Suchergebnisse

The commentaries in this Kitabkhana on Milan Vaishnav's When Crime Pays and Steven Pierce's Moral Economies of Corruption provide ample food for thought about the social-scientific study of crime and corruption. All agree on the importance of focusing on actual practice and not forcing non-Western societies into Eurocentric heuristics. They also pose urgent questions about what might constitute grounded theories of governance and productive avenues for pushing for reform and change.

AbstractIn many developing countries, economic statistics (such as the growth rate of GDP) are imprecise, making it difficult to evaluate economic reforms and learn "what works". Improving economic statistics has thus become a priority of international organizations. In this paper, we isolate an insidious mechanism—a type of observer effect—by which a push for better statistics can make matters worse. Precise statistics require the collection of data from a large number of firms. If firms suspect that detailed information, when spreading through the bureaucracy, is misused to collect bribes, they have weaker incentives to invest. As a result, the effects of reforms are muted, making it even harder to discover "what works". To suppress this mechanism, efforts to improve economic statistics should be comprehensive and also include institutional aspects.

Christianity as a consummate and the most individualized religion, allows one to best harmonize the relationships between an individual, society, and the state. Christianity roots in the fundamental sentiment of personal responsibility for own thoughts and deeds. That the Christian doctrine has an immense variety of tools to resolve the whole gamut of socio-political issues has been brilliantly evidenced in hosts of victories on a civilization scale. Being a pro-active religion, Christianity has been the driving force behind the groundbreaking, epoch-making processes both at political and scientific level. Christianity has brought about a new model of state economy basing on equity and liberalism. However, having swerved from good intentions, the modern Christian nations are caught in the economic crisis, facing the urgency to regain their economic strength lavished on the rest of civilizations. The only way to reach this is to reconsider Christian values.

The authors estimate total costs caused by pure existence of administrative barriers and those connected with them. The process of administrative barriers imposing is viewed through the prism of the institutional design approach. The authors suggest the model showing the benefits and costs for subjects of "barrier business", lobbing normative acts legislation aimed at imposing new administrative barriers. They propose to launch regular anticorrupt monitoring with the purpose of minimizing public costs caused by excess business regulation.

Does power corrupt or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are tyrants the products of bad systems or are they just bad people? And why do we give power to awful people?