For the first thirty years after the triumph of his revolution, Fidel Castro championed Cuba as a model socialist society. Gone were the casinos, the bootlegging Americans, the mafia, and the brothels they frequented. Socialist society, he claimed, is superior to capitalism. Girls do not have to sell themselves for money in Cuba’s new society. Women gain liberation through socialism. They have ...

Recent decades have been witnesses that developing world economies preceded global economic growth with all the consequences on healthcare systems of their countries. Complex and dynamic socioeconomic and technological evolution, primarily in free market of capitalist economies as well as in former socialist countries/economies with some postponement, provided significant advances and improveme...

Following initial enthusiasm in the post-war period, land reform fell out of favour with donors from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, sporadic efforts to redistribute land continued: Ethiopia in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and a renewed commitment to land reform in the Philippines in 1988. These reforms stemmed from shifts in the domestic balance of power between landowners and landless workers and pea...

Christian economists are often interested in statements made by theologians and church leaders on economic issues. While there critical of modern economics as a discipline. The purpose of this paper Theologians discussed include Catholics and Protestants. Several of the theologians examined are part of the Radical Orthodoxy group and almost M ost nations utilize markets to organize their econom...

This contribution to Science & Society's special issue on socialist economic organisation brings together the basic model proposed in Devine (1988) and subsequent work developing and elaborating that model (Adaman and Devine 1994, 1996, 1997, mimeo; Devine 1992, 1997, forthcoming). It is part of a project which is designed to assist in the revival of the movement for socialism by developing a w...

IN THIS ARTICLE I WILL DISCUSS MISES’ FAMOUS argument concerning economic calculation under socialism. I will point out that there are in fact two components of this argument. The first part deals with the fact that in capitalist economies, factors of production are allocated based on profit-andloss calculations in terms of (money) prices. Inasmuch as such calculations cannot be performed under...

Contacts and the way they are organized in different economic systems matter for the economy. In this paper we introduce the notion of Relational Capital to model contacts. Contacts are an input into sold output in our macro model based on matching theory (Pissarides, 1990). We argue that the destruction of some contacts in search for better ones is an integral part of technological advancement...

Transition on the Shop Floor – The Restructuring of a Weaving Mill, Hungary 1988-97 While a variety of studies analysed the benign effects of privatisation on firm performance under post-socialist transition using financial data very little is known about how the apparent productivity gains were achieved. This paper follows a weaving mill from 1998 to 1997 on its way of becoming a capitalist en...

Privatization and market liberalization are widely considered to be complementary reforms in transition economies. This article challenges this view and the closely related " big bang " approach: when pursued too vigorously, privatization may impede the transition process following liberalization. Our result is based on an explicit model of market learning. Compared to a mature market, a market...

This paper analyses the trends in within-country inequality during the postWorld War II period, with particular attention to the last 20 years, on the basis of a review of the relevant literature and of an econometric analysis of inequality trends in 73 countries accounting for 80 per cent of the world’s population and 91 per cent of world GDP-PPP. The paper suggests that the last two decades h...