Читать книгу Creating Risk Capital - Ian Whalley - Страница 27

Enterprises need a fertile soil for healthy growth, starting with a stable environment free from wars and civil strife. Thereafter, they need sound property rights and capital markets, and their handmaiden, the rule of law. These all developed in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and contributed greatly to the nation’s prosperity, in stark contrast to other nations like France and Russia, which had their own, bloodier, revolutions much later and fell behind as a consequence.

William Bernstein’s book, The Birth of Plenty, celebrates the recent wealth of the modern world “underpinned by the development of property rights, rule of law, capital market mechanisms, and scientific rationalism… The failure of the communist experiment and the current wealth and poverty of individual nations testify to the power of these critical institutions”. ^[16]

In Russia, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 demonstrated very clearly the close relationship between the rule of law, property rights and prosperity. This was an economic collapse as much as anything else, in a country where for generations property rights had remained undeveloped and weak, or indeed abolished altogether under communism, so that economic resources were concentrated in the hands of the state. “Thus, the most audacious attempt in human history to abolish private property… ended in disaster”. ^[17]