Can Neoclassical Economics Underpin the Reform of Centrally Planned Economies?

Can Neoclassical Economics Underpin the Reform of Centrally Planned Economies?

here's a curious symmetry between the arguments propounded over the last century in advocacy of socialism and the present popular discussion of the reform of centrally planned economies. In those old discussions, the vision of socialism was utopian, which was contrasted with the Dickensian realities of capitalism. Now, the disasters of central planning are contrasted with the benefits flowing f...

Evolution in Economics and in the Economic Reform of the Centrally Planned Economies*

How Centrally Planned

The millions of deaths that occurred during China’s great famine of 1959-1961 represent one of the world’s greatest civil demographic disasters. Two primary hypotheses have been advanced to explain the famine. One is that China experienced three consecutive years of bad weather while the other is that national policies were wrong in that they reduced and misallocated agricultural production. Th...

Axiomatizations of neoclassical concepts for economies

We characterize the Pareto correspondence, the core and the Walras solution using the axioms of consistency, converse consistency and one-person rationality. Consistency and its converse are defined with respect to suitably constructed reduced economies for each case. Our results hold for the well-known class of coalitional production economies, which covers exchange economies as a particular c...

Austrian Economics , Neoclassical Economics , Marketing , and Finance

51 WALTER BLOCK is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chair in economics, WILLIAM BARNETT II is associate professor of economics, and STUART WOOD is associate professor of economics and finance at Loyola University, New Orleans. Block would like to thank David Kennedy, Tony Sullivan, and the Board of Directors of the Earhart Foundation for financial support used to write this paper. An...