An entrepreneur’s prior knowledge and experience play a critical role in his ability to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. Although entrepreneurship research has acknowledged the role that prior information and prior knowledge play in opportunity recognition, few studies have...

This Handbook looks through the lens of the latest generation of scholars at the main propositions believed by so-called ‘Austrians’. Each contributing author addresses key tenets of the school of thought, and outlines its ongoing contribution to economics and to the social sciences.

With the collapse of communism in the late 1980s the field of comparative political economy has undergone major revision. Socialism is no longer considered the viable alternative to capitalism it once was. We now recognize that the choice is between alternative institutional arrangements of...

The Ministry of Economic Development ran a series of seminars about economic growth in 2004. One was an economic history of economic growth in New Zealand, three were on different and sometimes contradictory conceptual ways of thinking about economic growth – endogenous growth theory, Austrian...

Ludwig von Mises and Israel Kirzner are two of the most prominent scholars who have attempted to gain a richer understanding of how the invisible hand operates in coordinating the vast array of economic exchanges that occur on a daily basis in the actual imperfect world. These economists, among...

This is a policy paper on the stimulus plan as of December 2008.Fear of a deep recession has led policy makers to propose an unprecedented stimulus package to save the economy, a sort of Main Street economic recovery package that would rely heavily on government-sponsored infrastructure projects...

International efforts to alleviate poverty in the poorest of nations are increasingly turning to microfinance for solutions. The United Nations's recent declaration that 2005 is the International Year of Micro Credit means that there will be more pressure than ever on development agencies to...