing rules. This paper explores that common treatment of institutions as rules with a...

This article discusses the problem of "thought experiments" in Austrian economics and takes as a starting point Lawrence Moss’ argument on the divide between the older Austrian economists - for whom thought experiments were crucial - and the new generation that, in Moss’ view, has...

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Elinor Ostrom, a recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009, had a foundational contribution to the Public Choice movement and to the rise of the new institutionalism and has been a key figure in the resurgence of political economy. Her studies...

The paper explores the potential link between Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and the theoretical developments associated with New Institutional Economics (NIE). The emphasis is put in particular on the contributions of two Nobel Prize winners in economics, Douglass C. North and Elinor Ostrom,...

This paper compares and contrasts two schools of political economy: the Austrian School, prominent members of which include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; and the Bloomington School, which was founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is argued that the two traditions share a good deal in...