Journal of Economic Issues articles from December 1998

Journal of Economic Issues archives from December 1998

Men of steel meet the market: interpreting firm behavior in Russia's metallurgy industry.
December 1, 1998... The transformation of industrial enterprises from formerly state-owned entities, operating within a centrally managed economic system, to relatively autonomous, market-oriented firms, making independent production and investment decisions,...

Economics and institutions: the socioeconomic approach of K. William Kapp.
December 1, 1998... Most of the existing reviews of K. William Kapp's concept of social costs and his critique of economic theory originate in the seventies and eighties when Kapp was rediscovered as one of the founders of environmental policy. A review of his...

The second stage of bioethics and institutionalist economics.
December 1, 1998... Changes in financing practices, health care delivery methods, and medical technologies have led to a process of intense self-examination and fundamental reorientation in the health care system. Medical ethics is one component under examination....

Transaction costs and the historical evolution of the capitalist firm.
December 1, 1998... The aim of this paper is to critically assess the contribution of transaction costs economics (TCE) in explaining the nature of the firm. TCE suffers from conceptual problems and lacks a historical-evolutionary basis. The pursuit of a...

Commons and Keynes: their assault on laissez faire.(John R. Commons and John Maynard Keynes)
December 1, 1998... In his remarks upon receiving the Veblen-Commons Award from the Association for Evolutionary Economics, Wallace Peterson said that "Keynes and institutionalism are the two major intertwined threads in my work as an economist" [Peterson 1992,...

Economic theories about the benefits and costs of patents.
December 1, 1998... Since the early 1980s, patent policy in the United States has been strengthened, broadened, and extended to areas and actors where earlier patenting was relatively rare. The Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit, established in 1982 to deal...

A potential for understanding and the interference of power: discourse as an economic mechanism of coordination.
December 1, 1998... Mainstream economic theory usually neglects the fact that economic actors communicate with each other using ordinary language. At least the microeconomic textbook version of the rational utility maximizing man is basically a speechless person....

Poverty, single-parent households, and youth at-risk behavior: an empirical study.
December 1, 1998... This is a study of the relationship between supportive family attributes for an eighth grade cohort and their twelfth grade involvement in drug and/or alcohol use, and sexual activity, or, as it is called, "at-risk" behavior. The rise in the...

Deconstruction and reasonable value.(response to M. Covaleski, M. Dirsmith and S. Sajay, Journal of Economic Issues, vol 31, no. 1, p. 1, March 1997)
December 1, 1998... Is this unfair? Yes, No. But what about later? Here is a prediction and a hope: Without ever forgetting the journalist, people will learn to read "all" of the work . . . toward that which opens itself up there. - Derrida [1988b, 591]. ...

A note on deconstruction.
December 1, 1998... The controversy over the deconstruction of John R. Commons's regulatory discourse has two parts: the nature and role of deconstruction and its application to Commons. In this Note, I address both topics. Deconstruction Deconstruction...

Flying high on deconstruction and reasonable value.(response to J. Dennis Chasse, Journal of Economic Issues in this issue, p. 1107)
December 1, 1998... Chasse is a polemicist. His belligerence is both deadly and sneaky. After killing off two pilots on an imagined Air France Concorde, he condemns us and Derrida to collective suicide - all this buried in endnote seven! There are three ways of...

Institutionalist approaches to full-employment policies.
December 1, 1998... Wendell Gordon's recent [1997] note in this journal is a welcome commentary on institutionalist contributions to full employment policy. In particular, Gordon cites the support of institutionalists (including his own) for job assurance through...

The poor and transportation: a comment of Marlene Kim's 'The working poor: lousy jobs of lousy workers?'.
December 1, 1998... Marlene Kim's excellent article on the inability of most working poor to lift themselves out of poverty by working more hours was an informative and important contribution to our understanding of the difficulties and frustrations faced by a...

Non-redistributing prices and exclusion in the evolution of the Internet.
December 1, 1998... The Internet is evolving. Exponential growth in the number of new networks and users has been observed in recent years. This phenomenon is closely related to greater penetration of commercial relationships in the networks. While greater...

A note on economic growth in Eastern Europe.
December 1, 1998... The economic problems and relatively lower income per capita of Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe and the United States have frequently been blamed on the communist past of these countries [Pipes 1993]. For instance, even well-cited and...

Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment.(Review)
December 1, 1998... An extended review of edited by John Gowdy. Foreword by Richard Lee. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998. Pp. xxxi, 342. The Western view of hunters and gatherers has varied over the centuries most often in terms that suited the needs of...

LSE on Equality: A Centenary Anthology.(Review)
December 1, 1998... Edited by Meghnad Desai. New Brunswick, N.J. :Transaction Publishers, 1997. Pp. 308. $24.95 (paper). This anthology is for the centenary (1995) of the London School of Economics (LSE). The essays were written over several decades by authors...

Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions.(Review)
December 1, 1998... Edited by Thomas K. McCraw. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. 711, xii. The title conveys in precise and dramatic terms the aim of this book: to analyze the various forms of modern capitalism as they have evolved over...

Regionalization and Labour Market Interdependence in East and Southeast Asia.(Review)
December 1, 1998... Edited by Duncan Campbell, Aurelio Parisotto, Anil Verma, and Asma Lateef. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1997. Duncan Campbell, Aurelio Parisotto, Anil Verma, and Asma Lateef make an important contribution to our understanding of the...

Work and Pay in the United States and Japan.(Review)
December 1, 1998... By Clair Brown, Yoshifumi Nakata, Michael Reich, and Lloyd Ulman. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 234. $35.00 (cloth). The title of this book should really be reversed to read Work and Pay in Japan and the United...

Shopfloor Matters: Labor-Management Relations in Twentieth-Century American Manufacturing.(Review)
December 1, 1998... By David Fairris. London: Routledge Press, 1997. Pp. 234. Shopfloor Matters weaves together a historical narrative with case studies and empirical analysis to provide a scholarly study of shop floor conditions and governance in...

Does Financial Deregulation Work? A Critique of Free Market Approaches.(Review)
December 1, 1998... (New Directions in Modern Economics Series). By Bruce Coggins. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 1998. Pp. 240. $80.00. The current record profitability of banks appears to be correlated with a resurgence in the belief...

Improving the Global Economy: Keynesianism and the Growth in Output and Employment.(Review)
December 1, 1998... Edited by Paul Davidson and Jan Kregel. Cheltenham, U.K., and Lyme, N.H.: Edward Elgar, 1997. Pp. 351, xxiii. $100.00. As Henry Landreth and David Colander put it, "It's not easy being a heterodox economist. The profession does little to...

Economic Justice: The Market Socialist Vision.(Review)
December 1, 1998... By James A. Yunker. New York: Roman and Littlefield, 1997. Pp. xii, 392. This book is an argument for Yunker's particular model of market socialism, that it is a practicable alternative to today's corporate capitalism and that we should...

Households, Work, and Economic Change: A Comparative Institutional Perspective.(Review)
December 1, 1998... Edited by Jane Wheelock and Age Mariussen. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Pp. 229, index. Much of the new literature on globalization, restructuring, and gender has been focused on developing countries or former East bloc...

Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal.(Review)
December 1, 1998... By Sanford M. Jacoby. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. 332. In his recent book, Modern Manors, Sanford Jacoby traces the development of the nonunion model of industrial relations in the United States and argues that...

The Life and Times of Soviet Socialism.(Review)
December 1, 1998... By Alex F. Dowlah and John E. Elliott. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1997. Pp. 283, index. $65.00 (cloth). Alex Dowlah and John Elliott's The Life and Times of Soviet Socialism is a unique and useful book on the evolution of the...

Europe's Economic Dilemma.(Review)
December 1, 1998... By John Mills. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1998. Pp. 177. As 11 countries in the European Union (EU) go about setting up a common currency, the euro, there could hardly be a more timely book than John Mills's Europe's Economic...