Comparative economic studies have been in vogue for almost 40 years now. The pioneering ones were undertaken at the Yale Economic Growth Center and at the Brookings Institution, beginning in the early 1960s. They spread very rapidly to other venues, such as Bela Balassa’s research at Johns Hopkins, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) projects on the economics of trade protection, among others. Generally these comparisons had a positive bent, with normative undertones being the welcome corollaries.
The book being reviewed pursues a different angle. Instead of considering how various economies perform, and then drawing conclusions about appropriate policies, it examines systems of economic policies in a comparative vein, and tries to discuss how helpful they were in achieving various indicators of economic progress.
The field in question, comparative economic systems, has been largely defused since the confrontation between command and market economies became obsolete. So why a...
