A comprehensive reevaluation of the nature of economic systems across the globe, A New View of Comparative Economic Systems is today's choice for today's world. This exciting text is not merely a re-treading of an obsolete Soviet-oriented text, but a fresh, new, and comprehensive reappraisal of the nature and study of economic systems. A New View of Comparative Economic Systems defines a new approach and will set the standard for years to come in Comparative Economic courses.
Comparative Economic Systems: Culture, Wealth and Power in the 21st Century explains how culture, in various guises, modifies the standard rules of economic engagement, creating systems that differ markedly from those predicted by the theory of general market competition. This analysis is grounded in established principles, but also assumes that individual utility seeking may be culturally determined, that political goals may take precedence over public well being, and that business misconduct may be socially detrimental.
3 edge, methods and theory. I turn now to some of my own reflections on this score. Some Reflections My first proposition is that if we are interested in analyzing the performance and dynamic properties of the world's economies, it is only at significant peril that comparative economists can overlook noneconomic or "political" factors. This is not to say that it is illegitimate to abstract from non-economic factors for particular purposes; rather, such abstraction should occur only with cogni zance of the influences being suppressed. I have argued elsewhere that the analytical compromise in suppressing noneconomic variables is greater for the study of planned than for market economies. [7] Borrowing from Polanyi [8], it is claimed that in market sys tems the economic sphere is disembedded from (separate and not subordinate to) the political, social and cultural spheres, while in planned systems the economic sphere is embedded in the noneconomic spheres. To be sure, market economies are strongly affected by political and cultural factors, but planned economies have and often exercise the potential to let political goals dominate in making production, allocational, or distributional choices. Indeed, it is difficult in practice to separate out what are political and what are economic decisions in planned systems.
Gregory and Stuart have revamped this definitive text to mirror major changes within the global economy of the 21st century. In addition to a new title, the book now features more emphasis on transition, the acceleration of globalization, present trading agreements, and recent exchange rate regimes. The authors have incorporated the latest ideas on privatization, the changing role of the state, and developments in corporate governance. The discussion of key regional clusters covers Asia, as well as Western and Eastern Europe—giving students a wide variety of case studies for comparison.
This work compares the economic systems of regions from free market to communism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the movement toward entrepreneurship in the remaining communist countries, this field of study has changed. This text concentrates on these movements and their implications.
Comparing Economic Systems: A Political-Economic Approach presents a political-economic approach to the analysis and comparison of different types of economic systems. Full, integrated political-economic case studies of several representative countries, including Japan, Sweden, and France, are given. This book consists of six parts and begins with an overview of some definitions of the main kinds of political and economic systems; theoretical arguments from various points of view about how political and economic systems relate to each other; and the criteria for evaluating different political-economic systems. The next section considers three essentially market capitalist systems: Japan, Sweden, and France. The Soviet Union, a centrally planned, allegedly socialist economy, is examined next. More specifically, Soviet development from 1917 to 1928 and from 1928 to the present is discussed. Central planning in developing countries such as China and Cuba is also explored. Finally, the theory of market socialism is analyzed, citing the cases of Hungary and Yugoslavia. This monograph will be of value to politicians, economists, and economic policymakers.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.
In the late 1980s, the field of comparative economics and NATO faced a similar problem: the threat of obsolescence. A predictable reaction of those who had made major investments in both comparative economics and NATO was to look for a new job. It was time to say: comparative economic systems are dead, long live comparative economic systems. The purpose of this book is to redirect study of what we called comparative economic systems toward analysis of the development of institutions and the effects of alternative institutional arrangements on economic performance. To that end, the book internalizes into a theoretical framework (1) the effects of alternative property rights on the costs of transactions and incentives structures, (2) the effects of the costs of transactions and incentives on economic behavior, and (3) the evidence for refutable implications of those effects. Analysis here focuses on the issues, propositions and conclusions that lend themselves to the only known scientific test: empirical verification. Thus, this book is not about what socialism or capitalism could have been, should have been, or should be. Nor is it an ode to capitalism. Its purpose is not to assert that capitalism is a better economic system than socialism. The history of this century and the market for institutions have done that. My purpose is to explain what is it that makes the institutions of capitalism better in terms of economic outcome than all other alternatives that have been tried since the beginning of recorded history.
Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.
