Business and Finance Articles (Sorted by date)

Question: Dr. Vaknin – is it true that you are the father of the Law of Free Economic Zones? Answer: I participated in the dedicated and professional team, from many ministries and state organs, which prepared the law.

They are the object of thinly disguised envy. They are the raw materials of vulgar jokes and the targets of popular aggression. They are the Newly Rich.

Banks are institutions wherein miracles happen regularly. We rarely entrust our money to anyone but ourselves – and our banks. Despite a very chequered history of mismanagement, corruption, false promises and representations, delusions and...

It is when the going gets better, that the going gets tough. This enigmatic sentence bears explanation: when a firm is in dire straits, in the throes of a crisis, or is a loss maker – conflicts between the shareholders (partners) are rare.

In the previous article, we described the various methods developed in the West to cope with the ever-burgeoning public sector. Yet, economies in transition everywhere in the world have learned a lesson the hard way: not everything that is Western...

Lecture given at the Netherlands Economic Institute (NEI) on 18/4/2001Human vice is the most certain thing after death and taxes, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin.

Even the most devout proponents of free marketry and hidden hand theories acknowledge the existence of market failures, market imperfections and inefficiencies in the allocation of economic resources.

Roberto Calvo Macias, a young author and thinker from Spain, once wrote to me that it is impossible to design a coherent philosophy of Economy without accounting for the (sad?) fact that we are mortals. This insight is intriguing.

"(1) Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.

Economy is called the dismal science because it pretends to be one, disguising its uncertainties and shifting fashions with mathematical formulae. Economy describes the aggregate behaviour of humans and, in this restricted sense, it is a branch of...