A West Virginia University professor has just publishedMedia, Development, and Institutional Change,a book that investigates the medias critical role in institutional change and economic development.

While doing research on economic development and entrepreneurship in Romania after the fall of the Soviet puppet Nicolae Ceausescu, Dr. Christopher Coyne, assistant professor of economics at the College of Business and Economics , recognized the importance of media as a check on government.

Coyne says that the media serves as an important mechanism for change because of its ability to communicate to large groups of people.

Anytime you have widespread institutional change such as reform or a major political upheaval, there are collective action problems,said Coyne.The media serves as a device to overcome this problem by reaching the masses and coordinating actions to generate change.

A free media is especially important in poor, developing countries, whose political, social and economic institutions are often dysfunctional.

In the book, coauthored with Dr. Peter Leeson of George Mason University, Coyne argues for a media completely free of government interference in a competitive and diverse environment.

Taking an economists position, he says media should be open to both domestic and international investors to ensure a wide range of views and media outlets.

According to Coyne, only about a third of the world operates with a media free from government restrictions or influence. Coyne believes that the United Statescurrent debate over media bias, while important, is a secondary issue to ensuring the basic freedom of media in the rest of the world.

The book identifies both specific media-related policies conducive and harmful to the growth of underdeveloped countries.

The impact of media on the growth of a society is examined through the investigation of the transition from communism to capitalism in Poland and Russia. Coyne says that Poland, unlike Russia, has a free media today because of its free market approach to media privatization.

During the economic downturn of the early 1990s, Poland allowed many media outlets to either collapse or be financed by foreign investors,said Coyne.Russia, however, offered subsidies and tax breaks similar to what were seeing today in the United States, but used them to implicitly circumvent the medias freedom and achieve favorable reporting of the government.

The books free-market argument may not prevent corporate dominance or consolidation, but that system is preferable to government control.

A government dictating what the media can or cannot do allows the government to squash information threatening to those in power and opens doors to special interest group pressure,said Coyne.

Coyne is confident that recent developments in technology and fringe media outlets will continue to provide competition to these major media sources, building a positive economic media environment with diverse opinions and ideas.

Dr. Coyne publishedAfter War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracyin 2008.He is the North American editor forThe Review of Austrian Economics,a F.A. Hayek Fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science and associate editor ofThe Review of Austrian Economics.

Before coming to WVU , Coyne was assistant professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College. He earned a doctoral and masters degree from Economics, George Mason University and a bachelors degree from Manhattan College.

The book will be available at Amazon.com .