What is Market Economy? [antikvár]

Throughout history, every society has faced the fundamental economic problem of deciding what to produce, and for whom, in a world of limited resources. In the 20th Century, two competing economic systems, broadly speaking, have provided very different answers: command economies directed by a centralized government, and market economies based on private enterprise. Today, in the last decade of the 20th Century, it is clear that, for people throughout the world, the central, command economy model has failed to sustain economic growth, to achieve a measure of prosperity, or even to provide economic security for its Citizens. Yet for many, the fundamental principies and mechanisms of the alternative, a market economy, remain unfamiliar or misunderstood — despite its demonstrable successes in diverse societies from Western Europe to North America and Asia. In part, this is because the market economy is not an ideology, but a set of time-tested practices and institutions about how individuals and societies can live and prosper economically. Market economies are, by their very nature,