Organizations and Markets

European Entrepreneurship

19 February 2007 at 1:06 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Europe’s economic problem, writes Nobel Laureate Ned Phelps in last week’s Wall Street Journal, is its lack of dynamism — “how fertile the country is in coming up with innovative ideas having prospects of profitability, how adept it is at identifying and nourishing the ideas with the best prospects, and how prepared it is in evaluating and trying out the new products and methods that are launched onto the market.”

Europe, Phelps argues, lacks the economic culture and economic institutions to encourage dynamism. Europe’s economic institutions “typically exhibit a Balkanized/segmented financial sector favoring insiders, myriad impediments and penalties placed before outsider entrepreneurs, a consumer sector not venturesome about new products or short of the needed education, union voting (not just advice) in management decisions, and state interventionism.”

Man, how simplistic and comical can you get?

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Classical Liberalism, Entrepreneurship, Institutions.