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Market institutions precede market beliefs: a test with cross-country regressions
3-30Views:301The paper examines the literature on culture, economic growth and institutions to derive hypotheses about the relationships between market beliefs, institutions, and productivity. It then tests these hypotheses with cross-country regressions. First, it points out that each of the four cause-and-effect hypotheses of the possible relationships have an economic literature, in that market beliefs are seen as parts of culture. Second, the paper tests these hypotheses by making use of the fact that they consider different variables as exogenous ones. Measures of market beliefs are the coefficients of the country-dummies in the regressions run with individual data from the World Values Survey. The tests support the two hypotheses which hold that it is institutions, not market beliefs, that are exogenous.
Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes: L26, O43, P16
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The Relevance of the Washington Consensus for the Post-communist Countries
5-25Views:239The Washington Consensus (WC) is 20 years old now. With hindsight, its main significance is the unification of the normative economics. Prior to the WC, it was widely accepted that different policies should be pursued in the developed and in the underdeveloped economies. It was a sheer coincidence that the emergence of WC occurred a few months before the collapse of the communist systems of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Many scholars believe that the WC is responsible for the recurring economic crisis of the last two decades. I reject this view. A 200-year track record confirms that depressions and financial crisis have been always the intrinsic components of market economies – for the reasons identified by Marx and Schumpeter long time ago.
Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification: F02, F23, F41, P11, P36