Rent-seeking Society Research Articles

The “Damaged” State vs. the “Willful” Nonpayer: Pay-to-Stay and the Social Construction of Damage, Harm, and Moral Responsibility in a Rent-Seeking Society

States increasingly look to incarcerated individuals as a source of revenue to alleviate the fiscal burden of incarceration, which results in suing prisoners for these costs. Through lawsuit complaints, states claim they have suffered damages and seek reimbursement from incarcerated individuals through pay-to-stay fees. Drawing from an original dataset consisting of 102 civil complaints from Illinois, we examine how the state constructs damage, harm, and willfulness through pay-to-stay lawsuits. We find that the state achieves this beneficial outcome by labeling incarcerated individuals as <i>willful nonpayers</i> and thereby morally responsible for what it terms damages suffered. Our empirical and theoretical contributions position civil lawsuits as part of imagining incarcerated individuals as fiscally responsible for their incarceration within a rent-seeking society, contextualizing the social linkages between willfulness, legal moralism, and perpetual indebtedness.

The Limits of Capitalism: the Rent-Seeking Society as a Global Alternative

The natural limits of capitalism are expressed not only in the global suspension of economic growth, which has been considered endless. It is also a crisis of its non-economic legitimization, of those political forms that have made possible smoothing of inequality generated by capitalism. The nation-state, the model of social state and representative democracy were the mechanisms of access for the most citizens to the fruits of the economic growth generated by capitalism. However, the growth limits of available public resources did not significantly change the strategies of political and economic elites. Attempts to redistribute the non-growing public pie were expressed in neoliberal rhetoric; devaluation of the political nation model as co-citizenship; reduction of forms of social policy; the crisis of democracy, expressed in a return to its narrow interpretation as Schumpeterian competition of the elites. The tendencies related to the fact that the elites would like to keep receiving an additional piece of the public pie at the expense of the majority, reinforce inequality and deprive capitalism of convincing value-institutional regulation that have earlier ensured its stable existence. There is a growing demand in society for return to a more egalitarian model of the distribution of public resources. Its options are less and less associated with capitalism as a society dominated by market metaphor that ideologically represents modernity, but for many reasons has ceased to provide acceptable prospects for the majority. It seems that rental society is becoming an alternative to capitalism without economic growth and with a shrinking labor market. In the rental society, the key mechanisms of stratification and access to resources are again moving from the market to the nation-state, non-market types of public exchanges are strengthening, and social policy is striving for a model of basic unconditional income. The room for social construction is reduced to local utopias and virtues of various minorities, while populism becomes the dominant form of political discourse, which instead of decaying economic classes turns to the majority and is compatible with both the right and the left political value systems.

Socio-Psychological Effects of Urban Green Areas: Case of Kirklareli City Center

Urban open green spaces have an important role in today's health problems and the necessity for urban health to create green areas that have high accessibility for all citizens. Acceleration of urbanization in recent decades decays balance of green areas and impervious surfaces in cities because of the rent-seeking society. The main problem associated with adequate provision of green area and fair access for residents. According to the “Spatial Planning Policy Framework”, Kirklareli doesn’t provide green space per capita. The aim of the study is to identify the socio-psychological effects of the green areas in the Kirklareli. Objectives of the study is to determine the correlation between socio-psychological criteria with green space accessibility, per capita and visiting time and to discuss the findings rationale. The following hypothesis was proposed “urban green areas on inhabitants have positive effects on human health, quality of life and stress”. In this context, a survey was conducted to analyze the socio-psychological effects of urban green spaces in Kirklareli. The expected outcome of the study is that green areas are associated with positive emotions, green space per capita and accessibility that can assist to decrease inequalities in health.

Problems of Modeling the Relationship of Family Related Groups and the State in Political Rent-Seeking Society

The search for political rent is an essential attribute of the coexistence of the interests of family-related groups and the state. A civilized solution to problems in this area has not been fully developed, even in the developed countries of the world. In the media, materials on clan approaches to the distribution of the country's resources are regularly thrown up, which increases tension in human society and uncertainties in future development. In order to take proactive measures, it is necessary to model the state and prospects of the relationship of family-related groups and the state. The paper discusses some approaches to modeling the relationship of family-related groups and the state in political rent-seeking societ. The research methodology uses data from a survey of student youth, which is divided into three groups: students' perceptions of the current political and economic atmosphere of society, assessment of opportunities for access to political rent through family-related ties, assessment of measures for state regulation of the process of obtaining political rent by representatives of family-related groups society. According to the author, in the political life of society, institutions should be created to regulate the behavior of family-related groups in the implementation of political rents.

Family and related link as a cradle of behavior of youth in political rent-seeking society

Among the pressing problems of any society, a special place is occupied by the desire of various categories of people to receive a political rent-seeking society. To start solving this sensitive problem, it is necessary to have baseline data, including on the views of young people on the possibility of obtaining political rent through the use of family-family ties in social development. This paper presents some of the research results on the basis of a survey of student youth. The results of the study are divided into three groups: students' perception of the modern political and economic atmosphere of society, assessment of opportunities for access to political rent through family and family ties, evaluation of measures for state regulation of the process of obtaining political rent by representatives of family and related groups of society. According to the author, it is necessary to consider in depth and wider regulations on the participation of family-related groups in the implementation of political rent.

베트남 자본주의 시장경제의 발전과 지대추구에 관한 연구

This article explains Vietnam’s economic growth and industrial development despite the strong rent-seeking features of its economy. At first, this article discusses the post-Doi Moi political economy in Vietnam. From the adoption of Doi Moi in 1986 by the CPV’s Sixth National Congress to present day, Vietnam’s economy has transformed from a centrally planned model to market oriented with four characterized sub-periods. I divide the subperiods based on the economy’s entrepreneurial perspectives, emerging cultural values, the building of market economy, and attitude toward global geopolitics and economics. Secondly, this article explains the development of Vietnamese capitalism focused on the features of rent-seeking societies. Three analytical rent-seeking models are employed to assess three different industries: textile-garment and telecommunications, both under a state capitalist system with varying degrees of state control, and the motorcycle industry developed in a crony capitalist manner. Our cross-industry analyses demonstrate how a developing country such as Vietnam overcomes pervasive rent seeking to achieve growth outcomes. Under conditions of controlled economic reform, the Vietnamese government managed rent seeking using various measures of state intervention coupled with gradual market openness in the industrial sectors.

Aspect and cause of generational conflicts, and a exploring for alternative dispute resolution Mainly on the rent-seeking society in Korea

Aspect and cause of generational conflicts, and a exploring for alternative dispute resolution Mainly on the rent-seeking society in Korea

Economic development in a rent-seeking society: socialism, state capitalism and crony capitalism in Vietnam

ABSTRACT This article explains Vietnam’s economic growth and industrial development despite the strong rent-seeking features of its economy. We employed three analytical rent-seeking models to assess three industries: textile-garment and telecommunications, both under a state capitalist system with varying degrees of state control, and the motorcycle industry developed in a crony capitalist manner. Our cross-industry analyses demonstrate how a developing country such as Vietnam overcomes pervasive rent seeking to achieve growth outcomes. Under conditions of controlled economic reform, the Vietnamese government managed rent seeking using various measures of state intervention coupled with gradual market openness in the industrial sectors.

Would you trust lobbies?

We consider the regulatory problem to approve or to ban a new product/technology in the context of scientific controversy about its detrimental environmental and/or health effects. We formalize the regulator’s decision-making process as a Tullock contest (Towards a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, Texas A&M University Press, Texas, 1980), the contestants being an industrial lobby, representing the economic agents who have developed the new product/technology, and an environmental lobby, representing the economic agents who will be harmed by the product or technology. Assuming that the industrial lobby has private information about the unfavorable environmental and/or health effects, but can be held liable for damage ex post, we derive the equilibrium properties of the contest. In particular, we derive conditions under which it is socially preferable for the regulator to decide according to the contest’s outcome, rather than according to an ex ante cost-benefit analysis, using his prior beliefs. We find that the contest outperforms the ex ante cost-benefit analysis only if the risk of judgment-proofness is not too high.

The allocation of entrepreneurial efforts in a rent-seeking society: Evidence from China

This paper considers four types of entrepreneurial efforts: productive activities, aggressive rent seeking, defense against rent extraction, and leisure. It examines how entrepreneurs allocate efforts when facing dual-dealing relationships with politicians in a rent-seeking society: entrepreneurs not only pursue additional benefits through rent seeking, but also try to avoid extortions by politicians. Using unique city-level and firm-level data across China, we demonstrate that Chinese entrepreneurs survive in a twisted world: ordinary entrepreneurs would desire better institutional environment, but if institutional improvement is not available, they would prefer political connections which are often preoccupied by special interest groups and/or large-sized firms.

Parties as efficiency-improving gatekeepers in rent-seeking societies

Anti-corruption laws forbid selling public job nominations. Even if bribing is ruled out, those interested in the nominations may invest in good relationships with the nominators. This provides a legal way to influence the decision. Such networking is costly, however. Thus, rent-seeking results in excessive networking. We present a simple model featuring such effects and show that efficiency may be improved if political parties interfere with the nominations. Political parties may reduce wasteful networking, thanks to exclusive membership contracts. Parties can require that politicians belonging to the party promote the nomination of other party members, thus, reducing incentives to cultivate inter-party connections.

Gordon Tullock: A Conspectus on His Life's Work

Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) was a thinker par excellence. As with most thinkers, the tale of his life is told mostly through his scholarship. Accordingly, this essay reviews Tullock’s scholarship in such fields as public choice, law and economics, rent seeking, bureaucracy, social conflict, and non-human societies. Tullock is often cast as exemplifying a reductionist style of homo economicus reasoning. This is a severe misreading of Tullock, a caricature of Tullock. To the contrary, Tullock was a social theorist who thought in terms of interaction among heterogeneous agents who in no way reduced those agents to some representative agent. Tullock’s primary orientation was to theorize from inside his phenomena, in contrast to most social theorists who seek to theorize from some position outside their phenomena. Tullock was also a warm and sensitive man who was filled with a zest for whimsy, which is a quality that often accompanies highly creative people, though he sometimes had trouble directing that whimsy as he might have hoped.

Is Greece a Rent Seeking Society? A Research on the Relationship Between Entrepreneurship, Trust and Institutions

The paper analyses the various interactions among the institutional and cultural environment and the quality of entrepreneurial activity in Greece. The institutional context and the way in which institutions perform in particular, shape the structure of entrepreneurial incentives. As explicitly demonstrated by Baumol (J Political Econ 98:893–921, 1990) institutions actually channel entrepreneurial talent toward different activities which may be productive, unproductive or destructive. At the same time, informal institutions, i.e. culture and values have proven to be of equal importance for entrepreneurship. Within this context, the paper builds a simple model of rewards’ satisfaction accounting for first, the existence of income externalities, in order to test the hypothesis that individuals care about their relative position, i.e. economic status, and second, for the institutional quality, trust and values pertaining in the society, in order to analyze the possible existence of an underlying ‘social consensus’ that is supportive of rent-seeking behavior in Greece.

Putting Politics Above Markets: Historical Background to the Greek Debt Crisis

Political clientelism and rent seeking have been the central organizing principles of Greek society since the foundation of the Greek state in the 19th century. The influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church on Greek nationalism and the legacy of the patrimonialist Ottoman empire produced a weak civil society. The result has been a disproportionately large Greek state and public bureaucracy since the 1800s that set the stage for rent-seeking struggles that have followed. Since the 1930s, political patronage has been disbursed through increases in public sector employment, regulations that limit competition, and the imposition of levies on transactions that benefit third parties. The resulting system has encouraged corruption, discouraged wealth creation and affected popular ideological narratives. The view that the state is good and that markets are bad is widespread, held across the political spectrum, and is understandable in a rent-seeking society where all activities, including market transactions, are seen as redistribution. But the realization of “putting people above markets” has deepened clientelism and produced the current national crisis.

State capitalism and the rent-seeking conjecture

The notion that state capitalism (an economic system “in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain”) is a new form of capitalism emerging in the global arena has been recently advanced by several authors. This paper explores the problem of the nature of this system in the light of these claims to novelty. What are its main features as described by these authors? Is state capitalism distinctive from other forms of capitalism or other types of economic systems? Are we really witnessing the emergence of a new type of economic system? To address such questions the paper starts by trying to place the model of state capitalism within the traditional comparative economic systems framework. The inconclusive result leads to a different approach in which the concept of rent-seeking society is used to underlie the structural similarities between mercantilism, real life socialism and state capitalism. The article argues that the conjecture that what has been labeled “state capitalism” is yet another form of rent-seeking system is both robust and worth further investigating.

Rent-Seeking, Hierarchy and Centralization: Why the Soviet Union Collapsed So Fast and What it Means for Market Economies

Opening of the archives confirmed that the Soviet Union was a hierarchical economy driven by planning, not a rent-seeking society. Rent-seeking could not govern the classical socialist society because lower-level officials could not trust their superiors to collaborate. Individual incentives would have favored widespread rent-seeking in the absence of punishment, therefore loosening of control during perestroika infused the system with rent-seeking and triggered the collapse of the planned economy. Rent-seeking drives decentralization of a hierarchical economy but centralization of a free economy, suggesting a tipping point between the two systems.

A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform Sustainability: The Case of India

This article hypothesizes that economic reforms become sustainable when the discursive conditions prevailing in society tip against the existing paradigm under exceptional circumstances. Thus, unless the pro-liberalization constituencies dominate the development discourse, economic reforms, initiated under the exigencies of crisis and conditionalities, or carried out by a convinced executive with or without the stimulus of a crisis, will be reversed. The discursive conditions are determined based on eight factors: the dominant view of international intellectuals, illustrative country cases, executive orientations, political will, the degree and the perceived causes of economic crisis, attitudes on the part of donor agencies, and the perceived outcomes of economic reforms. The paper seeks to prove this “discursive dominance” hypothesis for the Indian case through a cross-temporal, comparative review of the evolution of economic policy in India over six different phases.

RESOURCE CURSE, POLITICAL ENTRY, AND DEADWEIGHT COSTS

A simple model of political entry in a two‐sector economy is developed to analyze the effects of natural resource wealth on economic policy, political development, and civil insurrection. The model emphasizes the role of political entry and deadweight costs of taxation on the joint determination of these economic and political outcomes. Contrary to popular belief, my model shows that natural resource abundance is an economic blessing even in a rent‐seeking society, although resource dependence can be negatively associated with economic performance. In a contested political market, dictators care about popular support and hence resource wealth can help reduce the deadweight cost of taxation (and hence the cost of public good provision). On the other hand, natural resource wealth can be a political curse, because it encourages political entry and hence it induces incumbent dictators to run more repressive regimes. With constant returns counterinsurgent technology, however, the equilibrium number of insurgents is independent of the size of resource wealth. The onset of civil war, therefore, depends on the counterinsurgent technology and whether the costs of entry deterrence are affected by resource wealth. This helps clarify the two seemingly contradictory hypotheses that “resource wealth enhances regime durability” and “resource wealth fuels conflict.”

The Rise of India: Overcoming Caste Society and Permit-License-Quota Raj, Implementing Some Economic Freedom

Two or three centuries ago most of mankind was still very poor. When the West outgrew mass poverty, India was a British colony and suffered from stagnation. When East Asian economies exploited the advantages of backwardness and benefited from export-led growth, India remained inward-looking and poor. The ‘Hindu rate of growth’ preserved mass poverty. Since the reforms of the early 1990s India has exploited the advantages of backwardness and some global markets. In this article, the roots of India's failure to grow rapidly before the end of the twentieth century are analyzed. Stagnation is blamed on restrictions of economic freedom, whereas growth is explained by the expansion of economic freedom. Before the mid-twentieth century, the caste system and the legacy of sultanism curtailed economic freedom and contributed to economic stagnation. Thereafter, democratic socialism distorted incentives and generated ‘permit-license-quota raj’ or a rent-seeking society. When some obstacles to growth were dismantled, vigorous growth followed. Although expanding economic freedom remains limited. India's growth potential is not yet fully exploited. Indian infrastructure and human capital formation remain inadequate, regulations intrusive, and the budget in deficit. The rule of law looks better on paper than from the ground. Compared to China Indian public policy still has a lot of room for improvements. ‘Maoists’ or Naxalites threaten political stability and economic freedom. Geopolitics may explain India's late, slow and incomplete reforms. The rise of Asia, in particular of China and India, generates geopolitical challenges of its own. Conceivably, the global expansion of economic freedom permits not only the rise of Asia, but the peaceful management of the coming power transition between Asia and the West.

The economics of “Certaine Lewd and Ill-Disposed Persons”: Comment on Leeson

In The Invisible Hook, Peter T. Leeson explores “the hidden economics of pirates.” The implications of his work are many, and there are several clear ways in which scholars can build on his insights. First, exploring piracy helps us better understand the rent-seeking societies of mercantilist Europe. Second, public and private policy toward pirates helps us better understand the institutions and organizations that emerge in order to govern and manage common resources. Third, the nearly universal condemnation of pirates by religious authorities and political leaders as well as the association of pirates with the demonic and satanic suggests further directions for research into the interactions between ideology, politics, and economic institutions.