DOCSLIB.ORG

Copyright and Public Good Economics: a Misunderstood Relation

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Copyright and Public Good Economics: a Misunderstood Relation Copyright and Public Good Economics: A Misunderstood Relation Christopher S. Yoo ABSTRACT The conventional approach to analyzing the economics of copyright is based on the premise that copyrightable works constitute pure public goods, which is generally modeled by assuming that such works are nonexcludable and that the marginal cost of making additional copies of them is essentially zero. These assumptions in turn imply that markets systematically produce too few copyrightable works and underutilize those that are produced. In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo argues that the conventional approach is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. A close examination of the foundational literature on public good economics reveals that the defining characteristic of public goods is the need to satisfy an optimality criterion known as the “Samuelson condition,” which suggests that the systematic bias toward underproduction is the result of the inability to induce consumers to reveal their preferences rather than nonexcludability and zero marginal cost. Reframing the analysis in terms of the Samuelson condition also expands the number of ways in which the assumptions underlying pure public goods can be relaxed. In so doing, it suggests that markets for copyrighted works are more properly analyzed as impure public goods. Unlike markets for pure public goods, markets for impure public goods exhibit no systematic bias toward underproduction and are not bounded away from providing efficient levels of utilization. The insights of impure public goods theory thus have broad implications for a wide range of copyright-related issues, including fair use, duration, compulsory licenses, database protection, digital rights management, and derivative works. Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 I. The Conventional Approach to Applying Public Good Economics to Copyright.....................9 A. Nonexcludability..................................................................................................................9 B. Nonrivalry as Zero Marginal Cost .....................................................................................11 C. Applications of the Conventional Approach to Specific Copyright Doctrines..................16 1. Fair Use........................................................................................................................17 2. Duration .......................................................................................................................19 3. Compulsory Licenses...................................................................................................19 4. Database Protection.....................................................................................................21 5. Digital Rights Management .........................................................................................22 6. Derivative Uses............................................................................................................23 D. The Analytical Shortcomings of the Conventional Approach...........................................27 II. The Samuelson Condition as the True Foundation of Public Good Economics.....................30 A. The Baseline Case of Private Goods..................................................................................30 B. Pure Public Goods..............................................................................................................34 C. Critique of the Conventional Approach.............................................................................41 i 1. A New Perspective on Nonexcludability.....................................................................41 2. A New Perspective on Nonrivalry as Zero Marginal Cost ..........................................42 3. The Proper Scope of Price Discrimination ..................................................................43 III. The Theory of Impure Public Goods .......................................................................................46 A. The Economics of Congestion...........................................................................................49 1. A Basic Description of the Economics of Congestion.................................................49 2. The Applicability to Copyright....................................................................................56 B. Spatial Competition...........................................................................................................60 1. A Basic Description of Spatial Competition................................................................62 2. The Policy Implications of Spatial Competition for Copyright...................................67 a. The Feasibility of Promoting Optimal Access.......................................................67 b. The Feasibility of Optimal Incentives....................................................................71 3. Potential Limitations to Spatial Competition...............................................................80 IV. The Policy Implications of Applying Impure Public Goods Theory to Copyright.................83 A. Fair Use..............................................................................................................................83 B. Duration .............................................................................................................................85 C. Compulsory Licenses.........................................................................................................87 D. Database Protection...........................................................................................................88 E. Digital Rights Management ...............................................................................................89 F. Derivative Uses..................................................................................................................90 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................93 ii Copyright and Public Good Economics: A Misunderstood Relation † Christopher S. Yoo INTRODUCTION Scholarship on the economics of copyright has been dominated by the assumption that copyrightable works are pure public goods.1 The most frequently cited definition of pure public goods focuses on two characteristics. First, pure public goods are nonexcludable, in that producers cannot provide their benefits to one consumer without simultaneously providing the benefits to other consumers. Second, pure public goods are nonrival, in that the consumption of † Professor of Law and Director of the Technology and Entertainment Law Program, Vanderbilt University Law School. I would like to thank participants at workshops conducted at the University of Michigan Law School and the Vanderbilt University Law School, as well as John Conley, Andy Daughety, Paul Edelman, Gerry Faulhaber, James Gibson, Paul Heald, Bob Inman, Mark Lemley, Glynn Lunney, Kristen Madison, Ted Parsons, Adam Pritchard, Bob Rasmussen, Jennifer Reinganum, Chris Sanchirico, Polk Wagner, and Joel Waldfogel, for comments on earlier drafts of this Article, and Catherine Sloan and Daniel Burks-Goodman for their research assistance. Financial support from the Vanderbilt Dean’s Fund is gratefully acknowledged. All errors are my responsibility. 1 See Ben Depoorter & Francesco Parisi, Fair Use and Copyright Protection: A Price Theory Explanation, 21 INT’L REV. L. & ECON. 453, 465 n.4 (2002) (calling the assumption that copyright is a pure public good “part of the collective wisdom of mainstream economic analysis”). For the seminal statement tying intellectual property to the theory of pure public goods, see Kenneth J. Arrow, Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention, in THE RATE AND DIRECTION OF INVENTIVE ACTIVITY: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FACTORS 609, 614-16 (Nat’l Bureau of Econ. Research ed., 1962). For leading examples within the copyright literature, see Stephen Breyer, The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs, 84 HARV. L. REV. 281, 281 (1970); William W. Fisher III, Reconstructing the Fair Use Doctrine, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1659, 1700-05 (1988); Wendy J. Gordon, Fair Use as Market Failure: A Structural and Economic Analysis of the Betamax Case and Its Predecessors, 82 COLUM. L. REV. 1600, 1610-11 (1982); William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, 18 J. LEGAL STUD. 325, 326 (1989); Mark A. Lemley, The Economics of Improvement in Intellectual Property Law, 75 TEX. L. REV. 989, 994-99 (1997). For overviews of the economics of pure public goods, see RICHARD CORNES & TODD SANDLER, THE THEORY OF EXTERNALITIES, PUBLIC GOODS, AND CLUB GOODS 143-239 (2d ed. 1996); William H. Oakland, Theory of Public Goods, in 2 HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS 485, 486-99, 502-22 (Alan J. Auerbach & Martin Feldstein eds., 1987). Of course, a wide range of noneconomic justifications for copyright also exist. See generally William Fisher, Theories of Intellectual Property, in NEW ESSAYS IN THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL THEORY OF PROPERTY 168, 170-73, 184-94 (Stephen R. Munzer ed., 2001). I leave extended discussion of copyright’s noneconomic aspects to other work. See Christopher S. Yoo, Copyright and Democracy: A Cautionary Note, 53 VAND. L. REV. 1933, 1953-63 (2000) (critiquing
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Kant and Lindahl
    KANT AND LINDAHL By John E. Roemer and Joaquim Silvestre February 2021 COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 2278 COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS YALE UNIVERSITY Box 208281 New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8281 http://cowles.yale.edu/ “Kant and Lindahl” by John E. Roemer, Yale University, and Joaquim Silvestre, University of California, Davis* February 2021 1. Introduction A good is public if its consumption is nonrival, and some public goods are nonexcludable. We consider three different ways by which the amounts of a public good and the distribution of its costs are determined: (i) The political system; (ii) Private supply by voluntary contributions; (iii) The supply of an excludable public good by private firms. 1.1. Public provision by the political system For many public goods, the decisions on their provision and financing are made by the public sector. These goods are quantitatively important, their supply requiring a substantial fraction of the budget at all levels of government. Knut Wicksell (1896) and Erik Lindahl (1919) analyzed the operation of a representative parliament.1 They envisaged a negotiation among the various parties in the parliament until all universally beneficial alternatives were exhausted. The resulting unanimous agreement yields (Pareto) efficiency. Section 2 below offers a precise model. 1.2. Private provision by voluntary contributions Some public goods are provided outside the public sector and outside the market by individual voluntary contributions: the textbook example is public radio. These tend to be quantitatively less important than the ones provided by the government. But information is a public good par excellence: thanks to the internet, much information is now provided on a voluntary contribution basis (Wikipedia, consumer ratings of products…).
    [Show full text]
  • Structural Reform and Economic Policy
    Structural Reform and Economic Policy Edited by Robert M. Solow Structural Reform and Economic Policy This is IEA conference volume no. 139 This page intentionally left blank Structural Reform and Economic Policy Edited by Robert M. Solow Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, USA in association with the INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION © International Economic Association 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3646–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
    [Show full text]
  • Tax Fairness and the Tax Mix David G. Duff Associate Professor Faculty
    Tax Fairness and the Tax Mix David G. Duff Associate Professor Faculty of Law University of Toronto Visiting Associate Professor Faculty of Law University of British Columbia November 2008 I. Introduction Justice, John Rawls famously wrote, is the first virtue of social institutions.1 Since a society’s tax system is one of its most basic and essential social institutions, the justice or fairness of this tax system is an important subject for social and political theory, as well as for practical politics. In order to assess the fairness of any particular tax or the tax system as a whole, however, it is essential to consider the purpose of the tax and the tax system in general. Although the most obvious purpose of most taxes is to raise revenue to finance public expenditures, this is not the only rationale for taxation which may also be employed to regulate social and economic behaviour and to shape the distribution of economic resources.2 For this reason, the concept of tax fairness is necessarily pluralistic, depending on the particular purpose for which the tax is imposed. Not surprisingly, therefore, modern welfare states typically levy a mix of taxes, including personal and corporate income taxes, broad-based consumption taxes, excise taxes on specific goods or services, payroll taxes, property or wealth taxes, wealth transfer taxes, as well as user fees and benefit taxes. Since the justification for any tax presumably depends on the legitimacy of the underlying purpose which it is designed to promote, the concept of fair taxation is necessarily secondary and derivative – depending on more fundamental principles concerning the fairness or justice of the public spending that taxes finance, the regulatory goals that they support, and the distribution of economic resources that they help to define.
    [Show full text]
  • Paul Samuelson and Global Public Goods
    Paul Samuelson and Global Public Goods William D. Nordhaus Yale University1 May 5, 2005 A commemorative essay for Paul Samuelson ________________________________________________________ It is both easy and hard to write an essay commemorating Paul Samuelson’s contributions to economics. Easy, because he has created so much of modern economics that you could write on virtually anything – stabilization policy, economic growth, international trade, welfare economics, or just about any topic that caught your fancy. Hard, because, like Buridan’s ass, you could easily procrastinate forever in deciding which of the many treasures of his ideas to draw from. In the end, I chose to draw from Paul’s writings on public goods. In two and one-half pages, he reshaped the way economists and political philosophers think about the distinction between private goods and public goods.2 Once those concepts are learned, we can never again forget why the allocational questions for bread are fundamentally different from those of lighthouses. I will focus on an important example of this topic, and one that poses particularly thorny practical 1 The author is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. 2 Paul Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 4, Nov. 1954, pp. 387-389. - 1 - issues, which is the case of global public goods. A brief intellectual history of the concepts is appended. What great blessings or scourges have befallen humanity? Consider issues as disparate as greenhouse warming and ozone depletion, the Internet and William Shakespeare, terrorism and money laundering, the discovery of antibiotics and nuclear proliferation.
    [Show full text]
  • The Scandinavian Contribution to National Accounting
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Aukrust, Odd Working Paper — Digitized Version The Scandinavian Contribution to National Accounting Discussion Papers, No. 73 Provided in Cooperation with: Research Department, Statistics Norway, Oslo Suggested Citation: Aukrust, Odd (1992) : The Scandinavian Contribution to National Accounting, Discussion Papers, No. 73, Statistics Norway, Research Department, Oslo This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/192057 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.
    [Show full text]
  • Traducciones Y Traslaciones En Economía
    TRADUCCIONES Y TRASLACIONES EN ECONOMÍA MANUEL MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ TRADUCCIONES Y TRASLACIONES EN ECONOMÍA TLEO GRANADA 2018 © MANUEL MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ © De la edición: EDITORIAL TLEO [email protected] Traducciones y traslaciones en economía ISBN: 978-84-15099-94-9 Depósito legal: GR.-1098/2018 Edita: Editorial Tleo. Granada. © Diseño, maquetación e impresión: TADIGRA. (Taller de Diseño Gráfi co y Publicaciones, S.L. Granada.) [email protected] Diseño de cubierta: José María Medina Alvea Printed in Spain Impreso en España “Cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública o transformación de esta obra sólo puede ser realizada con la autorización de sus titulares, salvo excepción prevista por la ley. Diríjase a CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográfi cos –www.cedro.org), si necesita fotocopiar o escanear algún fragmento de esta obra.” PRESENTACIÓN En este libro se reúnen cinco trabajos sobre historia del pensamiento económico en España: Traductores de libros de economía política al español (1776-1870), La economía de Manuel María Gutiérrez en sus artículos de prensa (1820-1848), La recepción de Wicksell en España (1920-1959), La Escuela de Friburgo y los economistas españoles (1939-1964) y Economía política en las bibliotecas privadas de cinco economistas españoles. Los cinco tratan de bibliografía económica, traductores y traducciones, y traslaciones de corrientes económicas europeas a España. Los dos primeros y el último son inéditos. Los de Wicksell y la Escuela de Friburgo aparecieron como documentos de trabajo en DT-AEHE-1419-2015 y DT-IUAES-02/2016, respecti- vamente, y ahora se publican revisados. Los historiadores españoles del pensamiento económico comenzaron a interesarse por las traducciones de libros de economía hace casi medio siglo, con los catálogos de Reeder (1973) y Cabrillo (1978).
    [Show full text]
  • Revisiting the Classical View of Benefit-Based Taxation
    NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES REVISITING THE CLASSICAL VIEW OF BENEFIT-BASED TAXATION Matthew Weinzierl Working Paper 20735 http://www.nber.org/papers/w20735 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 December 2014 Thanks to Alan Auerbach, Rafael Di Tella, Roger Gordon, Louis Kaplow, Wojciech Kopczuk, Ilyana Kuziemko, Benjamin B. Lockwood, Greg Mankiw, David Moss, Kristi Olson, Andreas Peichl, Florian Scheuer, Daniel Shaviro, Pierre Yared, Glen Weyl, and participants at the 2013 NTA conference, NYU Law School Tax Policy Colloquium, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Instituteís inaugural Normative Ethics and Welfare Economics conference. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2014 by Matthew Weinzierl. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Revisiting the Classical View of Benefit-Based Taxation Matthew Weinzierl NBER Working Paper No. 20735 December 2014, Revised March 2016 JEL No. D63,H21,H41 ABSTRACT This paper explores how the persistently popular "classical" logic of benefit-based taxation, in which an individual's benefit from public goods is tied to his or her income-earning ability, can be incorporated into modern optimal tax theory. If Lindahl's methods are applied to that view of benefits, first-best optimal policy can be characterized analytically as depending on a few potentially estimable statistics, in particular the coefficient of complementarity between public goods and innate talent.
    [Show full text]
  • Subject ECONOMICS
    ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Subject ECONOMICS Paper No and Title Paper No. 7: Theory of Public Finance Module No and Module No. 17: Voluntary Exchange Models Title Module Tag ECO_P7_M17 ECONOMICS Paper No. 7: Theory of Public Finance Module No. 17: Voluntary Exchange Models ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Learning Outcomes 2. Introduction 3. Benefit Theory / Voluntary Exchange Theory 3.1 Lindhal’s Model 3.1.1 Lindhal Equilibrium 3.1.2 Lindhal tax and Pareto optimality 3.1.3 Lindhal pricing 3.1.4 Mathematical representation 3.1.5 Limitations of Lindhal’s model 3.2 Bowen’s Model 3.2.1 Advantages and Limitations of Bowen’s model 3.3 Application of Benefit principle 4. Ability to Pay Approach 5. Summary ECONOMICS Paper No. 7: Theory of Public Finance Module No. 17: Voluntary Exchange Models ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Learning Outcomes After studying this module, you shall be able to Know about the Benefit theory / Voluntary exchange model. Learn the two approaches of Voluntary exchange model i.e. Lindhal and Bowen’s approach. Identify the advantages and limitations of these approaches. Analyse the feasibility of the two approaches. 2. Introduction Theory of Public goods provides a rationale for the allocation function of Public policy. Public goods exhibit the features of non-excludability and non-rivalry. In the provision of Public goods, private market fails to utilize resources efficiently. Public goods are also closely associated with the ‘free-rider’ problem, in which people do not pay for the good and may continue to access it which results in under-production, overconsumption and degraded goods and hence, government intervention is required.
    [Show full text]
  • PAUL A. SAMUELSON Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts Nobel Memorial Lecture, December 11, 1970
    MAXIMUM PRINCIPLES IN ANALYTICAL ECONOMICS PAUL A. SAMUELSON Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts Nobel Memorial Lecture, December 11, 1970 The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. Indeed, it is only in the last third of the century, within my own lifetime as a scholar, that economic theory has had many pretensions to being itself useful to the practical businessman or bureaucrat. I seem to recall that a great economist of the last generation, A. C. Pigou of Cambridge University, once asked the rhetorical question, “Who would ever think of employing an economist to run a brewery?” Well, today, under the guise of operational research and managerial economics, the fanciest of our economic tools are being utilized in enterprises both public and private. So at the very foundations of our subject maximization is involved. My old teacher, Joseph Schumpeter, went much farther. Instead of being content to say economics must borrow from logic and rational empirical enquiry, Schump- eter made the remarkable claim that man’s ability to operate as a logical animal capable of systematic empirical induction was itself the direct outcome of the Darwinian struggle for survival. Just as man’s thumb evolved in the struggle to make a living - to meet his economic problem - so did man’s brain evolve in response to the economic problem. Coming forty years before the latest findings in ethology by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, this is a rather remarkable insight. It would take me away from my present subject to more than mention the further view enunciated by Schumpeter [1] in launching the new subject of econometrics.
    [Show full text]
  • Quaderni Del Trentennale 1975-2005
    ISTITUTO ITALIANO PER GLI STUDI FILOSOFICI QUADERNI DEL TRENTENNALE 1975-2005 3 1 2 ISTITUTO ITALIANO PER GLI STUDI FILOSOFICI LEZIONI DI PREMI NOBEL Nella sede dell’Istituto Napoli 2005 3 A cura di Antonio Gargano, Segretario generale dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici @ Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici Palazzo Serra di Cassano Napoli, Via Monte di Dio 14 4 INDICE PREMESSA 7 EDUARDO CAIANIELLO, Napoli perla della scienza 23 AUGUSTO GRAZIANI, Introduction to the essays of Kenneth J. Arrow 29 KENNETH J. ARROW, The Economics of Information 35 KENNETH J. ARROW, General Equilibrium and Economic Growth 47 SHELDON L. GLASHOW, La sfida della fisica delle particelle elementari 55 FRANCESCO NICODEMI, Premessa al testo di David Gross 57 DAVID GROSS, Unified Theories of Everything 63 DAVID GROSS, Teorie unificate del tutto 83 MAX F. P ERUTZ, Emoglobina, una molecola vivente 101 ILYA PRIGOGINE, Vers un humanisme scientifique 105 RITA LEVI MONTALCINI, Un nuovo ordine internazionale per la sicurezza dell’umanità 119 AUGUSTO GRAZIANI, Premessa al testo di James Tobin 123 JAMES TOBIN, Price Flexibility and Full Employment. The Debate Then and Now 133 5 SEMINARI E GIORNATE DI STUDIO DI SCIENZE E STORIA DELLE SCIENZE 147 SEMINARI E GIORNATE DI STUDIO DI STORIA E TEORIA ECONOMICA 331 6 PREMESSA L’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici fin dalla sua fondazione ha costantemente affiancato alle attività di formazione e di ricerca in ambito filosofico e storico iniziative di ampio respiro nel campo delle scienze matematiche e naturali, persuaso della fondamentale unità della conoscenza nella ricerca della verità. Proprio al tema Unity and Internationalism of the Sciences and Humanities l’Istituto dedicò un convegno nella sede del CERN a Ginevra, alla presenza di Edoardo Amaldi.
    [Show full text]
  • The International Economic Association
    The International Economic Association A non-profit organization with purely scientific aims, the International Economic Association (IEA) was founded in 1950. It is a federation of some sixty national economic associations in all parts of the world. Its basic purpose is the development of economics as an intellectual discipline, recognizing a diversity of problems, systems and values in the world and taking note of methodological diversities. The IEA has, since its creation, sought to fulfil that purpose by pro- moting mutual understanding among economists through the organiza- tion of scientific meetings and common research programmes, and by means of publications on problems of fundamental as well as of cur- rent importance. Deriving from its long concern to assure professional contacts between East and West and North and South, the IEA pays special attention to issues of economics in systemic transition and in the course of development. During its more than forty years of exist- ence, it has organized some hundred round-table conferences for special- ists on topics ranging from fundamental theories to methods and tools of analysis and major problems of the present-day world. Participation in round tables is at the invitation of a specialist programme commit- tee, but eleven triennial World Congresses have regularly attracted the participation of individual economists from all over the world. The Association is governed by a Council, composed of representa- tives of all member associations, and by a fifteen-member Executive Committee which is elected by the Council. The Executive Committee (1995–98) at the time of the San José Conference was: President: Professor Jacques Dre`ze Vice-President: Professor Anne Krueger, USA Treasurer: Professor Erich Streissler, Austria Past President: Professor Michael Bruno, Israel Other Members: Professor Anthony B.
    [Show full text]
  • Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal on the Role of the Economist in Public Debate
    Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal on the Role of the Economist in Public Debate Carlson, Benny; Jonung, Lars Published in: Econ Journal Watch 2006 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Carlson, B., & Jonung, L. (2006). Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal on the Role of the Economist in Public Debate. Econ Journal Watch, 3, 511-U4. Total number of authors: 2 General rights Unless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply: Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Read more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Econ Journal Watch, Volume 3, Number 3, September 2006, pp 511-550. CHARACTER ISSUES Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal on the Role of the Economist in Public Debate BENNY CARLSON* AND LARS JONUNG** Abstract WHEN SWEDEN WAS HIT BY A DEEP ECONOMIC CRISIS IN THE fall of 1992 and was forced to abandon the pegged exchange rate, the government appointed a commission of primarily university economists under the chairmanship of Assar Lindbeck, the most well-known economist in the country at the time.
    [Show full text]