George C. Bitros

Values and institutions as determinants of entrepreneurship in ancient Athens

This paper shows that in classical Athens, values and institutions encouraged many types of entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurs received social and political distinctions, and some entrepreneurial slaves gained their freedom. However, to deter extreme individualism, success in business was judged by the means used to acquire wealth, rather than simply the amount of wealth acquired. The system encouraged those entrepreneurs who were esteemed socially, to work hard, use ethical means, not to consume their wealth conspicuously but to share it with the rest of the people by undertaking public expenditures, and to abide by the laws and ordinances of the city-state.

Creative crisis in democracy and economy

The Athenian Democray.- The Classical Democracy.- The Contemporary Democracy.- A Digression on Social Democracy.- The New Classical Democracy.- The Place of Democracy in the World and Globalization.- Democracy, Free Market Economy and European Unification.- Democracy in the Future and the New Welfare State.- The Case of Contemporary Greece.

Entrepreneurial morality: some indications from Greece

In countries with relatively small firms, entrepreneurial morality is determined by the influences that shape the values, the personality and the character of entrepreneurs as owners and managers of their enterprises. To shed some light on the processes involved we estimate an ordered probit model using data from 1643 enterprises, which were collected in Greece in the spring of 2006. We find that localized and generalized morality, the family and the educational environment, the level of education, the size of firms, and the moral factors that contribute to success in business, determine entrepreneurial morality in a statistically significant way. By contrast, even though we experimented with such other influences as the age of enterprises, the gender of entrepreneurs, the location of schools where they grew up, etc., none of them turned out to exert perceptible impacts.

Utilization and maintenance in a model with scrapping

We consider a productive asset, called equipment or capital good, and we examine the properties of, as well as the interactions between, the operating policies, which are determined by its optimal utilization and maintenance, and the capital policy of scrapping, which defines the optimal time when the productive asset is retired from its current use. Starting with an abstract model and using the approach of optimal control, initially we characterize the various types of equipment by assigning to them a single total profit index, which indicates how the above policies affect the flow of operating revenues plus capital gains or losses. This index is a function of market-determined prices. So using it we then investigate how the operating and capital policies are influenced by the rate of discount, the price of new equipment, and the rise or fall of the price of new equipment relative to the value of its output. Among other interesting results, we find that the effects of these prices on the nature and interactions of optimal policies depend crucially on whether the equipment is of the usual profit making type, where output is the main source of revenue, or of the antique type, where the main source of revenue is capital gains.

Structural Policies to Unwind the Greek Fiscal Tangle

For over a decade now, and particularly since 1980, the Greek economy has continued to defy the imperatives which derive from the Country’s choices in international, political and economic relations. More specifically, whereas, during the 1980s, developed nations in general, and those in the European Community (EC) in particular, tamed inflation, reduced or at least checked unemployment, balanced with relative success the accounts of their payments abroad, and achieved satisfactory rates of economic growth, Greece regressed in these most vital respects. Inflation in Greece, relative to inflation in these other countries, increased markedly, unemployment and the balance of payments worsened significantly, and the process of development came to a standstill. As a result, the gap in material welfare which separates Greece from the developed nations of the EC widened. In other words, the country lost ground at a time when the international economy flourished.

The Athenian Democracy

In the Athenian democracy, political parties had been outlawed. All powers were in the hands of citizens themselves. By selecting, appointing, monitoring and recalling the officials and civil servants, citizens managed to control effectively phenomena of extreme individualism. To their success contributed also the kind of education they received and the social pressure to behave in accord with the ethical norms that prevailed. Central were the objectives and the freedoms of citizens as individuals. This priority was dominant and was ensured through institutions that protected property rights, enforced private contracts and facilitated voluntary transactions and entrepreneurship. In this chapter, we explain how governance by the people in the context of a proto-capitalist economy enabled the city–state of Athens in classical times to attain an unprecedented measure of civilisation in the history of mankind.

Character, knowledge and skills in ancient Greek education: Lessons for today’s policy makers

The efforts to alleviate poverty by increasing social budgets have failed everywhere in the world and now the question is what else can be done to support those that are left behind. In this paper we search for illumination in the approaches to education that Athens and Sparta adopted in the peak of their power. Our findings indicate that both city-states confronted their challenges successfully because they managed to mold into the character of their citizens “ethos” compatible with the integrity of their institutions. On this ground, and given that “knowledge” and “skills” as engines of economic growth are in the interest of the individuals to accumulate, we conclude that an alternative policy to check the trend towards extreme individualism is to place priority on the character of citizens and pursue it through appropriate restructuring of educational curricula in the direction suggested by ancient Athens.

Entrepreneurship and market order: Some historical evidence

Our objective here is to establish the proposition that creative entrepreneurship gives rise to a market order which is optimally adjusted to facilitate the introduction and the diffusion of innovations, particularly those that take the form of new markets, new organizational schemes, new management devices and new methods and means of doing business. To substantiate this claim we extract from the existing historical literature and employ the ideal type entrepreneurial method of the Greek diaspora network. The interpretation we offer is that this method showed a high degree of operational flexibility and institutional adaptability and that it is these two proper-ties that explain its marked tenacity over time. The key ingredient for its success is traced to the self-regulatory robustness of the network, which was secured by the commitment of its partners to a moral order based on the triptych of ‘trust, reliability and reciprocity’ as well as to their ac-ceptance in advance of the sanctions in case of transgressions. Moreover, the embeddedness of the branches of the network in the Greek communities abroad, called Paroikies, where the Greek Orthodox Church provided moral leadership and maintained the community ties, reinforced the adherence of network partners to the rules of ethical business conduct. But in our view the domi-nant force in the design of the core mechanism that made the Greek diaspora network such a suc-cess was entrepreneurship.

The City-State of Ancient Athens as a Prototype for an Entrepreneurial and Managerial Society

In this paper we argue that a significant part of the wealth amassed by Athens in classical times emanated from the entrepreneurial incentives Athenians, rather consciously, instituted and applied in their city-state. To corroborate our view, we give a brief account of the political institutions and rules of governance of the city-state of Athens; we describe the economy within which entrepreneurs operated, and we explain the reasons why Athenians chose to establish an open society, based on international trade and incentives for almost everyone (including slaves) to pursue entrepreneurial activities. Lastly, we focus on a “protagonist of management science,” i.e. Xenophon, who developed explicitly the first principles and imperatives of managerial actions.

Two puzzles regarding the replacement ratio in the context of renewal theory

The models Feldstein and Rothschild, on the hand, and Jorgenson on the other adopted in 1974 to highlight the replacement ratio are identical. Yet, the authors reached opposite conclusions and the latters view prevailed, which is weaker in terms of theoretical and empirical foundations. This paper argues that both puzzles may be resolved by reference to the differences in the methodological preconceptions of the authors involved, the operational advantages of the theorem of proportionality, the accumulated data that facilitate research, the inertia of the status quo, the lack of a model leading to a more useful theorem, the lack of communication among economists and their aversion toward complex solutions and policy prescriptions. In this light it is concluded that the time has come for research efforts to be directed towards constructing and testing models in which the useful life of capital is determined endogenously in the presence of embodied technological change.