Series Title | CESifo DICE Report |
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Series Details | Vol.13, No.3, Autumn 2015 |
Publication Date | September 2015 |
ISSN | 1612-0663 |
Content Type | Journal | Series | Blog |
A series of article discussing the concept of 'rent-seeking'. Firms and industries across the world regularly engage with political and government players in order to obtain economic rents through a variety of elaborate strategic tools. Scholars in political economy and economics refer to this behavior as rent-seeking, while scholars in business and management often call it non-market strategy or corporate political strategy. The usual goal of these rent-seeking efforts is to secure benefits from the government that would ultimately allow the rent-seekers to improve or maintain their economic position. Examples are plentiful in a variety of institutional settings across the world and include classic cases (e.g., agricultural protection). As Mueller (2003) points out, rent-seeking usually imposes welfare losses on society, which can be substantial depending on the type of rent-seeking behavior that takes place, as well as the political system it occurs in. However, despite the prevalence of rent-seeking and the increasingly salient participation of firms in the political process, rent-seeking behavior and its costs to society often do not receive as much public scrutiny when new policies are developed as they should. This can be quite problematic for a country’s political process and economic development, particularly because rent-seeking by its very definition distorts the efficient Article include: |
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Source Link | Link to Main Source http://www.cesifo-group.de/ifoHome/publications/docbase/details.html?docId=19172595 |
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Countries / Regions | Europe |