Imposed Institutions and Preferences for Redistribution

Mark Gradstein and Alberto Chong

No 5922, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and arguing that the period under the communist rule can be viewed as an ?experiment? in institutional imposition. We find, consistent with some earlier related work, that citizens from ex-communist countries tend to be more supportive of state ownership than respondents from capitalist economies. However, they also favour increasing inequality and competition as the means to enhance incentives. Our conclusion is that, in some important relevant dimensions, institutional imposition (that lasted for about fifty years) had a limited effect on preferences.

Keywords: Institutions; Markets versus state; Redistributional preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D30 I31 P30 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5922 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Imposed institutions and preferences for redistribution § (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5922

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5922

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().