This paper explores the effects of general and agricultural trade openness on economic freedom and alongside with the quality of institutions, on income and poverty. Recent cross-country data for over 200 nations in global regions were used to estimate equations for income, poverty and economic freedom. Economic freedom appears to have positive impacts on income levels, which together with good...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...

In an era of global economic recession, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are experiencing severe pressure from budget reduction. As a result, they have been forced to develop more competitive ways in order to tap on resources and capabilities stemming from contemporary rapid technological and organisational changes. Thus, quality management issues have drawn the interest of academics and pr...

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de fa...

The Government of Poland (GoP) is currently engaged in reforming its higher educational institutional framework and sought World Bank assistance in assessing the quality of educational services at its higher education institutions (HEIs), specifically post-graduate courses and training. The World Bank prepared a study describing and comparing strategies followed by (largely) OECD countries in r...

Higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in OECD states over the past two decades. Some states have introduced tuition fees for the first time, others have massively increased public funding for higher education, and still others remain in stasis, retaining the elitist model with which they began the post-war era. This paper develops a formal model of the politics of high...