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...

Throughout human affairs there are two dual logics. Albert Hirschman investigated the two logics as the parallel-oriented logic of exit and the series-oriented logic of commitment, loyalty, and voice. Economics focuses almost exclusively on the logic of exit and questions of institutional design...

The purpose of this paper is outline an alternative theory of development assistance by analyzing the old strategies for technical cooperation, capacity-building and, in broader terms, development assistance in a way that will point to new strategies. The perspective is the very old idea that...

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...

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) implicitly uses a specific mathematical construction, the group of differences using pairs of unsigned numbers ('T-accounts'). That construction was only formulated abstractly in mathematics in the nineteenth century, even though DEB had been used in the business...

A theory of property needs to give an account of the whole lifecycle of a property right: How it is initiated, transferred, and terminated. Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and almost completely neglected the question of initiation and termination of property in normal...

Liberal thought (in the sense of classical liberalism) is based on the juxtaposition of consent to coercion. Autocracy and slavery were seen as based on coercion whereas today's political democracy and economic 'employment system' are based on consent to voluntary contracts. This paper retrieves...

A decade has passed since the privatization debates concerning Russia and the other transition economies. This note reviews literature on two issues: the overall institutional change strategy, and the alternatives to and arguments against voucher privatization. The alternative is a strategy of...

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...

Evolutionary economics often focuses on the comparison between economic competition and the process of natural selection to select the fitter members of a given population. But that neglects the other “half” of an evolutionary process, the mechanism for the generation of new possibilities...