Comparative Economics

 

 

JOHN MICHAEL MONTIAS

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

AVNER BEN-NER

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

EGON NEUBERGEN

State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, USA

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Approaches to the study of comparative economics

Until the last ten or fifteen years, two partly overlapping approaches dominated comparative economics: the ideological and the straight-forward-descriptive. Writers following the ideological (or ‘isms’) approach stressed the essential features of broad types of economies (‘capitalist,’ ‘socialist,’ ‘labor-managed’), which they regarded as a seamless web of interdependent institutions. The descriptive approach concentrated on the precise description of the ...