We trace the rise of the so called oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia and examine their relationship to income distribution in Russia. When Russia moved to a market economy in the 1990s a new business elite evolved. Russia's distinctive path towards market economy, among other factors, gave rise to...

As Suharto’s authoritarian regime came to an end in 1998, the country’s business elite faced new challenges. While rent seeking had previously primarily taken place through direct relationships with and concessions from Suharto, the business elite in contemporary Indonesia operates in a...

The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimper In How Will Capitalism End? the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth is giving way to secular stagnation; inequality is...

Thinking about the intellectual journey that Michels undertook, one whereby his critique of social democracy and of the party in a democratic regime matured, and one in which he also moved towards the valorization of patriotic and national convictions, I noticed the existence of a significant...

On capitalism that is created under the pressure of globalization there are created many economic systems that derived into a new model: the asymmetric model created from propriety rights’ perspective and the influence of interest groups, an asymmetric model that is called “oligarchy”(1)....

The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other "emerging markets" have transformed their economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa...

We augment the mechanism used in Nash implementation with a political process that collects the opinions of a subset of individuals with a xed probability distribution. The outcome is a function of only the collected opinions. We show that the necessary - and sometimes sufficient - condition for...

Despite the introduction of competitive elections and decentralization, Indonesia's democracy has yet to realize its promise of good government. Public reform efforts have been paralyzed by national political controversies. Meanwhile, corruption and inefficiency remains a rampant problem across...

This paper deals with a proposal by Frederic Schick for resolving Arrow’s dilemma of social choice. Schick challenges Arrow’s assumption that rational social indifference is transitive. It turns out, however, that even if we drop this assumption, we still face a dilemma as embarrassing as...

Bank shareholders cannot be expected to provide good stewardship to banks because there is a conflict of interests between the shareholder owners and a non-mutually owned bank's depositors; who provide the bulk of the funds in traditional retail banks and are willing to accept a lower return on...

The private sector is the driver of growth in most ASEAN economies. It is therefore expected to play a significant role in the process of economic integration in ASEAN. In the Philippines, the private sector has dominated the economy, contributing about 95 percent of GDP, but it has not lived up...

The private sector is the driver of growth in most ASEAN economies. It is therefore expected to play a significant role in the process of economic integration in ASEAN. In the Philippines, the private sector has dominated the economy, contributing about 95 percent of GDP, but it has not lived up...

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites due to globalization. In the last century, the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment. Although meritocratic selection should...

Eliaz (2004) has established a "meta-theorem" for preference aggregation which implies both Arrow's Theorem (1963) and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem (1973, 1975). This theorem shows that the driving force behind impossibility theorems in preference aggregation is the mutual exclusiveness of...

Eliaz (2004) has established a 'meta-theorem' for preference aggregation which implies both Arrow's Theorem (1963) and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem (1973, 1975). This theorem shows that the driving force behind impossibility theorems in preference aggregation is the mutual exclusiveness of...

Eliaz (2004) has established a ``meta-theorem'' for preference aggregation which implies both Arrow's Theorem (1963) and the Gibbard- Satterthwaite Theorem (1973, 1975). This theorem shows that the driving force behind impossibility theorems in preference aggregation is the mutual exclusiveness...

"The authors use a sample of 133 countries to investigate the link between the abundance of natural resources and micro-economic reforms. Previous studies suggest that natural resource abundance gives rise to governments that are less accountable to the public and states that are oligarchic, and...

We develop a dynamic political economy model in which investment in the state capacity to levy taxes and deter crime is a policy variable, and we study the evolution of state capacity when policy is chosen by an elite. We show that democratization in the sense of expansion of the elite leads to...

We study the incentives to expropriate foreign capital under democracy and obligarchy. We model a two-sector small open economy where foreign investment triggers Stolper-Samuelson effects through reducing exporting costs. We show how incentives to expropriate depend on the distributional effects...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium model to account for stylized facts about the behavior of oligarchs, politically and economically strong conglomerates in transition and developing countries. The model predicts that oligarchs are more likely than other owners to invest in productivity...