|
Initial World View | Discussion Threads -- Read and/or Post | News Items | |
| Membership | What Is A Moral Group? | Direct Economy Thread | Economy News |
Time is running out for thousands of the nation's richest people to decide whether to accept a hard-nosed settlement offer from the Internal Revenue Service.
The deadline is June 21 for those who participated in the so-called Son of BOSS tax shelter, which the IRS calls "abusive." It was used by many entrepreneurs and other people in the late 1990s and 2000 to avoid paying more than $6 billion in taxes, and was developed and marketed by law firms, accountants and investment banks. The IRS offer is drawing widespread interest because it represents an aggressive new front in the government's rapidly escalating war on tax shelters -- transactions with no real business purpose other than dodging taxes.
If Economists Are So Smart, Why Is Africa So Poor?
President Bush's new Africa initiative, and the recent events unfolding in Liberia, raise the question why, despite decades of aid, Africa remains impoverished. Over the years, the continent has been the site of large-scale experiments to reform its economies. But however ambitious, these projects have failed to generate sustained economic growth. Most African nations today are poorer than they were in 1980, sometimes by very wide margins. And of the continent's three-dozen countries, only two (Botswana and Uganda) have managed to grow at rates exceeding 3% per annum since 1980. More shocking, two-thirds of African countries have either stagnated or shrunk in real per capita terms since the onset of independence in the early 1960s.
A major reason for the failure of reform is that the market-based policies -- the so-called "Washington consensus" -- that underpinned the African experiments had a fatal flaw: they assumed that economic reforms can create efficient markets without simultaneous reform of the political institutions. Without a limit on government and a guarantee of property rights and individual liberty, "efficient markets" cannot exist. Economists have made an impressive start on the types of economic institutions needed to support efficient markets, but have not made equal strides in devising political institutions that will accomplish that objective. It took a Sekou Toure, or a Hastings Banda, five minutes of despotism to undo the finest economic theory.
| Home Page | Table Of Contents | Discussion Threads | Membership | Copyright Notice |