Chapter 1: Economic Growth and Institutions
• World Economic Growth—A Broad-Brush Overview 
• The Importance of Institutions
• Institutional Change: From Tribal to Global Society 
• The Emergence of the Institutions of Capitalism
• Institutions and Value Judgements
• Insert: Economic Growth: Is it Worth Having?

Chapter 2: The Economic Problem: Coordination, Knowledge and Motivation
• The Economic Problem: Scarcity 
• The Economy as an Evolving Complex System
• Ignorance, Discovery and Knowledge 
• Insert: On Subjectivism
• Three Kinds of Rationality
• What Motivates Us?
• Principal-Agent Problems
• Conclusions so Far
• Insert: The Knowledge Problem and Some
Commonsense Consequences

Chapter 3: Institutions and Order
• Order and the Knowledge Problem
• Institutions Defined
• Internal Institutions Evolve in the Community
• External Institutions Depend on Political Action 
• The Qualities of Effective Institutions
• The Benefits of Effective Institutions
• Shared Values Underpin the Ordering of Rules and Conduct 
• Some Consequences for Public Policy
• Creating Institutional (or Social) Capital  

Chapter 4: Private Property Rights
• On Private Property Rights 
• Ownership of Oneself 
• Free Goods, Club Goods, and Public Goods
• The Private Production of Public Domain Goods
• Divisibility and Tradability of Property Rights
• Secure Property and Economic Development
• Insert: Land Titles and Development

Chapter 5: Markets: The Right and the Responsibility to Compete
• The Market Process
• The Costs of Using Property
• The Spirit of Enterprise
• Tax and Compliance Costs
• Market Participants Compete by Incurring Transaction Costs
• Insert: How Producer Rivalry Drives the Innovation of
Products and Processes
• The Role of Middlemen
• How Knowledge is Signalled to Others
• The Responsibility to Compete
• Competition and Equity
• Competition is a Public Good

Chapter 6: The Limits of Public Choice
• The Shortcomings of Collective Choices
• The Functions of Government
• The Game of Rent Creation and Rent Seeking
• Insert: Industry Policy
—Can Government Know?
• The Failures of the Welfare State
• How to Control the Opportunism of Political Agents?

Chapter 7: Cultivating the Constitution of Capitalism
• Coming to Terms with Globalisation
• The New Constitutional Economics
• India's Institutions

Glossary
References
About Centre for Civil Society

ISBN : 81-87984-05-8    Rs.200

Overpopulation, colonial exploitation, pervasive corruption, chaotic democracy, high illiteracy, and antimaterialist and fatalist culture do not explain India's poverty. Lack of economic freedom does. Let the natural prosperity of the Indian to truck, barter, and exchange flourish within the spontaneous order of the market.   Parth J. Shah

Reviewed in Freedom Daily, April 2003

• It has become increasingly obvious that people in free, open societies generate relatively fast economic growth, whereas planned and controlled economic systems make for stagnation or decline. This essay addresses the factors and rules that expand productivity and incomes and those that retard economic progress or even lead to economic decline. Although India lagged behind East Asia, the easing of bureaucratic controls and central planning in recent years has allowed the spontaneous forces of growth to emerge in India too. Much remains to be done, including the tackling of discrimination on grounds of caste, religion and other such criteria within civil society, apart from reforming the State and its interventions and opening the economy so that Indians can freely compete in world markets.

• It is the purpose of this essay to explicate the connection between freedom and growth to an Indian audience, where remnants of an opposing philosophy—that growth can be generated by planning from the top down and by copious controls and regulations—still have lingered, despite much global and historical evidence to the contrary.

• We begin by asking about the causes of economic growth: Is it investment, learning, innovation, resource development, or something else? All these factors have played a role in economic progress throughout history and around the world. But focussing on these factors begs the question why people invest, learn, innovate in some and not in other societies! The reason for such differences in behaviour lies in different sets of rules of coordination, which we call ‘institutions’. The institutions have to evolve if economic and social development is not to stall in its tracks. What might have been good ‘traffic rules’ to coordinate a tribal society are not necessarly the institutions that help a nation’s prosperity in the era of globalisation. This essay therefore restates the fundamental insights of the new and rapidly spreading discipline of Institutional Economics. It explains in particular what has come to be known as the "constitution of capitalism," which has been widely recognised as essential for general material progress, as well as a free, peaceful and just society.

• A modern economy is a complex system that evolves in ways similar to a natural ecological system. Enterprising people search spontaneously for new wants and new resources, if they are able to rely on simple, stable and non-discriminatory ground rules. Discretionary market interventions by governments and powerful groups tend to have unforeseen and harmful side effects and, if allowed to cumulate, make the entire economic system dysfunctional. This applies a fortiori to developing countries. They are going through disorienting and confusing structural changes, so that past experience is frequently a poor guide in coordinating people. Economic development therefore depends on the cultivation of good, citizen-friendly institutions and habits that enhance economic freedom and an effective, honest and just division of labour.

• The most successful set of ground rules for coordinating economic activities is the system of protected private property rights, as well as private autonomy to compete under the rule of law. An important part of this is the protection of life and limb, a condition regrettably absent in many shantytowns and rural areas. Under well-run protective institutions, propertied and talented people have an incentive to compete. They incur the costs of searching for useful knowledge and test whether such knowledge is sufficiently valued by others (reflected in a profit). Genuine competition thus stimulates innovation and economic growth. It also induces people to abandon errors that are signalled by losses. In a competitive market economy, property owners who shirk the shouldering of the costs of knowledge exploration probably incur losses in the value of their assets.

• Governments must therefore not protect the existing socio-economic positions of the competition-shy. Yet, such favouritism and interventionism are frequent pursuits of corrupt politicians and officials.

• A genuine competitive system tends to go along with a high degree of equality of opportunity. Therefore, the control of competition- and growth-impeding collusion between corrupt officials and ‘crony capitalists’ must be made one of the fundamental tasks of economic development.

• Public policy and collective action normally do not coordinate human conduct as well as free markets. Many traditional collective pursuits—such as the provision of water or electricity—are nowadays satisfied more effectively by competing private providers. Nevertheless, public policy and the visible hand of government are sometimes needed to back up the institutions of civil society and to control concentrations of power. It must, however, be kept in mind that governments cannot protect the private property rights and other economic freedoms of all citizens, when they engage in the promotion of specific industries or intervene in trade. This always occurs at the expense of some property owners, typically the weaker and less keep ‘well’ organised members of society.

• The domain of collective action has been relentlessly expanded over the past 100 years by self-serving military men, elected parliamentarians, an activist judiciary and bureaucratic influence-seekers. Where the power of well-connected political and industry groups is unbridled, public policy has not served the ordinary people well; and where economic freedom and the ground rules are poorly protected (as in India), economic growth, which benefits all, remains an illusive goal. Political and economic power therefore have to be constrained by just rules if the challenges of economic development, the open economy and the communications revolution are not to inflict further pain and traumatic experiences on the majority of citizens.

Wolfgang Kasper is emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales in Australia and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney. While working with international agencies, he gained first-hand knowledge of virtually all East Asian economies and has visited India and Latin America repeatedly.

read reviews order now ! Rs.100

Download the entire book  pages 1-40,
pages 41-76

"This book is not just about Economics but also poerty and wisdom and whimsy - just what i would give a wayward son to turn him to Economics, Great style !" 
Ashok V. Desai, Consulting Editor, Business Standard

How is wealth created? If humans are the only species capable of creating wealth, how can population be a cause of poverty?
Is swedeshi better than free trade?

Is government the solution or the problem? What economic policies
should we vote for ? This little book will help you find answers to
these important questions. Written in a lucid, reader-friendly, jargon-free style,it makes political economy easily
understandable to the lay person.

Table of Contents

Chapt. 1 - Know Thyself
Chapt. 2 -Population Causes Prosperity
Chapt. 3 -Why Political Makers Don’t Work
Chapt. 4 -Public Goods and Market failure
Chapt. 5 -The Case for Free Trade
Chapt. 6 -Sound Money I: How humans, and not government,invented money
Chapt. 7-Sound Money II: Credit creation and the evil that is political banking
Chapt. 8-Employment
Chapt. 9-Poverty
Chapt. 10-Environment
Chapt. 11-Bureaucracy and the Future of Public Administration
Chapt. 12-Knowledge
Chapt. 13-Public Goods II: How to beat the trap and get them free
Chapt. 14-Morality and Secularism
Chapt. 15-Freedom and Equality: Freedom as the supreme political value
Chapt. 16-Politics

Introduction

Who is this book meant for?

This book is written for those who wish to be well-informed citizen of the world’s largest constitutional democracy.

The purpose of a constitution is to limit the powers of the government and make it functions as per set laws. The Indian constitution, however, gives unbridled powers to the government and does not even guarantee the property right of its citizens.

This book is written especially for young readers. Anyone around the age of 14 years can understand this book, perhaps with a little assistance. The purpose of aiming this book at the very young is to educate them prior to their getting the right to vote.

However, this book will be useful to all voters, the they dentists, architects or fashion designers: anyone who wishes to understand how the politico-economic system works will benefit from this book. It will be of great use to managers—who need to guide a firm’s interactions with the political world. And teachers, who need to be conversant with the essential errors of socialism.

Why do you REALLY need to read this book?

Government –approved textbooks teach you CIVICS and INDIAN ECONOMIC. These subjects, as they are taught, do no give you a critical understanding of contemporary reality. They teach you what the socialist state wants you to believe.

It would benefit you if you looked at things from a different perspective: that of the free market. This is the very opposite of state socialism. This school of thought has a very well developed critique of state socialism, which should be of interest to all citizens.

For, above all, education must be liberal. That is, educators must teach the value of freedom. Only when people learn why it is in their interest to be free will they value their value constitutional freedom and seek to protect them Freedom does not just refer to political freedom or self-rule. It also refers to ECONOMIC FREEDOM, or the freedom to earn your livelihood and keep what you earn. India is ranked 120 in the 1999 World Economic freedom Index: "mostly unfree" is the category in which we are placed bare notches above the ECONOMICALLY REPRESSED. This is the most important cause of mass poverty. This book will teach you why you should be economically free and how, thereby; you and the entire country will be prosperous.

Remember a free society rests on three pillars:

• The political freedom of DEMOCRACY.
• The economic freedom of the FREE MARKET.
• And LIBERAL EDUCATION, that which teach6+es the value of freedom.

We have, in India, just one of these pillars! This book is intended to strengthen the last two.

What is so important about the knowledge in this book?

Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to his son’s teacher thus:

Teach him to listen to all men
But teach him to filter all he hears
On a screen of truth,
And take only the good that comes through.

This book will help your mind obtain a ‘screen of truth’ with which to ‘filter’ all the information that is given to you—by the government. You will soon realize that much of what is taught to you as ‘knowledge’ is really nonsense.

Profiles in Courage: Dissent on Indian Socialism
edited by Parth J Shah

Reviews: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,17 June 2002 (German version & english translation) Business Standard 9 March 2002 order now!

ISBN : 81-87984-01-5,  Rs.350

Each of the seven chapters in the book narrate the fight of an individual against the socialist Indian state when it was unfashionable to do so.

Table of Contents

Introduction   Parth J Shah
Minoo Masani: The Making of a Liberal
    S V Raju
Rajaji: Man with a Mission
    G Narayanaswamy
N G Ranga: From Marxism to Liberalism
    Kilaru Purna Chandra Rao
B R Shenoy: The Lonely Search for Truth
    Mahesh P Bhatt
Piloo Mody: Democracy with Bread and Freedom    R K Amin
Khasa Subba Rau: Pen in Defence of Freedom
    P Vaman Rao
A D Shroff: The Liberal and the Man
    Minoo Shroff
About the Contributors

Download the BR Shenoy chapter
(PDF format - 35 KB)

Money, Market, Marketwallahs
Essays on Free Banking, Civil-Society Capitalism, FA Hayek, BR Shenoy by R K Amin

First chapter is available in PDF format Cover Page order now !

ISBN : 81-87984-02-3    Rs.125

Introduction

Money, Markets, Marketwallahs by R.K.Amin discussess capitalism, free banking, and the lives and contributions of B R Shenoy and F A Hayek.

Table of Contents
Money
1 Laissez-faire Money or free Banking
Market
2 Understanding capitalism in the Post- Communist World
Marketwallahs
3 Professor F A Hayek: A Life of Knowledge
4 Professor B R Shenoy: In a Hayekian Perspective

How Markets Work: Disequilibrium, Entrepreneurship, and Discovery
by Israel M. Kirzner

out of stock!

It elucidates views of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek of the market as a process, competition as a discovery procedure, and entrepreneurship as the engine of economic growth. By focussing on the fact that economic knowledge is dispersed and often inarticulate, it critiques the perfect competition model of neo-classical economics.

Rs.50

Table of Contents
Foreword by Professor Colin Robinson
The Author

I. Introduction

II. The Background In The History of Economic Ideas
The Emergence of Neo-classical Theory
Mengerian and Walrasian Traditions
The Role of Robbins
The Socialist Calculation Debate
Mises and Entrepreneurial Action
Hayek and the Market Process
Mises and Hayek: Differences and Similarities
The New Austrian Paradigm

III. Problems In the Standard Theory of Price
Textbook Competitive Price Theory
The Problem of the Assumed Solution
The Unrealism of Mainstream Theory
The Individual Decision in Mainstream Theory
Mainstream Market Theory
The Perfectly Competitive Model Critics of the Market Economy

IV. The Theory Of Entrepreneurial Discovery

Breaking out of the Neo classical Box: The Concept of Discovery Discovery and Entrepreneurship
Either Entrepreneurial or Equilibrium
The Driving forces of Entrepreneurial Alertness
System out of Chaos: The Paradox of Entrepreneurship
Jevons’s Law of Indifference Extended
Errors of Overpessimism and Errors of Overoptimism
Competition and Entrepreneurship
Mises, Hayek, and the Theory of Entrepreneurial Discovery
The Theory of Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Mainstram Neo-classical Paradigm

V. New Perspectives Provided By the Theory Of Entrepreneurial Discovery
The Economics of Advertising
The Economics of Anti-trust
The Economics of Welfare
The Economics of Socialism
Economics, Markets, and Justice

VI Conclusion
Further Reading
Summary

Rs.100

out of stock!

Introduction by Ashok V. Desai

The book explores voluntary alternatives to state regulation for assuring quality and safety of goods and services. The first chapter details scores of for-profit and not-for-profit organisations that provide private regulation in the United States. The second challenges the justifications for quality and safety restrictions, namely, externalities in knowledge, asymmetry of information between buyers and sellers, and paternalism. The third describes how the market creates institutions to expand and strengthen trust among buyers and sellers of goods and services. Dr. Desai's Introduction lists follies of state regulation in India and emphasises the need to promote self-regulation.

Table of Contents

Introduction   Ashok V. Desai
Chapt. 1 Private Regulation: A Real Alternative for Regulatory Reform  Yesim Yilmaz
Chapt. 2 Quality and Safety Restrictions: Knowledge-Externality and Paternalism   Daniel B. Klein
Chapt. 3 Trust For Hire: Voluntary Remedies For Quality and Safety  Daniel B. Klein

Bibliography

Contributors

Foreword by            Mrs. Sonia Gandhi Introduction by Bibek Debroy & Parth J Shah Published by Centre for Civil Society & Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Cntemporary Studies, 1998, Out of print

The Agenda for Change was published shortly after the Indian general elections in 1998. The second edition is due in November, a month after the unexpected mid-term elections of 1999.

The Agenda for Change aims to provide precise reforms for all departments / programs of the government and a brief rationale for those reforms. It is the place where any inquiring member of the parliament or the new government could learn about very specific proposals related to their particular area of interest. The Agenda for Change is precise and direct, yet comprehensive. One of the objectives of the Agenda is to work towards making feasible policies that may seem distant at the moment.

Review of Agenda for Change,Outlook, 1 June 1998; Business India, July 27 - August 9, 1998; and Seminar, September 1998.