The article offers an analysis of the processes of neoliberal transformation, or the transition from ‘real socialism’ to ‘real capitalism’, which took place roughly three decades ago in Central-Eastern Europe, with particular consideration given to Poland. The key to a sociological understanding of capitalist modernisation is the combination of two perspectives present in social sciences: analysis in terms of shock therapy and the prospect of debt. Referring to the concepts of the ‘rent theory of ownership’, the role of foreign debt, creditor–debtor relations and the resulting crisis are submitted to analysis as the key factors of modernisation. Finally, the social, political and cultural consequences of the neoliberal transformation are also considered. These are argued to be growing right-wing populist and authoritarian tendencies.

This paper examines whether changes in US presidential administration and central bank turnover during the period 1976–2016 caused regime shifts in Taylor rule deviations. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to construct the welfare-maximizing policy rule and deviations from the optimal rule, we find evidence that politics indeed play a key role in explaining these deviations. In addition to politics, unemployment rates and the interest rate spread significantly account for regime shifts in Taylor rule deviations.

Britain, like many other societies within the OECD, has been facing cumulative and interdependent social, political, and economic crises which came to a head shortly before COVID. The shock of COVID has accentuated these crises, creating a state of policy flux in which all long-established intellectual frameworks have proved inadequate: across the OECD, public policy has largely abandoned them. Fortunately, across the social sciences, history and philosophy there have been important new advances by major scholars which cohere and provide a more sophisticated account of society. While they will ultimately prove inadequate as new complexities emerge, for the present that offer the best guide available for policy. This essay provides an integrated review of this recent literature and relates it to some of the key policy problems.

For some 25 years in revolutionary Haiti, most of the productive land was nationalized and run as state property. This paper shows that this economic system can be accurately described as agrarian socialism. Its life and death are compared with the experiences of 20th-century socialist regimes and their transition to a market economy, paying special attention to the kindred case of São Tomé. Haitian socialism is interesting because it was the unintended, accidental product of an emergency situation: the killing or flight of all the French landlords, which made their land vacant property and drove the state to run it in the public interest to defend the revolution. Therefore, it can be read as a natural experiment in socialism in the absence of a socialist ideology and of a socialist party that could hold the system together, constrain its income distribution, and control its eventual privatization.

In all legal systems, possession and property are inextricably linked. Game theory captures this relationship in the Hawk–Dove game: players competing for an asset are better off when the possessor plays Hawk and the intruder plays Dove (the bourgeois strategy) so that property can emerge as a spontaneous convention. This theory has been supported by large experimental evidence with animals. This paper presents a lab experiment where possession is manipulated to study the emergence of the property convention with human subjects. We show that the highest coordination emerges when possession is achieved meritoriously and that possession induces only bourgeois coordination (never antibourgeois).

Having enterprises engaged in environmentally friendly behavior is an important part of reducing negative environmental impacts. This study makes a quantitative analysis against the backdrop of China's transitional economic system. The results show that politically-connected enterprises significantly reduce environmental expenditure, but this only holds for state-owned enterprises; private enterprises with political connections spend significantly more. Analysis of the efficiency of environmental expenditure indicates that, for private enterprises, environmental spending is used as a way to maintain political connections, with rent-seeking as the likely motivation. Politically-connected private enterprises have not reduced their emissions to the same extent as state-owned enterprises, despite increased expenditure. Given the scale of environmental degradation in China during a period of massive economic and social upheaval, the results of this analysis provide a quantitative case for policy change: governments should shift focus to the results that environmental spending produces.

The economic literature is clear that transparent and impartial rule of law is crucial for successful economic outcomes. However, how does one guarantee rule of law? This paper uses the idea of ‘self-reinforcing’ institutions to show how political institutions may derail rule of law if associated judicial institutions are not self-reinforcing. We illustrate this using the contrasting examples of Estonia and Poland to frame the importance of institutional context in determining both rule of law and the path of legal institutions. Although starting tabula rasa for a legal system is difficult, it worked well for rule of law in Estonia in the post-communist transition. Alternately, Poland pursued a much more gradualist strategy of reform of formal legal institutions; this approach meant that justice institutions, slow to shed their legacy and connection with the past, were relatively weak and susceptible to attack from more powerful (political) ones. We conclude that legal institutions can protect the rule of law but only if they are in line with political institutions, using their self-reinforcing nature as a shield from political whims of the day.

This study examines the relative importance of local institutions and external finance on small business investment. Utilising the institutional theory, we argue that local institutions and external finance have heterogeneous effects on firm investment. More importantly, they may interact and moderate each other. Analysing a set of 1.3 million observations of small businesses operating in Vietnam (2006–2016) obtained from the Annual Enterprise Survey data from the Vietnam Statistics Office, we find that local institutional settings and external finance are important determinants of firm investment. Moreover, local institutions are able to moderate the effects of external finance on firm investment. As such, this study asserts that conventional models cannot discern whether institutions or external finance are more important to firm investment. Rather, the relative importance of institutions and external finance should be investigated from the perspective of their interaction.