This essay examines the role that expectations play in economic development and the efficacy of international development assistance programs. Because specialists within the development community tend to hold and perpetuate naively optimistic expectations about their programs, they fail to...

Media, Development, and Institutional Change investigates mass media's profound ability to affect institutional change and economic development. The authors use the tools of economics to illuminate the media's role in enabling and inhibiting political-economic reforms that promote development

What factors and processes influence the wealth of nations? This is the central question addressed by North, Wallis, and Weingast (NWW) (2009) in their framework for quot;interpreting recorded human history.quot; This essay emphasizes that the implications of NWW's analysis provide the...

The issue of economic development has been at the center of economics from its beginnings. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, attempted to determine the factors that led to the wealth of nations. He concluded that low taxes, peace and a workable system of justice would lead to economic growth (Smith...

Current proposals for strengthening policy ownership in reforming economies are fundamentally flawed. Modeling the reform process as a prisoners' dilemma demonstrates that political agents must overcome this conflict of interests before present proposals for bolstering ownership will work. A...

This paper discusses the inherent tension in the notion of entrepreneurship as developed by Ludwig von Mises and Israel Kirzner. Given that entrepreneurship is an omnipresent aspect of human action, it cannot also be the “cause” of economic development. Rather, for economic development to...