Industrial Organization and the Gains from Europe 1992

macroeconomics, 1992, industrial organization

Do Borders Matter? Soviet economic Reform after the Coup

macroeconomics, Soviet, borders, economic reform

Unintended, unanticipated or unexpected consequences of policy and surprises for government: understanding how bias and process shape causation – comparing British governments, 1959-74

The vulnerability of policymaking to unintended and unanticipated consequences has been documented since Thucydides. Yet we still lack integrated conceptual and explanatory accounts of their variety and aetiology. Adequate consideration of putatively unintended and unanticipated consequences requires evidence about policymakers’ prior intentions and anticipations, the factors affecting their cognition, and the forces bearing upon responses to attempted execution of policies. This study uses archival evidence about three post-war British governments to examine hypotheses derived from neo-Durkheimian institutional theory. It compares relationships between policymakers’ informal social organization and their biases in framing anticipations and intentions in three policy fields. It shows that, contrary to widely made claims about a ‘law’ of unintended consequences, neither unintended nor unexpected consequences are random, but reflect basic patterns in variation and aetiology which the neo-Durkheimian theory explains well.This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number F01374I

International Trade Issues of the Russian Federation

Trade and capital flows between Russia and the rest of the world are now significant for both partners. The economic reforms introduced in Russia since 1991 have converted an autarkic, highly regulated economy into a relatively open one. The dramatic change followed from the abolition of central planning and complex exchange rate controls as Yeltsin came to power in Russia and the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the years since 1991 are not simply a record of tearing down trade barriers. Instead Russia's role in the international economy appears to be erratic and inconsistent. Also the transformation of earlier inter-republic deliveries between former republics of the Soviet Union to trade between independent states implied the sometimes controversial establishment of new trade barriers. The country's struggle to develop a viable trade policy provides unique insights into the consequences of the conflicts of economic ideas: free trade versus protectionism; rewards for economic efficiency versus social equity; and macroeconomic stability versus maintaining employment. The clash among policy proposals has been reflected in political struggles, for the decisions on these matters have an impact on the lives of the 179 million Russians. The papers that make up this volume are from a conference held in May 1994 at IIASA, in Laxenburg, Austria. The conference was on Russia's international trade issues, aside from its ties to the republics of the former Soviet Union, a topic of another conference in 1993

'Excellence' and exclusion:the individual costs of institutional competitiveness

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality

Discussion

Antitrust policy, demand forecasting, corporate diversification,