1. Free-market institutions and income inequality : did the link persist around the world even in times of falling within-country inequality, 2000–2021?Tibor Rutar, 2025, original scientific article Abstract: High or rising economic inequality can exacerbate political inequalities and is plausibly linked with some social harms, such as health problems and declines in happiness and trust. Within-country income inequality increased sharply across most of the world since the 1980s. One prominent critical sociological account of this occurrence points toward institutions of free-market capitalism, or “neoliberalism,” as a key cause that unleashed inequality during the globalization age. This article empirically operationalizes free-market institutions with the use of Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom and examines the issue with fixed-effects regressions in a novel dataset of 130 countries between the years 2000 and 2021. It finds a substantial positive correlation between the two variables in the developing, though not the developed, world. This finding is robust to a variety of alternative specifications. Moreover, across specifications, modest size of government and freedom of international trade stand out as the two clear components of economic freedom driving the aggregate relationship. Finally, mediation analysis suggests there also exists an indirect ameliorative relationship between economic freedom and inequality through the conduit of economic development.
Keywords: economic freedom, free-market capitalism, income inequality, neoliberalism, capitalism
Published in DKUM: 08.10.2025; Views: 0; Downloads: 3
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2. ‘Free-market capitalism’ and democracy in the period of democratic recession : investigating the relationship in 141 countries, 2006–2017Tibor Rutar, 2023, original scientific article Abstract: Since the mid-2000s, democratization has slowed, stopped, and even reversed across the world. At the same time, societies have become more oriented toward free markets as measured by indexes of economic freedom. Relying on a panel sample of 141 developed and developing countries between 2006 and 2017, this paper is the first to investigate whether the two phenomena are related by employing economic freedom data. It finds that there is no net-negative relationship between aggregate economic freedom and democracy in this time-period. Instead, mixed findings of both an overall positive and overall neutral (but not negative) association are uncovered in between-country and within-country analyses, respectively. In between-country analyses, using the disaggregated index shows that the legal system/property rights component drives most of the positive relationship between aggregate economic freedom and democracy in the developed world. The same between-country analyses in the developing world show that freedom of international trade is positively associated with democracy, while modest regulation has a negative relationship. However, additionally controlling for omitted variable bias using country-fixed effects, the paper does not find evidence for either a positive or negative relationship between subsequent changes in levels of economic freedom and democracy.
Keywords: democratic recession, democracy, economic freedom, neoliberalism, free-market capitalism
Published in DKUM: 13.03.2024; Views: 332; Downloads: 44
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3. Knowledge capitalism : business, work, and learning in the new economyAlan Burton-Jones, 1999, manual Keywords: knowledge, management, capitalism, theory, support, empirical research, data, data sources, working organization, industrialization, human capital, intelligent systems, business, business operation of the enterprise, socio-economic development, contemporary society, work, learning, new economy, enterprise, property, control, restructuring, individualism, employment, supply, models, career success, career, entrepreneur, dependences, independence, business cooperation, networks, boundary, transition economics
Published in DKUM: 01.06.2012; Views: 2674; Downloads: 52
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4. The new financial capitalists : Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the creation of corporate valueGeorge Pierce Baker, George David Smith, 1999, professional work Keywords: financial capital, capitalism, capital company, institutionalization, maintenance, debts, USA, corporations, valuation, creativity, business finance, financial engineering, capital, restructuring, value added, management, creativity, risk
Published in DKUM: 01.06.2012; Views: 2634; Downloads: 122
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