Search results for ""Author Paul Dragos Aligica""

Very few studies have ventured to explore the shift in economic ideas that were such a critical factor in shaping and understanding the East European transition process. Paul Dragos Aligica and Anthony J. Evans have seized upon the potential that this crucial case has to illuminate the larger phenomenon of diffusion and adoption of economic ideas. Two different but related research agendas are developed: the study of the spread of 'neoliberalism' as seen from the perspective of Eastern European post-communist evolutions and the study of Eastern European transition as seen from an ideas-centered perspective.Combining a distinctive synthesis of the existing data about the spread of neoliberal economic ideas in Central and Eastern Europe with an analysis of the processes at work, the authors challenge a series of misunderstandings and myths about the spread of neoliberal economic ideas. The disputed topics include: the myth of an Eastern European rush to embrace the theories and ideas that may be considered the mark of 'market fundamentalism'; the notion that a harsh 'neoliberal dogmatism' was somehow imposed on the region from outside; the idea that the standardization and regimentation of economic thinking was a result of the spread of the Western way of doing economics; and the belief that the Eastern Europeans passively embraced this uniformity and standardization due to pressure from the Westerners.This unusual synthesis will appeal to scholars in economics, political science, communist/post-communist studies and new institutionalism, as well as policymakers.

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Elinor (Lin) Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her pathbreaking research on "economic governance, especially the commons"; but she also made important contributions to several other fields of political economy and public policy. The range of topics she covered and the multiple methods she used might convey the mistaken impression that her body of work is disjointed and incoherent. This four-volume compendium of papers written by Lin, alone or with various coauthors (most notably including her husband and partner, Vincent), supplemented by others expanding on their work, brings together the common strands of research that serve to tie her impressive oeuvre together. That oeuvre, together with Vincent's own impressive body of work, has come to define a distinctive school of political-economic thought, the "Bloomington School." Each of the four volumes is organized around a central theme of Lin's work. Volume 1 explores the roles played by the concept polycentricity in the disciplines of public administration, political science, and other forms of political economy. Polycentricity denotes a complex system of governance in which public authorities, citizens, and private organizations work together to establish and enforce the rules that guide their behavior. It encapsulates an approach toward policy analysis that blurs standard disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences. Throughout their long and remarkably productive careers, Elinor and Vincent Ostrom never tired of reminding us of the capacity of ordinary humans to transcend their own limitations by engaging with others in the myriad forms of collective action required to build and sustain a self-governing society. Their careers stand as exemplars of the proper relationship between rigorous scholarship and responsible citizenship.

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Classical liberalism entails not only a theory about the scope of government and its relationship with the market but also a distinct view about how government should operate within its proper domain of public choices in non-market settings. Building on the political economy principles underpinning the works of diverse authors such as Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, this book challenges the technocratic-epistocratic perspective in which social goals are defined by an aggregated social function and experts simply provide the means to attain them. The authors argue that individualism, freedom of choice, and freedom of association have deep implications on how we design, manage and assess our public governance arrangements. The book examines the knowledge and incentive problems associated with bureaucratic public administration while contrasting it with democratic governance. Aligica, Boettke, and Tarko argue that the focus should be on the diversity of opinions in any society regarding "what should be done" and on the design of democratic and polycentric institutions capable of limiting social conflicts and satisfying the preferences of as many people as possible. They thus fill a large gap in the literature, the public discourse, and the ways decision makers understand the nature and administration of the public sector.

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The relationship between the Austrian tradition and Bloomington institutionalism has been part of a larger intellectual evolution of a family of schools of thought that coevolved in multiple streams over the last 100 years or so. The Bloomington scholars, once they delineated the broader parameters of their own research program, started to reconstruct, reinterpret, and in many cases simply rediscover and reinvent Austrian insights and themes. As such, they created the possibility of giving those insights and themes new interpretations and new applications, in novel circumstances with new research priorities, in particular, public administration, governance and collective action, and entrepreneurship in non-market settings. Was there a programmatic and explicit effort to recover and reinvent the Austrian tradition? The answer has to be an emphatic ‘no’. But that is precisely the reason why the Ostroms’ work should be interesting to scholars working in the Austrian tradition. The thematic convergence and the compatibility and complementarity between the Austrian and Bloomington schools is driven by their internal underlying theoretical logic and by the logic of problem solving. Upon closer inspection, the underlying familial and genealogical connections reveal themselves again and again. The convergence and interplay between these two intellectual traditions is rich and productive. On the one hand, it stands as a demonstration of the applied relevance of the set of approaches and issues that we traditionally associate with the Austrian tradition. On the other hand, it is a challenge to further explore and elaborate this area. This volume is an attempt to respond to that challenge.

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