The moratorium on loan repayments during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Europe: a comparative analysis of loan moratoria in selected European countries

This paper examines the moratorium on loan repayments, which was intended to relieve debtors in a difficult situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, various aspects of such moratoria are critically discussed and compared from an international perspective. Some debtors were significantly hit hard by the pandemic, whereas others were no. But should the moratoria apply to all of them? The free-rider problem, or even harm to some clients, are among the unintended results of the moratorium. Moreover, the loan repayment moratorium has different effects on the traditional banking sector and on P2P lending platforms. Such differences were not discussed sufficiently before adopting the moratoria. The different effects might have a negative impact on some debtors, on some creditors, or on the market and society in general. Along with using some traditional legal research methods, this paper takes a comparative perspective on loan repayment moratoria in different EU countries among. The conclusions of the paper may help regulators and lawmakers prepare more balanced regulations of loan repayments in the next crisis. Future regulations should reflect the perspectives of both debtors and creditors.

An Analysis of Government Interventions in Addressing Market Failures Caused by Non-Excludable and Non-Rivalrous Public Goods Based on COVID-19 Vaccination Cases

The non-excludable and non-rivalrous characteristics of public goods distinguish them from private goods. The existence of these two characteristics leads to the “free rider problem” and the variation problem, making the market supply less than the actual demand, thus causing market failure. The government should therefore intervene against this impact. At the beginning of 2020, the global outbreak of the novel COVID-19 brought significant harm to various countries, races, and groups of people. In the second half of 2020, several companies developed vaccines, which are able to fundamentally block the transmission of the virus. However, as vaccines have been reducing the severity of the epidemic in certain regions, the situation somewhat reflects non-excludability and non-rivalry, in which before officially being listed in vaccination programs, the society may have the thought of “vaccination would reduce the risk of transmission; thus, I can enjoy the reduced risk of everyone being vaccinated without paying for it.” For this reason, most countries have been purchasing vaccines for the public through government appropriations to solve the free-rider problem. It can be said that in the face of market failure caused by public goods, the government should carry out timely intervention measures, including taxation and government appropriation, to avoid negative impacts from the characteristics of public goods.

The Battle over Patents

Do patents facilitate or frustrate innovation? Lawyers, economists, and politicians who have staked out strong positions in this debate often attempt to validate their claims by invoking the historical record—but they typically get the history wrong. The purpose of this book is to get the history right by showing that patent systems are the product of contending interests at different points in production chains battling over economic surplus. The larger the potential surplus, the more extreme are the efforts of contending parties, now and in the past, to search out, generate, and exploit any and all sources of friction. Patent systems, as human creations, are therefore necessarily ridden with imperfections; nirvana is not on the menu. The most interesting intellectual issue is not how patent systems are imperfect, but why historically US-style patent systems have come to dominate all other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The answer offered by the essays in this volume is that they create a temporary property right that can be traded in a market, thereby facilitating a productive division of labor and making it possible for firms to transfer technological knowledge to one another by overcoming the free-rider problem. Precisely because the value of a patent does not inhere in the award itself but rather in the market value of the resulting property right, patent systems foster a decentralized ecology of inventors and firms that ceaselessly extends the frontiers of what is economically possible.

The oil market will move towards balance in 2022

Significance The rebound in demand from the pandemic slump should keep the market in deficit, supporting current price levels. However, in 2022, demand growth is expected to slow, while supply from non-OPEC+ producers will accelerate. A potential return of Iranian oil exports and further pandemic reversals remain major downside risks. Impacts Forecasts suggest a return to normality in 2022, but discontinuities with the past remain powerful forces reshaping global energy markets. If pandemic concerns recede, energy transition impacts will move to the fore. Non-OPEC supply growth plus expectations of more muted demand increases mean OPEC will still have a 'free rider' problem to address. Oil services companies’ prospects should improve but margins will remain thin.

On The Poitical Economy of the April Uprising of 1876

Based on a politico-economic analysis, the paper provides answers to important questions about the April Uprising of 1876: why the Bulgarians revolted, why many Bulgarians did not revolt, and why the uprising was relatively short as a time-span. According to the available primary sources the Bulgarians who revolted in April 1876 revolted because they were relatively wealthy and as such they had something to lose. Revolutionary sentiments, however, did not prevail in their political views concerning the Bulgarian question. Here comes the role of the propaganda lie about the authority planned massacre of the Bulgarians. As a result, live and property of the future rebels, were considered as endangered. The response to the threat is a risky and desperate anti-state uprising. The organizers of the uprising did not overcome the free-rider problem. The population in the insurgent settlements was left to pay the price of putting the Bulgarian question before Europe. Additional difficulties in the implementation of a relatively mass riot pose the short deadlines for its preparation. They resulted in high prices of and do not allow the supply of larger quantities of weapons and gunpowder.

Evolution of prosocial punishment in unstructured and structured populations and in the presence of antisocial punishment

A large body of empirical evidence suggests that altruistic punishment abounds in human societies. Based on such evidence, it is suggested that punishment serves an important role in promoting cooperation in humans and possibly other species. However, as punishment is costly, its evolution is subject to the same problem that it tries to address. To suppress this so-called second-order free-rider problem, known theoretical models on the evolution of punishment resort to one of the few established mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation. This leaves the question of whether altruistic punishment can evolve and give rise to the evolution of cooperation in the absence of such auxiliary cooperation-favoring mechanisms unaddressed. Here, by considering a population of individuals who play a public goods game, followed by a public punishing game, introduced here, we show that altruistic punishment indeed evolves and promotes cooperation in the absence of a cooperation-favoring mechanism. In our model, the punishment pool is considered a public resource whose resources are used for punishment. We show that the evolution of a punishing institution is facilitated when resources in the punishment pool, instead of being wasted, are used to reward punishers when there is nobody to punish. Besides, we show that higher returns to the public resource or punishment pool facilitate the evolution of prosocial instead of antisocial punishment. We also show that an optimal cost of investment in the punishment pool facilitates the evolution of prosocial punishment. Finally, our analysis shows that being close to a physical phase transition facilitates the evolution of altruistic punishment.