The subject of values was once considered to lie beyond the purview of economic science. Preferences, taken as given to the agent and society, were seen as being about goods, dates of consumption, and states of the world, not about means (how to behave), or about beneficiaries other than the self. But as industrial civilization ends a turbulent century with rising anxiety over its social health...

This article examines the nature of India’s federal system, and recent and potential reforms in its structure and working. We summarize key federal institutions in India, focusing particularly on the mechanisms for Center-state transfers. These transfers are large, and are the major explicit method for dealing with inequalities across constituent units of the federation. We examine the evidence...

Institutions affect the process of economic growth through their many indicators. The authors have checked the relationship between institutions and economic growth in selected countries of South Asia by using data from 1995 to 2010. The results of ‘Fixed Effects Estimation’ and ‘Generalize Method of Moments’ confirmed the significant positive relationship between institutions and economic grow...

This paper focuses on the link between economic rights and institutions. Simple analysis of data is used to demonstrate countries’ human development effort in advancing economics rights of the citizens. A country’s human development effort is evaluated on the basis of the well-being of the poorest members of the society. An analysis of data reveals that there is a wide variation in countries’ p...

For most of history, economics did not have a separate identity apart from social thought in general. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Adam Smith viewed economics as a subset of jurisprudence. This makes the search for fIrst principles of economic reasoning more difficult, not because the intellectual cupboard of antiquity was bare, but because the subject boundaries between the social s...

My paper addresses an issue that is rarely discussed in the economics literature: how does the economic actors’ trust in each other and in the legal and political institutions affect a country’s economic performance? The first part of the paper is an empirical analysis of the interrelationship between confidence in institutions in different countries, the economic actors’ willingness to coopera...

In this paper, we test the Rodrik et al (2004) framework to explain differences in development levels across countries by using a broader set of definitions for institutions, geography and economic variables. We use a multi-faceted database to measure institutions in an attempt to go beyond the single-dimension measures that are often employed. We find that institutions trump other factors (geo...