Question

compare and contrast the new and old field of comparative economics. Why does the field of comparative economics have shifted? 3-4 paragraph

Answer 1

ANSWER:

Comparative economic analysis refers to analysis of the economics’ subfield dealing with the comparative study of economic organization, such as socialism, capitalism, feudalism and the mixed economy. The old field of comparative economics focused on comparisons of socialism and capitalism, and it vanished due to the socialism collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a decade ago. The new comparative economics replaced old comparative economics that aims to focuses on varieties of capitalism and ascribes a proper described explanatory role to institutions.

The main benefit of the new comparative economics is in its single criterion choice on judging the economic system performance. Moreover the new comparative economics emphasis on politics and shares it with the field of public choice. The literature on older comparative economic systems tended to discard economic development due to the market-led consensus among economists at the time that rational public policy would lie among the extremes of socialism and capitalism.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the collapse of communism resulted to an intellectual stocktaking in the field of development economics and comparative political economy. The empirical estimates and older models seemed to have wildly missed the mark. The economists trained in the traditional approach in these fields noticed that a decline in the human capital investment in value more rapidly. During the perestroika days after an initial interest blip, there was a collapse of traditional field of comparative systems.