Search results for " political economy"

Drastic innovation reduces firms’ incentives to create divisions

2020

I study a game in which two firms create independent divisions, then they choose whether to do R&D so as to reduce their divisions’ marginal costs, and then the divisions compete in the market. I provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which the game has an equilibrium in pure strategies, and I show that the game has an equilibrium only if each firm threatens that if the rival creates more divisions it will use R&D to foreclose the market. The case we find in the literature, in which firms flood the market with their divisions, should happen only in industries with low returns to R&D.

Is Democracy Exportable?

2017

Among many aspects to the question of whether democracy is exportable, this contribution focuses on the role of the people, understood not as a unitary actor but as a heterogeneous set: the citizens. The people matter, in a different way, both in the countries to which democracy might be exported and in the democratic countries in which the question is about promoting democracy elsewhere. The mechanisms or characteristics involved in the discussion include yardstick competition, differences among citizens in the intensity of their preferences, differences among autocracies regarding intrusion into private life, citizens’ assessments of future regime change, and responsiveness of elected inc…

It’s a matter of confidence. Institutions, government stability and economic outcomes

2021

In this paper we analyse the effect of constitutional structures over policy outcomes. In particular, we exploit the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems deriving from the presence and the use of the confidence vote to investigate whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policies they implement. This finer partition of parliamentary systems allows us to identify effects that are more robust than the ones previously discussed in the literature. We show that the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems documented in previous works is driven by a difference between presidential and stable parliamentary systems. We suggest that poss…

The Political Economy of the World Bank. The Early Years

2009

This book covers the early years of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonly known as the World Bank when it first confronted the issue of development as a fundamental part of its mission. The book is mainly concerned with how the Bank interpreted its mission and, more specifically, how its mission was born: what events shaped it, what cultural and ideological background influenced it and what was the historical context in which it arose. So this book is a contribution to the study of the prehistory of development, understood in its social and economic context. In this respect, the study of the early years of the World Bank offers excellent context for obser…

Immaterial capital : ideas of human and social capital in the Older Historical School of German Political Economy

2007

State-Owned Enterprises

2019

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often considered to be relics of twentieth century history. The transformation in the basic concept of SOE is closely linked to two major recent developments in Western capitalism. This chapter examines the process of change in the concept of SOEs and their impact in the making of global business. The traditional SOE was established and developed in a variety of circumstances. Ownership is closely related to control, and, for traditional SOEs in particular, the means a close interconnection with the national government. SOEs have assumed various organizational forms: government agencies, intermediaries between the agency and the business enterprise, and st…

Measuring freedom of choice: An alternative view of a recent literature

2004

A recent literature has emerged in social choice theory which attributes intrinsic importance to freedom in the evaluation of states of affairs. The literature’s philosophical basis lies in Berlin’s notion of positive liberty. Accordingly, axiomatic measures of availability of choices are developed and the information they convey used for ranking states on the basis of the extent of liberty they offer to individuals. This paper argues that the literature’s contributions have taken Berlin’s analytical framework for granted exceedingly narrowing the philosophical terms of the debate. It is shown that, once freedom is analyzed from the perspective of an alternative structure, the triadic synta…

Le origini della Banca Mondiale. Una deriva conservatrice

2007

Nel secondo dopoguerra la Banca Mondiale dovette affrontare per la prima volta il problema del sostegno ai cosiddetti paesi in via di sviluppo, trovandosi costretta a riconvertirsi dal sostegno alla ricostruzione europea agli aiuti allo sviluppo nel resto del mondo. Una delle istituzioni attualmente ai vertici dell'economia mondiale attraversò allora una fase di definizione di quali dovessero essere i propri obiettivi e quali i mezzi per raggiungerli. Attraverso la consultazione di materiali d'archivio mai utilizzati prima d'ora, Alacevich indaga sulle istanze culturali, politiche e ideologiche che contribuirono a dare origine alle scelte di politica economica della Banca Mondiale nei confr…

The term “political oeconomy” in Adam Smith

2020

This article analyses the use of the term “‘political oeconomy” in the Wealth of Nations, considered by many the founding text of the discipline of Political Economy. It shows that Adam Smith could not accept the use of the term “political oeconomy” that had been made by other authors to indicate the subject matter of his scientific inquiry, devoted to the nature and causes of the wealth of nations; he used the term “political oeconomy” as a synonym for economic policy, especially in the fourth book of the Wealth of Nations. In order to understand this statement, it is necessary to keep in mind the methodological and epistemological perspective developed by Smith; in his view, the inquiry i…

IPE scholarship about Southeast Asia : Theories of development and state-market-society relations

2020

Contemporary Southeast Asia is a diverse region that is fully integrated into the world economy. Its eleven constituent countries are distinct with unique historical, political, economic, and cultural configurations – as such, they develop unevenly within, and respond accordingly to, the evolution of the global capitalist system. This chapter provides a survey of literatures, themes and debates that have significantly contributed to the study of Southeast Asia from the discipline of international political economy (IPE). It shows how specific IPE scholarship about Southeast Asia since the 1950s have been framed within the general theories of development (i.e., modernization and dependency) …