Economic Policy Formation and Decision-Making

The scope of the chapter is to understand the modulation of past growth and to evaluate the conditions that will shape the future, in terms of the relation of policy formation with social welfare and evolutionary perspectives. Policy-makers have to consider several fundamental issues presented in this chapter, which have always been at the heart of the social, political and, certainly, the economic sciences. These are the factors enabling human activity, the mutual interaction between theory and policy, the degree to which the course of economies and societies depends on randomness or historicism, the market mechanism versus the policy-making hierarchy and the level of intervention in economy. Also presented are the neoclassical concepts of economic policy-making along with a separate analysis of the importance of positive and normative public choice.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Economics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece Panagiotis E. Petrakis, Dionysis G. Valsamis & Kyriaki I. Kafka

1. Panagiotis E. Petrakis