Legal and Institutional Frameworks Supporting Accountability in Budgeting and Service Delivery Performance.
Malcolm Russell-Einhorn, in a chapter of the recent World Bank publication "Performance Accountability and Combating Corruption," highlights the critical need for legal and regulatory frameworks to address a number of procedural details that can help ensure more genuine and effective citizen participation in matters of budgeting and service delivery.
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The Corruption Nexus and the People’s Republic of China: Current Thinking on Causes and Consequences.
A volume of research findings originally presented to the Department of Defense (Office of Net Assessment) on the impact of corruption on China’s economic, social, and political development.
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Does Corruption Affect Health and Education Outcomes in The Philippines?.
An examination of the effect of corruption in municipal governments on health and education outcomes in the Philippines, proving that corruption has a negative effect on education outcomes.
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A Corruption Primer: An Overview of Concepts in the Corruption Literature.
A brief, critical overview of some of the key ideas and debates regarding corruption, drawn from the several literatures of political science, political economy, and economics.
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Foreign Direct Investment and Corruption in China.
Existing literature on the connection between foreign direct investment(FDI) and corruption focuses almost exclusively on the impact of corruption in the host country on its FDI inflow.
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Dreams of Red Mansions: Causes and Consequences of Chinese Military Corruption.
One of the oft-noted side-effects of China’s economic reforms since 1978 has been the widespread proliferation of corruption.
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Anti-Corruption Agencies:
A Review of Experience.
How can we best control corruption? Recently, policymakers have chosen to establish anti-corruption agencies. But how much authority should these agencies have? What should their jurisdiction be? And what should we expect of them? This paper examines anti-corruption agencies, using a range of case studies.
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Measuring the Economic Impact of Corruption: A Survey.
A survey of literature on measuring corruption and empirical work aimed at specifying both the causes of corruption and the impact of corruption (and related governance variables) on economic output.
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Does Corruption Hinder Trade Reform?.
Providing evidence that countries with higher levels of corruption are less likely to reduce tariffs.
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Improved Relations with the Muslim World: How can the United States Reach, Help, and Enliven the Silent Majority.
Examining the central puzzle that confronts US policy makers in the post-9/11 world: Why is it that the people of many Muslim countries display hostility toward the United States, while their governments profess friendship?
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Russia's Agricultural Policy Negotiations with the WTO: Are Institutional Rigidities Preventing Gains from Further Trade Lib.
In this paper we argue that the late start and relatively lengthy negotiations over the country’s agricultural policies have contributed to the delay of the Russia's WTO membership application.
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Market-Augmenting Government: The Institutional Foundations for Prosperity.
Shows how governments and markets are complementary rather than opposing forces.
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“Trade” Among Agents and the Linearity of Incentives.
Presenting an explanation for why incentive schemes are predominantly linear, and do not have the complicated shapes predicted by Principal-Agent theory.
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The New Institutional Economics Approach to Economic Development — An Analytic Primer.
By aligning the incentives of agents with the interests of principals, and improving information flows about actions and outputs can improve outcomes. Using Williamson’s hierarchy of institutions, the author introduces several conceptual ideas and theoretical insights from the New Insitutional Economics.
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Governance and Growth: Measurement and Evidence.
Describes the gradual accumulation of indicators and evidence of the links between governance and growth, focusing on broad cross-country analyses. It discusses the need for more institutionally-specific and transparently constructed governance indicators, and summarizes progress in identifying and collecting these “second generation” indicators.
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Understanding and Measuring Social Capital: A Synthesis of Findings from the Social Capital Initiative.
A simple conceptual framework for apprehending the concept of social capital. Also includes a synthesis of the SCI studies, which have shown, using quantitative as well as qualitative analytical approaches, that social capital can have a major impact on the income and welfare of the poor by improving the outcome of activities that affect them.
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Does Corruption Affect Health and Education Outcomes in the Philippines?.
Showing that corruption is associated with lower quality of health and education delivery in the Phillipines by examining the effect of corruption in municipal governments on health and education outcomes.
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Trade Intensity, Country Size and Corruption.
Providing evidence of significant selection bias in the decisions of investor rating agencies to rate countries, and that the empirical relationship between smaller country size and better governance may merely be a reflection of selection bias, rather than a causal relationship.
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A New Institutional Approach to Economic Development.
New Institutional Economics analyzes issues in economic development using a multi-disciplinary approach. This book explores examples from developing and developed countries to examine the interaction between political, economic, legal, and social forces, with a particular focus on India.
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Conditions for Effective Decentralized Governance: A Synthesis of Research Findings.
Providing an overview of theories and outcomes regarding decentralization, with a focus on conditions in Uganda and the Philippines.
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Bolivian Customs Reform: A Case Study of Consolidating Democratic Institutions.
This study reviews the early stages of reform of corrupt Bolivian customs stressing the background of customs corruption in politics and economy, and the story of the reform process.
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Keeping Accounts: A Case Study of Civic Initiatives and Campaign Finance Oversight in Argentina.
Allegations of widespread public sector corruption in Argentina were endemic in the 1990's and campaign finance corruption was no exception.
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Social Capital and Rural Development: A Literature Review.
This paper reviews selected issues relating to rural development, including common property and risk management, productivity, marketing, and vertical relations. A conclusion draws upon the positive as well as negative experiences with social capital in rural development.
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The Nexus between Violent Conflict, Social Capital and Social Cohesion: Case Studies from Cambodia and Rwanda.
This paper explores the depletion and restoration of social capital in two war-torn societies, Rwanda and Cambodia, which are among the worst cases of genocide.
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Does Foreign Aid Promote Democracy?.
An analysis of the impact of aid on democratization in a large sample of recipient nations over the 1975-96 period. Uses several alternative democracy indexes and measures of aid intensity to locate evidence that aid promotes democracy.
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Institutions, Incentives and Economic Reforms in India.
Essays in this volume seek to illustrate the efficacy of the new institutional approach with reference to a number of policy areas -- privatization, fiscal policy, agricultural reform, labor policy, and financial sector development.
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Agricultural Extensions in Mali: Trust and Social Cohesion.
Social capital may be seen as interpersonal trust expressed through the relationships that exist among a society’s members, its institutions and organizations. The manner in which people relate to each other in and through the institutions that affect their lives helps determine the quality of those lives and the degree to which they will improve them. Given the fundamental quality of trust as it affects an institution's ability to help people realize their aspirations, development becomes more effective wh
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Induced Social Capital and Federations of the Rural Poor.
Poor people's organizations embody a particular and important form of structural social capital.
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Roads with Destinations: A Case Study of Governance and Rural Infrastructure in Nepal.
An examination of the effort to combat endemic corruption in the rural infrastructure programs of Nepal.
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Power and Prosperity.
IRIS founder Mancur Olson was famous for providing simple and insightful answers to broad economic questions. His famous Logic of Collective Action first analyzed how interest groups influence and subvert public policy. Power and Prosperity, completed just before his death in 1998, takes on the broadest questions of his career: What sort of government best promotes economic well-being? How can governments best "augment" market structures?
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Gender and Corruption.
In this paper the authors inquire whether women have different attitudes towards corruption than men, and whether countries with more women in legislatures have lower levels of corruption.
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The Optimal Number of Governments for Economic Development.
An examination of how replacing "broad, deep" governments with "shallow, narrow" governments increases stability and reduces corruption.
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What Does Social Capital Add to Individual Welfare?.
The purpose of this paper is to test the instrumental significance of social capital empirically.
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Decentralization, Governance, and Public Services: The Impact of Institutional Arrangements.
A discussion of the factors that are likely to lead to better governance at the local level.
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Ethnicity, Capital Formation, and Conflict.
Ethnicity plays an ambiguous role in the great transformation. On the one hand, ethnicity creates: by providing incentives that organize the flow of resources across generations, it provides the capital for urban migration and the acquisition of skills for industrial employment.
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Market-Mobilized Capital.
Does commercial law reform payoff in terms of financial market development and economic growth?
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Aid Dependence and Quality of Governance: An Empirical Analysis.
By analyzing cross-country data, this paper provides evidence that higher aid levels erode the quality of governance, as measured by indexes of bureaucratic quality, corruption, and the rule of law.
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Mapping and Measuring Social Capital: A Conceptual and Empirical Study of Collective Action for Conserving and Developing Wa.
The project described in this paper stratified villages in Rajasthan watersheds in terms of high, medium or low performance in their restoration of degraded or vulnerable common lands.
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Governance Aspects of the East Asian Financial Crisis.
The authors attempt to show how poor political governance in Indonesia and other East Asian countries, compounded by poor corporate and financial governance and inadequate international financial governance, created the financial crisis of 1997. Each type of governance is discussed in a principal-agent framework, and possible reforms are considered.
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Social Capital and Poverty.
Paul Collier investigates the concept of social capital from an economic perspective. He suggests that social capital is 'social' because it generates externalities arising from social interaction, and it is 'capital' only if its effects persist.
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Getting Things Done in an Anti-Modern Society: Social Capital Networks in Russia.
While social capital networks are used to produce goods and services in every society, what is the nature of these networks in an "anti-modern" society, that is, a society characterized by organizational failure, or the corruption of formal organizations?
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Governance and Growth: A Simple Hypothesis Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Productivity Growth.
Authors settle the argument that to explain why the fastest growing countries are a subset of developing countries, while at the same time having no tendency for general convergence, it is necessary to focus on the quality of governance.
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The Allocation of Publicly-Provided Goods to Rural Households in India: On Some Consequences of Caste, Religion and Democracy.
Drawing on characteristics of India's institutional structure and the implications of existing literature to address the question: What determines the allocation of publicly-provided goods to rural households in India?
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The Relationship Between Economic Growth and the Speed of Liberalization During Transition.
Usding exisiting results, examining the simultaneous relationship between growth and speed of liberalization during transition.
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Enterprise-State Relations After Mass Privatization: Their Character in Mongolia.
A changing relationship between state and enterprise is one central element in the economic reforms of post-socialist countries.
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Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation.
Presenting evidence that “social capital” matters for measurable economic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Surveys for a sample of 29 market economies.
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Determinants of Lasting Democracy in Poor Countries.
One of the most widely recognized and empirically documented findings in social science is the association between a country's level of economic development and the democratic character of its political institutions.
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Decentralized Public Finance and Effective Governance in West Africa.
An analysis of public finance and governance issues in West Africa that places research findings within a broader comparative context, while reviewing the literature on decentralized public finance in developing nations. The paper provides a series of parameters for assessing fiscal decentralization and its accompanying system of accountability.
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Combating Corruption in Africa: Institutional Challenges and Responses.
Breaking down the large and varied phenomenon of corruption, into components more easily subject to legal and policy analysis.
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End of the Tunnel? The Effects of Financial Stabilization in Russia.
During 1996 Russia passed two milestones. Successful completion of the Presidential election marked a further episode in the country's democratic development.
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Political Institutions and Economic Reform: Lessons from the Indian Experience.
The paper analyses India’s stabilization and structural adjustment program since mid-1991 to advance the theorizing on the politics of adjustment in democratic developing countries.
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Governance for Development: Policy Environment for Private Sector Development: Agro-Industry in Utta Pradesh, India.
Various initiatives have been taken up by the state and union government in the last four years to reform the Indian economy.
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Panchayati Raj in India: Problems and Prospects.
This study is a modest attempt to understand the dynamics of decentralization and evolution of PR in India.
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Electoral Systems and Fragmentation: The Indian Experience.
The main purpose of this paper is to compare the actual fractionalization in state legislatures with the extent of fractionalization which would have occurred in legislatures elected under PR systems.
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Fertility, Literacy, and the Institution of Child Labour.
The paper demonstrates how the institution of child labor can generate a poverty trap when fertility is driven by the need for old-age security.
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Regional Poverty and Access to Public Services in India.
This study analyzes the extent of access to public social services the poor have in different regions in rural India based on the National Sample Survey data (42nd round) at the household level.
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Coalition Governments and Fiscal Policies in India.
This paper focuses on government instability, which can be a cause of economic distortions.
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Center-State Relations in India and Brazil: Privatization of Electricity and Banking.
This paper uses four focused case studies to explore the following question: “When and why do state governments oppose (or support} privatization programs initiated by the central government?”
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Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations Are Rich and Others are Poor.
An assistant professor is walking along with a full professor when he sees a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. As he bends to pick it up, his senior colleague restrains him, pointing out that if the bill were real it would have already been picked up. This article discusses theories about the efficiency of markets, and how the differences between poor and rich countries test those theories.
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Governance and the Returns to Investment: An Empirical Investigation.
Focusing on the effect of two dimensions of governance--a) the degree of civil liberties and b) the political regime type and degree of political liberties--on one observable indicator of economic performance: the returns on government investment projects financed by the World Bank.
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Cultural Evolution and Constitutional Public Choice: Institutional Diversity and Economic Performance on American Indian Res.
This paper argues that the foundations of effective collective institutions rest on the processes of normative and positive acculturation of individuals, and we refer to socially shared normative and positive conceptions (or “norms”) of proper and feasible behavior in the realm of human action as “culture.”
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Governance and the Economy in Africa: Tools for Analysis and Reform of Corruption.
This volume discusses the ways in which contemporary developing nations have begun to impose discipline on those holding power, and more importantly how African societities can do so more fully and on a more permanent basis.
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Institutions and Economic Performance: Cross-Country Tests Using Alternative Institutional Measures.
Using alternative indicators provided by country risk evaluators to potential foreign investors, this study aims to quantify the relationship between institutions, investment, and growth.
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Decentralization and the Potential for Effective Municipal Governance in Senegal.
Across Africa, and indeed throughout the developing world, the devolution of authority to local government has failed to achieve the efficiency, and democracy-enhancing goals championed by international agencies in their support of decentralization.
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Citizens, Autocrats, and Plotters: An Agency Theory of Coups D’Etat.
Authors present an agency theory of coup attempts in autocracies. Autocrat’s, modeled as self-interested with aims to benefit from power while staying in office, interests conflict with those of his principal, the citizenry, who wants the state to be efficiently run.
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A Simple Analytic of a Selfish Hegemon.
This paper deals with the concept of hegemonic stability and Kindleberger's attributes leading to the main cause of the great depression after World War II.
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How Communism Could Have Been Saved? An Unexpected Political Consequence of an Electoral Law.
The current analysis reconstructs the impact of the electoral law adopted by Solidaritv and PUWP2 during the 1989 Roundtable talks on the subsequent course of events.
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Constitutions for New Democracies: Reflections of Turmoil or Agents of Stability?.
Despite the widely held view in newly emerging democracies that constitutions are mere words on paper or that parchment barriers cannot render a state stable or democratic, those who draft such documents commonly act as if words ARE of consequence.
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Lessons for Citizens of a New Democracy.
This manuscript is a book-length manuscript scheduled for publication (Edward Elgar Pub) around November or December of this year.
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Russia, Federalism, and Political Stability.
This essay has two parts -- a text in English and one in Russian. The Russian version is a translation of a slightly abbreviated form of the English text and will be published sometime this year in Russia (Siberian Academy of Science’s Regional Economics and Sociology).
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If Hamilton and Madison Were Merely Lucky, What Hope is There for Russian Federalism?.
The swirl of events in Russia lead in too many contradictory directions, and make it difficult if not impossible to confidently render conclusions about the future direction of events, and, in particular, the prospects for meaningful federal domestic relations.
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Deforestation in Colonial Kumaon: 1815-1947.
The forests of the Kumaon Himalayas offer a good case-study of the kind of institutional breakdown which ultimately leads to deforestation.
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Contraception and the Income-Fertility Relationship.
The puzzling result that income growth is generally associated with decreasing fertility has generated a large literature. Economists have been reluctant to classify children as an inferior good and so have offered alternative explanations for the negative impact of income on birth rates.
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Social Capital and Development Capacity: The Example of Rural Tanzania.
Which came first, economic development or cultural change? The usual paradigm would appear to order causality as in the title of the periodical economic development leads to changes in attitudes and behaviours.
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Russia's Stormy Path to Reform.
Russia's Stormy Path to Reform is areport of a high-level seminar held in Moscow between leading Russian, American and British thinkers and politicians to discuss the hopes, aims, constraints and possible outcomes of the reform process in the Russian Federation.
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How Many Parties Will New Zealand Have Under MMP?.
In November 1993 New Zealanders voted to replace their venerable First-Fast-the-Post (FPP) electoral system with Mifed-Member-Proportional (MMP), a version of proportional representation (PR) based on party lists.
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Bureaucracy and Economic Development.
This paper discusses the role of organizational performance in economic development.Public agencies that produce outputs that cannot be readily measured vary greatly in theirefficiency. Some countries have overcome the difficulties associated with poorly measured outputs-of public agencies and have established highly efficient civil se&es, f&owing strategies that are discussed in the paper. These efficient bureaucracies have contributed substantially to economic development, as illustrated in this paper by
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Constitutional Reform and Social Difference in New Zealand.
The new electoral system adopted by New Zealand in 1993 includes a little-known arrangement designed to assure fair and effective representation of the indigenous Maori minority in Parliament.
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Big Bang vs. Gradualism: Why Were Economist too Optimistic about the Transformation in Eastern Europe and USSR and Why Is th.
Most Western economists (the present writer inciuded) were too optimistic about the big-bang transformation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union around the time of its commencement around 1989-l 992. Most expected only moderate falls of output and relatively quick and strong recovery and growth. The actual fails have been much iarger and with the exception of Poland, the recovery has yet to take place.
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Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism.
The starting premise of this paper is that the greatest obstacle to understanding change in contemporary Eastern Europe is the concept of transition.
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Family Safety Nets Economic Transition: A Case Study of Poland.
Can those Eastern European families who are most severely impoverished during the transition from socialism to capitalism rely on private family safety nets for support?
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A Note on Recent Policies for Higher Education in Chile.
Educational expansion at the primary and secondary levels tends to have an equalizing effect on the distribution of earnings for a given wage structure. However, the resulting change in relative supplies of labor
generates an offsetting increase in the wages of more educated workers relative to less educated workers.
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Wheeling, Dealing, Stealing and Appealing: Bases of Voting in the Brazilian Congress.
This paper begins with a puzzle. Brazil's legislature ought to be active. The system is presidential; the electoral system is decentralized and candidate-centered.
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Relative Wage Structure in Chile, 1957-1992: Changes in the Structure of Demand for Schooling.
It is commonly hypothesized that moving from protectionism to liberalized trade will increase the demand for goods whose production is intensive in its use of unskilled labor.
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Agrarian Institutions and Agricultural Productivity: Africa in the European Mirror.
Attempts to reform agriculture n underdeveloped countries have been informed by the idea that exclusive private property rights were a prerequisite to an efficient agricultural sector. Thus the 1989 World Bank Report Sub Saharan Agriculture. From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, stressed the need for changes in land law from communal property rights towards individualized rights. Yet there has been dispute about whether costly state intervention is required in these matters, or whether land rights will endogen
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Bureaucracy, Infrastructure and Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Cities during the Progressive Era.
Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish.
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An Approach to Institutional Reform in Higher Education.
Changes in the South African environment present severe challenges to the country’s universities,challenges that, in less strenuous forms, have devastated universities in many other countries.
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The Effects of R&D, Foreign Technology Purchase, and Spillovers on Productivity in Indian Firms.
This paper is an abridged version of the authors' working paper at the United Nations University Institute of New Technologies (UNUINTECH) in Maastricht (Basant and Fikkert (1993));and Rakesh Basant acknowledges with thanks the financial and other support he received from UNU-INTECH.
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Institutions and Incentives: The Prospects for Russian Democracy.
The lament that Russia is at the mercy of powerful personalities contesting for the reigns of power may be accurate.
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Optimal Provision of Public Goods under Costly Exclusion and Corruption.
Laws and rules that underlie and enhance public safety, clean environments and public goods are promulgated with the intent of promoting social welfare.
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Coalition Structures, Duverger's Law, and the Split-Merger Stability Hypothesis.
This papaer focusses on developing a nonspatial, game-theoretic framework capable of capturing the complexity of electoral coalition formation process.
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Analysis of Competition in Mongolia: Three Case Studies.
The IRIS-Mongolia Project and the Privatization Commission of the Government of Mongolia recently engaged in a cooperative effort to draft legislation to regulate industry conduct competition in Mongolia's industrial sector.
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Ethnic Heterogeneity, District Magnitude, and the Number of Parties.
Recent events leading to the importation of democratic ideas and ideals by previously totalitarian states increase our interest in the ways in which electoral institutions influence party systems.
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Anti-Trust and the Evolution of a Market Economy in Mongolia.
This paper features two essential tasks in the transition: development of a democratic, transparent process for establishing the market rules of the game, and making the shift from socialistic givernment as economic planner/manager to government as rule arbiter and protector of market processes. The project aslo serves as a good illustration of a model for assisting developing countries with institutional reform.
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Growth Capabilities and Development: Implications for Transition Processes in Cuba.
Two conceptual issues are addressed in this paper: the distinction between growth and development and the definition of the standard of living.
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Communism, Constitutionalism and the Transition to Market-Based Democracy.
The introduction of a modern constitutional regime in the post-communist countries would assist in overcoming the economic crisis and in preventing political crisis.
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A Critical Perspective on the Yeltsin Economic Reform Program.
A number of reform alternatives have been worked out by Russian economists, some of which take into account unique features of the Russian political and economic landscape more comprehensively than the program initiated under Gaidar’s direction. The re-entry of Gaidar into the Yeltsin government, while probably a positive sign to some democrats in Russia and many Western leaders, suggests that many mistakes of the past two years may be repeated.
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The Transition to Republican Government.
Democratic republics are founded on the idea that th epeople must rule. But of central concern to the founding and maintenance of such republics is the manner in which the people accomplish self rule.
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Industrial Organization in a Restructuring Socialist Economy: Evidence from Bulgaria.
Using new data for all state and cooperatively-owned Bulgarian establishments and enterprises in 1988 and 1989 we portray key aspects of Bulgarian industrial organization.
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Risk, Scarcity, and Land Market: The Uneven Economies of Induced Institutional Change in the West African Sahel.
This paper theoretically shows that land scarcity by itself is insufficient to induce the emergence of an active land market in a relatively egalitarian agrarian economy.
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Taking Trade Policy Seriously: Export Subsidization as a Case Study in State Capabilities.
In thinking about policy, academic economists alternate between theoretical models in which governments can design finely-tuned optimal interventions and practical considerations which usually assume the government to be incompetent and hostage to special interests.
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Notes on Constitutional Change in the Republic of China: Presidential versus Parliamentary Government.
The debate over constitutional reform has moved to center stage in Taiwan, with a focus on two issues: the choice of presidential versus parliamentary government and a determination of the ultimate role of the National Assembly.
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The Initiation of New Democratic Institutions in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Much has been written about a possible incompatibility between democracy and economic liberalization, on the one hand, and democracy and the cultural legacy left by forty years of Leninist rule in Eastern Europe, on the other.
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Parallel Market for Foreign Currencies in Nepal.
Existence of parallel market for foreign currencies is a common phenomenon in many developing countries which are characterized by restrictive trade practices, capital control and official fixation of the exchange rate at an overvalued level.
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Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development.
Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by "roving bandits" destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits.
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A Simple Test of the Nutrition-Based Efficiency Wage Model.
In the nutrition-based efficiency wage model, wages in labor markets in developing countries are rigid because lowering them would reduce worker productivitty and increase the cost per efficiency unit . This paper evaluates this claim, using data from rural India. It is found that,contrary to what has been assumed in these models a wage cut should lower the cost per efficiency unit of labor.
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The Economic Role of Government: Property Rights, Externalities and Mechanism Designs.
This paper provides a discussion of the role of government as arbiter of property rights.
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Fiscal Decentralization and Economic Development.
The point of departure for my contribution to this symposium is the striking contrast in the extent of fiscal centralization of the industrialized and the developing countries
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Why Don't Poor Countries Catch Up? A Cross National Test of an Institutional Explanation.
Since 1952 scholars have advanced the hypothesis that poorer countries should grow faster than richer ones.
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A Constitution for the Russian Federation.
The draft constitution prepared for the Russian Federation can, in many respects, be regarded as a generic presidential constitution for a federation, it summarizes much of what we have learned about due process, the rule of law, the relationship between legislative and executive powers, and stable federalisms
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Constitutional Reform: What Direction Now?.
Russia enjoys the apparent luxury of two official draft constitutions, one by the Constitutional Commission, another by President Yeltsin’s staff. Which is better? That is like asking which of two piles of building stones is better.
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The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Why are some societies characterized by welt-defined. stable individual rights and others not? Why are constitutional provisions easily evaded or ignored in some societies and respected and binding in others?
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Russia's Transition to Democracy: Essays 1-10.
The ten essays contained herein are the first in a series of twenty prepared for translation into Russian and publication in Moscow's Independent Gazette.
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Russia's Transition to Democracy: Essays 11-18.
The eight essays contained herein are the second Inca series prepared for translation into Russian and publication in Moscow’s Indepetrdetu Gazefre.
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Group Composition, Collective Consumption, and Collaborative Production.
An enduring question in the analysis of groups is: what determines their composition in terms of their individual constituents?
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From Communism to Market Democracy: Why is Economic Performance Even Worse After Communism is Abandoned?.
Seeks to answer the question: If too much government control of the economy brought about the failure of the communist economies, why didn’t economic performance improve as communism was abandoned and government control cut back?
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Federalism and Government Finance.
A survey of “fiscal federalism” and an overview of reflections on multi-level public finance with special attention to the challenging research agenda that remains.
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Autocracy, Democracy, and History with Appendix: An Abstract Model of Autocratic Versus Democratic Government.
Outlining historical differences between autocracies and democracies, this essay suggests that autocracies are not always the norm at all stages of historical development.
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Consequences of Limited Risk Markets and Imperfect Information for the Design of Taxes and Transfers: Overview.
The central thesis for this publication is that sound policies for the rural sector of developing countries must be based on an understanding of the structure of a rural organization and that rural organization can in turn be interpreted as partly the consequence of limitations on information and the absence of a complete set of risk markets.
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Multiparty Representative Government.
A discussion and comparison of the two modes of representation as relating to the normative properties of the final outcomes of public policies, stability, and possible alienation of voters and resulting instability.
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Comparison of Two-Party and Multiparty Representative Governments.
Although modes of representation come in a variety of institutional forms, they can be usefully divided into two categories: (1) those that seek to have each voter represented by a person or party coming fairly close to a voter’s position on the issues, and (2) those that seek to limit a voter’s choice to two candidates or parties which encompass a broad cross-section of interests and ideologies.
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The Rise and Decline of Nations.
The second half of the twentieth century saw rapid shifts in the relative positions of different countries and regions. In this book, Mancur Olson brought forth a new and compelling theory to explain these shifts in fortune, and tested the theory against evidence from many periods of history and many parts of the world.
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