The 2008 recession resulted from the failure of financial institutions including banks, due to their uncontrolled self-indulgent financial practices leading to a severe economic crisis. Policy options to resolve the recession that has resulted from the crisis included financial sector restructuring or bail-outs on the assumption that the banks are generally moral and trustworthy organizations. ...

Agricultural parastatals were a common feature during apartheid and were intended, according to the government, to address poverty in the Bantustans. However the failure of these projects to achieve the publicised goals, mainly due to their heavy dependence on government funding, led to a belief that their establishment was motivated more by politics than the stated reasons. Following a review ...

TECHNOLOGY—the societal process for the pro duction and operation of artifacts, both tangible and intangible—impacts virtually every other so­ cietal structure and process and is, in turn, influenced by them. From its inception at the early emergence of humans as a distinct species, technology was the in­ strument that extended our biological capabilities, eventually making possible increasingl...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions, in contrast to what would be suggested by a reasoning extending the Coase Theorem to politics? Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions because of differences in the beliefs and ideologies of their peoples or leaders? Or are inefficiencies in politics and economics the outcome of social and distributional conflicts? Thi...

In the paper “Entry Barriers in Politics, or: Why Politics, Like Natural Monopoly, Is Not Organised as an Ongoing Market-Process,” an analytical framework for dealing with processes of political competition is presented. The idea goes back to Tullock’s model of democracy as franchise-bidding for natural monopoly. To this, basic insights of New Institutional Economics and Austrian Ecomomics are ...

For protected areas (PAs), variation in forest impacts over space—including types of PA—are increasingly well documented, while shifts in impacts over time receive less attention. For Mexico, in the 1990s, PAs effectively were ‘paper parks’. Thus, achieving impacts on the forest would require shifts over time in the politics of PA siting and PA implementation. We rigorously analyze the impacts ...