CONVERGENCE THEORIES OF THE 196OS AND I97OS PREDICTED THAT THE two rival political-economic systems would more or less rapidly assimilate each other and inevitably move toward one another. The East was to be enriched with market elements, while the "mixed" economic order of Westem capitalism had already adopted elements of state intervention into production and distribution processes. The probl...

Using the newly expanded set of 41 social tables from pre-modern societies, the paper tries to find out the factors associated with the level of inequality and the inequality extraction ratio (how close to the maximum inequality have the elites pushed the actual inequality). We find strong evidence that elites in colonies were more extractive, and that more densely populated and less urbanized ...

When Mao died in 1976, Russia appeared better poised than China to become an important commerical and industrial power in the global economy. Yet it is China rather than Russia that has embraced globalization and developed trade and manufacturing, exporting increasingly higher-value-added goods. The explanation for this surprising outcome in found is Chinese elites viewing globalization as thei...

Global public health is intimately linked with political, economic and social determinants. The current global order has been built on the assumption that the globalisation agenda shared by political elites of the last several decades will continue. Individuals, businesses and countries have all made decisions, many of them linked to health, based on this assumption. The election of Donald Trum...

Throughout the 1990s, all Latin American countries but Cuba implemented to varying degrees health care sector reforms underpinned by a neoliberal paradigm that redefined health care as less of a social right and more of a market commodity. These health care sector reforms were couched in the broader structural adjustment of Latin American welfare states prescribed consistently by international ...

Agent-based models and computer simulations are promising tools for studying emergent macrophenomena. We apply an agent-based approach in combination with data analysis to investigate the human development sequence (HDS) theory developed by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel. Although the HDS theory is supportedby correlational evidence, the sequenceof economicgrowth, democracyandemancipatio...