ABSTRACT

The concepts of rent and rent seeking were developed by Gordon Tullock and other economists associated with the Public Choice literature in order to understand the economic costs of government regulation and to argue that the costs of monopoly to the American economy were much higher than those calculated using earlier theoretical constructs.1 While most studies have concentrated on democratic societies, some theorists have argued that the socialist economies were essentially mercantilist, and that the allocation of and competition for rents were absolutely central to them.2