Walter Eucken was the head of the Freiburg school of economics, a circle of German ordoliberal scholars of the interwar period, whose thoughts were highly influential in the immediate post war period. Being disillusioned by what he called the "age of experiments"- the failure of both classical...

After the fall of state socialism about two decades ago, democracy and market economies were assumed to diffuse worldwide. However, the American financial crisis of 2008, leading to a worldwide economic crisis caused increasing criticism of capitalism. As laissez-faire capitalism, Keynesianism...

The paper discusses the role of the state in shaping an economic system which is, in line with the welfare economics approach, capable of performing socially important functions and achieving socially desirable results. We describe this system through a set of indexes: the IHDI, the World...