I consider transactions involving asymmetric prisoners’ dilemmas between pairs of players selected chosen from two large populations. Games are played repeatedly, but information about cheating is not adequate to sustain cooperation, and there is no official legal system of contract enforcement. I examine how profit-maximizing private intermediation can supply the information and enforcement. I...

The paper investigates the dynamic relationship between social trust and economic governance using a principal-agent model with stochastic returns. To mitigate the inherent moral hazard problem both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives are useful. The cooperative tendency of an agent measures his intrinsic discipline against shirking, the distribution of which characterizes social trust in societ...

2 Summary Economists generally argue that the level and structure of a country's own trade barriers, as well as the "quality" of its governance policies, such as regulations on foreign investment or bureaucratic "red tape" on commercial activity, will have a major influence on its economic growth and performance. However, a problem previously encountered in attempts to test these relations empi...

The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance—the quality of public administration—to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? How solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest ...

This paper examines the functioning of India's institutions of governance, namely, the legislative and executive branches of government, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy. An economist's view of the role of government is adopted, i.e., as a provider of public goods and corrector of externalities. Governance is analyzed along three dimensions: (1) the degree of commitment or durability of laws ...

Addressing the increasingly globalised determinants of many important problems affecting human health is a complex task requiring collective action. We suggest that part of the solution to addressing intractable global health issues indeed lies with the role of new legal instruments in the form of globally binding treaties, as described in the recent article of Nikogosian and Kickbusch. However...

Schaller, Susanne: The Democratic Legitimacy of Private Governance. An Analysis of the Ethical Trading Initiative. Duisburg: Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg‐Essen (INEF Report, 91/2007). Private actors increasingly influence global governance and generate transnational rules and regulations. By creating soft law, they adopt governance tasks t...