http://hdl.handle.net/11089/26773 Annales. Etics in Economic Life, vol. 20 No.6 2026-04-07T15:19:14Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/26889 Development Economics and the issues of poverty and social inequalities Piasecki, Ryszard Development economics emerged as a separate discipline of economic science in the 1950s but it wasn’t until the 1960s and mid-1970s that it began to draw serious attention. Gradually, an extensive literature concerning economic development was built up. In the 1980s it turned out, however, that despite some successes, the economic growth in most of medium and less developed countries was not as high as expected. During the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Washington Consensus dominated the theory and practice of economic development. This notion covered the whole range of activities that were to lead the developing countries to improved welfare and prosperity. It included strict fiscal and monetary policies, deregulation, foreign trade and capital flow liberalisation, elimination of government subsidies, moderate taxation, liberalisation of interest rates, maintaining low inflation, etc. Based on the developmental experience of over past ten years, a new paradigm of development is emerging, the elements of which can be described as follows: (1) the basic economic environment should encourage the long-term investment in (2) the economy should have a high sensitivity to market stimuli (3) human capital must complement physical capital (4) due to the fast flow and absorption of information in the rapidly changing world, the key role is played by institutions and mechanisms that jointly respond to stimuli (5) wherever market failures occur, an intervention of the state should be market-friendly 6) social equality must be guaranteed if the economic development is to take place on a sustainable basis. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/26887 Exploitation in the face of justice Stoiński, Andrzej The paper refers to selected issues of exploitation in the face of justice. The analysis is based on the definitions of exploitation contained in the Polish Penal and Civil Codes. The main goal is the identification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the recognition of exploitation as being unjust. A supplementary question will refer to a specific type of justice which should be considered in this case. In this respect, we should consider retributive, distributive and social justice. Another important factor in this regard is the accepted theory of value. In the presented considerations, we will focus on the labour theory of value. The principal issue can be expressed by the questions whether exploitation is ipso facto unjust and how the phenomena of exploitation and justice are related to each other. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/26888 Values and economic development Banach, Wiesław The main aim of the paper is to show and examine how culture shapes human progress; in particular—how values determine economic development. The author describes culture as an axiological sphere including values, rules, customs, beliefs attitudes and worldviews that are prevalent in a given society. According to the humanistic perspective (called cultural turn), adequate values and other axiological determinants have a very positive impact on economic development of each society. The author analyses Mariano Grondona’s twenty cultural factors: religion, trust in the individual, the moral imperative, two concepts of wealth, different views of competition, two notions of Justice, the value of work, the role of Heresy, education, the importance of utility, the lesser virtues, time focus, rationality, authority, worldview, life view, salvation from or in the world, two Utopians, nature of optimism, two visions of democracy. The main thesis of the Grondona’s work is that economic development and well-being of civilization depends on choosing a progressive value system by a society. The author emphasizes that a further study must be conducted to understand and apply scientifically this model. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/26885 Economic process as institutionalization of values. Karl Polanyi’s institutional theory and its ethical consequences Kassner, Maciej This article is devoted to a critical reconstruction of Karl Polanyi’s institutional theory and its ethical consequences. Starting with the distinction between the formal (neoclassical) and the substantive (institutional) understanding of the economy, the article proceeds to discuss the main forms of institutional integration of economic life described by Polanyi: reciprocity (symmetry), redistribution (centricity), and exchange (market). In this context, the author examines the connection between the work of Karl Polanyi and the economic anthropology represented by the works of Richard Thurnwald and Bronisław Malinowski. The author argues that three main forms of institutional integration of economic life introduced by Karl Polanyi can be interpreted both as analytical tools to describe institutions and as a grand scheme for the classification of different economic systems. The next section of the article is devoted to a comparison between the institutional theories of Douglass North and Karl Polanyi. For North, the main explanatory category is the idea of transaction costs, whereas for Polanyi the key idea is that of the social embeddedness of the economy. When speaking about the social embeddedness of the economy, Polanyi draws our attention to the inseparable bonds which exist between economic institutions on the one hand, and culture, social structure and politics on the other. This theoretical difference between North and Polanyi, the author argues, has important ethical consequences. If Polanyi is right, then institutions are not only alternative solutions to a certain economic problem (i.e. the efficient allocation of resources, the reduction of transaction costs) but above all they are the embodiment of different conceptions of a good life. In conclusion, the author emphasizes the political dimension of Karl Polanyi’s institutional theory, along with its intriguing promise of liberating our social and political life from the economistic fallacy, that is, from the unfortunate tendency to think about society in market terms. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z