Dambisa Moyo’s new book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, has received a great deal of attention in the last few months. Moyo’s book is a must-read for any person interested in the question of why some countries are rich while others remain stagnant or poor.

Under modern ideological conditions, a national emergency produces a virtual free-for-all of policies, programs, and plans that expand the government’s power. This expansion leaves the public with altered political and ideological sensibilities. Efforts to rein in the government’s crisis-driven overreaching must concentrate, first, on affecting the public’s thinking about how the government ought to act during an emergency and, second, on changing the machinery of government so that ill-considered or poorly justified measures cannot be adopted so easily.

When deviating from best responses, do people have a stronger propensity to increase or decrease other people’s payoffs? The authors find that negative intentions are more likely to induce payoff decreases than positive intentions are to induce payoff increases.

This paper investigates the evolving meaning of the term coordination as used by economists. The paper is based on systematic electronic searches (on “coord,” etc.) of major works and leading journals.

This paper identifies the four elements that compose the sociological tradition: social action, embeddedness, social problems, and social construction. The author argues that these elements are more pronounced in sociology than in any other academic discipline and hence contribute to the value-added character of sociology.

Inspired by Berger and Luckmann’s work The Social Construction of Reality, this paper describes the social construction of the market, specifically focusing on the Austrian understanding of the market as a product of human action, acknowledging that knowledge is socially distributed, and focusing on the subjectively held though socially mediated meanings that actors ascribe to market activity.

In the public sector, no tool adjusts spending to changing conditions. In the current recession, many states have decreased revenues, but little decreased spending has been seen. This pattern raises a difficult question: How do states correct for the inflexibility in spending cuts?

Why is it that some countries adopted growth enhancing institutions earlier than others during the early-modern period? We address this question through a comparative study of the evolution of French and Ottoman fiscal institutions.