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...

Recent studies document a disappointingly low impact of resilience interventions and policies. This prompts us to revisit the formation of perceived individual resilience using a country-representative sample of 1500 adults. Our study explores how this perception is shaped by family resilience,...

This paper revisits the debates about the meaning of economic efficiency, and the moral dilemmas associated with using Kaldor-Hicks efficiency or Pareto efficiency for policy analysis. I lay out the best case for efficiency as meta-value, and highlight that it still does not allow us to evade...