New Issue of QJAE

24 February 2010 at 12:13 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

The new issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (volume 12, no. 3) has several papers of likely interest to O&Mers. For instance:

Jack High, “Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth: The Theory of Emergent Institutions”

This paper enlarges Menger’s theory of the origins of money by making explicit the role of entrepreneurship in the theory and by extending the theory to market institutions other than money. Drawing on the research of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, the paper considers the origins of three institutions that underlie economic growth — the division of labor, monetary accounting, and private property. Menger’s generalized theory of the origins of institutions is used to interpret each of these institutions.

Laurent A.H. Carnis, “The Economic Theory of Bureaucracy: Insights from the Niskanian Model and the Misesian Approach”

Governmental interventions in the economy take numerous forms, and they require the existence of a public authority, a bureaucracy, to implement them. This article proposes an analysis of the origins and the dynamics of bureaucracy, and discusses means of escaping bureaucracy’s disadvantages. I will proceed by means of a comparison between the theories of Niskanen and Mises, two impressive and very representative works from the Public Choice School and the Austrian School of economics. Although Mises and Niskanen share a common analysis of the defect of bureaucratic management, there are strong disagreements between the two authors about the reasons for the existence of bureaus and about their functioning and their deficiencies. Inevitably, the means proposed by Niskanen and Mises for escaping the disadvantages of bureaucracy are different and cannot be reconciled.

Check out the rest!