Coyne Wins Award

The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders is pleased to announce that it has awarded its twelfth $10,000 prize to Dr. Christopher J. Coyne, Assistant Professor of Economics at Hampden-Sydney College, for a series of related articles on the influence of institutional arrangements on entrepreneurship and international development; and on weak and failed states and the problem of nation building.  In these articles Coyne applies an Austrian economics perspective to argue that just as successful economies and polities can not be built from whole cloth according to rational constructivist principles, there are limits to what even well-intentioned governments can do to build free markets and free political orders elsewhere.  The legal institutions, the understanding of the rule of law, the definitions of property rights, upon which entrepreneurial activity depend do not transfer easily, if at all, from one nation to another.  Similarly, according to Coyne, we find that nation building has a chance for success only in areas that already have strong national institutions and histories that encourage and protect entrepreneurial activity for the nation builders to draw upon.

For Coyne, neither extensive programs of government-to-government foreign aid nor occupying armies from democratic nations will be able to develop directly such institutions in countries that lack them.  Efforts to do so may provoke negative unintended consequences and adverse affects on neighboring polities.  In contrast to such direct interventions, Coyne writes, “Instead of employing illiberal means to achieve liberal ends (occupation and coercion) the focus should shift to liberal means (non intervention and free trade) to achieve liberal ends. [Then the opportunity exists] to exchange cultural practices and ideas and the potential for enemies to be transformed into trading partners.”

Coyne received his doctorate in economics at George Mason University in 2005.  He is also the North American Editor of The Review of Austrian Economics and a Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center.

March 2007