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Editorial

This article’s central subject is the importance of the intervention of the Church in social-economic issues. The author starts from two questions: the reason why the Social Doctrine of the Church was established only by the end of the XIX century and not before, and the reasons that led to the breakdown between the Social Doctrine of the Church and the prevailing economic theory. To give an answer to these points, Pasinetti dates back to the origin of Christianity, and makes a historical analysis of the development of economic theory until the proclamation of the Rerum Novarum encyclical in 1891. The author explains that this doctrinal corpus came up from three historical events: the Industrial Revolution, the impact of Karl Marx’s work, and the failure in formulating an economic theory able to solve the problems of a new world. The Social Doctrine of the Church, therefore, is meant to overcome these difficulties because it possesses the tools required to achieve this task.

In 1947 a group of American Catholic intellectuals gathered in Uruguay signed the Declaration of Montevideo. In it, the signatories pledged to influence on their countries politics on the basis of the Social Doctrine of the Church. In subsequent years, many of them held important government positions in both the Executive branch and in the Legislative branch. In the Argentine case, however, the matter was not easy. On the return of the delegates, it begana complex controversy around the present social economic principles in the Declaration, among them the problem of the meaning of the notion of social justice and its relation to the capitalist economy. This article seeks to examine the main positions that were generated in this debate, showing the efforts of each of these authors to specify the content of this idea and its relation to economic and social sciences. Particularly, the challenge they had to face was to address to what extent the Christian social thought was consistent with the capitalist economy that, after the Second World War, appeared as the only possible economic model against communism, or if it was necessary to think of a better alternative.

What is the fair price for social welfare? This paper shows that economic measurement performed in value-based markets may give an answer to this question. Economic measurement can do the same in very different fields of social work applying different methods, such as public bids or qualified bargaining. After giving a short theoretical overview, two German projects are presented and analyzed in detail. The paper presents how trading welfare expressed in terms of outcome may be established with positive effects for public finances as well as for the common good.

In this article the author compares market reforms effects carried out by the end of the last century in Argentina with the ones implemented in Mexico and Chile. In her view, in the Argentine case, market reforms were marked by serious difficulties because of the political-institutional context of the country, characterized by a lack of an export-oriented national strategy due to the State’s patrimonialist intervention by business and labor interests.

Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection Selected texts from the document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (2012)

The author considers in his article the Chapter VI of the papal document, entitled “The development of people and technology”. The article sees human development as a part of a transcendent call which must avoid the self-sufficiency that endangers the search for ultimate meanings. Caritas in veritate claims that efficiency and utility should not be the only judgement criterion and should be integrated into the framework of a tradition of wisdom open to the question for true purpose.

Editorial

Article presented in the symposium "Church and Economy in Dialogue", in 1985 in Rome