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The increased concerns about climate change have made renewable energy sources an important topic of research. Several scholars have applied different methodologies to examine the relationships between energy consumption and economic growth of individual and groups of countries and to analyze the environmental effects of energy policies. Previous studies have analyzed carbon emission savings, using renewable energy usage as an individual source or in combination with traditional sources of energy (e.g., hybrid plants) in connection with lifecycle analysis methods. It is shown that after a certain period, economic growth leads to the promotion of environmental quality. However, econometric modelling critiques have opposed the results of these studies. One reason is that the effectiveness of governance-related parameters has previously been neglected. In this research, we analyze the impact of renewable energy development on carbon emission reduction. We estimate a model to evaluate the effectiveness of renewable energy development, technological innovation, and market regulations in carbon emission reduction. The empirical results are based on a panel data estimation using the EU-15 countries data observed from 1995 to 2010. The elasticities of CO2 emissions are estimated, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of each parameter. The findings show that the effects of a negative climate change could be mitigated by governance-related parameters instead of economic development.

Romania’s international agrifood trade increased significantly during the last decade, and mostly after the EU accession. Since 1990, the Romanian agrifood trade balance showed an almost continuous increasing deficit trend until 2008. In four years only, the trend reversed and in 2013, for the first time in the last two and a half decades, the agrifood trade balance turned positive. The present paper is analyzing the evolution of the trade evolution and its structure, separating the agrifood products in three categories: agricultural commodities, primarily processed products and secondary processed products. A higher ratio of processed products in exports is indicating an increased competitiveness, resulting from higher unit values incorporating more added value, and showing, at the same time, a higher development degree of the country’s food industry. The results for total trade show that the processed products represented at most 46% of the Romanian exports, and at least 63% of imports, indicating a low-competitive structure of the agrifood trade. The analysis is detailed for intra and extra-EU trade and by main partners and groups of products.

The principal objective of the present study is to explain the changes in the direction of agri-food trade flows during the second half of the twentieth century. Since the end of the Second World War, trade has tended to be concentrated among developed countries, breaking the pattern of complementarity among industrialized countries and developing countries from the first wave of globalization. Elsewhere, agricultural exports from developing countries to countries of similar income have significantly increased since the 1990s. To compare and explain the evolution of different trade directions, the present article estimates the gravity equation for the bilateral volume of agri-food trade, analyzed separately in four categories of trade flows based on the development level of countries. Specifically, we have used the UN-COMTRADE database to construct a data panel for bilateral trade among 30 reporting countries and 39 partner countries with a significant presence in international markets for the period 1963 - 2000. The following conclusions can be extracted from the present study. Firstly, while other types of trade, such as manufactures, enjoyed greater multilateral liberalization of their markets, strong market intervention caused them to base their growth on the proliferation and success of regional trade agreements in the North. As a result, agri-food trade concentrated progressively on developed economies. Secondly, the latest liberalization of some preferential trade agreements gave rise to new increases in agricultural trade, this time in South-South flows. Finally, the negative sign of income demand elasticity for imports of agricultural products from Southern countries demonstrates that the latter behaved like inferior goods and also explains why the export growth of such countries suffered a brake on such expansion.

Fundamental research of the coffee economy have shown that regional class alliances were established imprecisely in the territories, usually in the central mountains of Colombia (although not exclusively or only way) and organized by the State being a necessary response to the inevitable need to defend certain values as embodied and structured regional coherence. Partnerships proposals actively promoted favorable conditions.

We investigate how the colonial strategy through the settlement decision affected French trade patterns. In this regard, we construct a new database relying on various primary historical sources containing information on the value of French sectoral trade between 1880 and 1913. Our results show that French colonies with more European settlements traded more with France, whereas the opposite is true for other colonies. We also investigate two channels through which European settlements might have affected the French trade pattern with colonies: institutions and networking. We find that better institutions brought by European settlements had a negative impact on trade with French colonies, while it promoted trade with British colonies. These results are consistent with the extractive nature of French trade relations with its colonies. As for networking, it increases overall French trade within French colonies but reduces it in other colonies.

This is Part 1 of a two-part paper which surveys the historical evidence on the role of institutions in economic growth. The paper provides a critical scrutiny of a number of stylized facts widely accepted in the growth literature. It shows that private-order institutions have not historically substituted for public-order ones in enabling markets to function; that parliaments representing wealth holders have not invariably been favourable for growth; and that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 did not mark the sudden emergence of either secure property rights or economic growth. Economic history has been used to support both the centrality and the irrelevance of secure property rights to growth, but the reason for this is conceptual vagueness. Secure property rights require much more careful analysis, distinguishing between rights of ownership, use and transfer, and between generalized and particularized variants. Similar careful analysis would, we argue, clarify the growth effects of other institutions, including contract-enforcement mechanisms, guilds, communities, serfdom, and the family. Greater precision concerning institutional effects on growth can be achieved by developing sharper criteria of application for conventional institutional labels, endowing institutions with a scale of intensity or degree, and recognizing that the effects of each institution depend on its relationship with other components of the wider institutional system. Part 1 of the paper discusses public-order institutions, parliaments, the distinction between generalized and particularized institutions, and property rights.

This paper sets out a simple spatial model of energy exploitation to ask how the location and productivity of energy resources may affect the distribution of economic activity around the globe. We combine elements from resource and energy economics into one framework linking the spatial productivity of energy resources (both renewable and non-renewable) to the incentives for economic activity to concentrate. Our theory provides a novel scaling law; a magnification effect; and reveals a complementarity between infrastructure investment and spatially productive energy resources. Our empirical work provides estimates of key magnitudes and reviews empirical work supporting our approach.

This paper examines the dynamic effects of demand and supply shocks on mineral commodity prices. It provides empirical insights by using annual data for the copper, lead, tin, and zinc markets from 1840 to 2010. I identify structural shocks by using long-run restrictions and compare these shocks to narrative historical evidence about the respective markets. Long-term price fluctuations are mainly driven by persistent demand shocks. Supply shocks exhibit some importance in the tin and copper markets due to oligopolistic market structures. World output- driven demand shocks have persistent, positive effects on mineral production. Long-term linear trends are statistically insignificant or significantly negative for the examined commodity prices. My results suggest that the current price boom is temporary but not permanent. Commodity exporting countries should prepare for a downswing of prices, while commodity importing countries should not fear for the security of supply of these widely used mineral commodities.

En este trabajo se realiza una síntesis de los fundamentos teóricos en los que se sustenta el discurso de la «soberanía alimentaria». A partir de una revisión de las publicaciones disponibles en las páginas web de las organizaciones afines al movimiento (Vía Campesina, GRAIN y Veterinarios Sin Fronteras) y de la consulta de otros materiales, se integran las principales propuestas de la soberanía alimentaria dentro de un contexto teórico amplio y se discute su coherencia conjunta. El análisis de discurso está centrado en los planteamientos económicos en relación al comercio internacional, la persistencia de crisis alimentarias y las posibles ventajas de un modelo de agricultura campesina. En el texto se argumenta que el paradigma de la soberanía alimentaria es un discurso construido por contraposición al discurso económico dominante. Sobre esa base, se identifican sus principales rasgos diferenciales y sus posibles incongruencias o ambigüedades. El análisis enlaza con algunos debates abiertos en la historiografía agraria reciente. This paper summarises the major issues that inform the discourse of «food sovereignty», based on a thorough review of the available literature on organizational websites related to the movement (Vía Campesina, GRAIN, and Veterinarians without Borders), various academic articles and official reports by international institutions. The main proposals of food sovereignty are integrated into a broad theoretical context and their overall consistency is discussed. Discourse analysis focuses on economic arguments relating to international trade, the persistence of food crises and the possible advantages of a model of peasant agriculture. We argue that the food sovereignty discourse «pa‐radigm» is constructed in opposition to the dominant economic discourse. Likewise, we identify the main differences between both discourses and the possible inconsistencies or ambiguities of the food sovereignty approach, linking it with several ongoing debates in agrarian history.

We investigate the costs of transportation regulation using the example of agricultural markets in the United States. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that the coefficient of variation (as a measure of market integration between states) falls for many commodities until the First World War. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transportation costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between the First and Second World Wars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920 Transportation Act. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (i.e. agricultural producers and final consumers).

This paper analyzes the response of international oil producers to demand-induced changes in the real price of oil during 1975–2011. The goal is to disentangle fluctuations in OPEC and non-OPEC production and to derive consistent estimates of the short-run price elasticity of crude oil supply at the country level. I find that oil producers hardly respond to demand shocks within the same month, and that the corresponding impact price elasticities of supply are not statistically different from zero. Although there is little evidence of a systematic response following a typical flow demand shock, the medium-run responses to a speculative demand shock differ between OPEC and non-OPEC producers, i.e., on average over the sample period, OPEC members seem to curtail production, whereas non-OPEC supply expands significantly. Flow and speculative demand shocks account for a non-negligible fraction of the total variability in country-level crude oil production.

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political-economy explanations that have been advanced. Based on a rich global data set covering a half-century of evidence on commodities, countries, and policy instruments, we identify hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible. X-PublishedAs-Type: article X-PublishedAs-Journal: Journal of Economic Literature X-PublishedAs-Year: 2013 X-PublishedAs-Volume: 51 X-PublishedAs-Pages: 423-477

This paper presents a survey of literature on the `resource curse', a puzzling empirical result that associates natural resource riches with lower economic growth. We show the main theories that attempt to explain the curse ? ranging from the structuralist theses of the 1950s to recent and more consensual institutional causes ?, and present a critical review of results in view of theory, estimation procedures and used resource proxies.

This research examines the climatic origins of the diffusion of Neolithic agriculture across countries and archaeological sites. The theory suggests that a foraging society's history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming. Specifically, as long as climatic disturbances did not lead to a collapse of the underlying resource base, the rate at which hunter-gatherers were climatically propelled to experiment with their habitats determined the accumulation of tacit knowledge complementary to farming. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, the empirical investigation demonstrates that, conditional on biogeographic endowments, climatic volatility has a hump-shaped effect on the timing of the adoption of agriculture.

Sustainable development requires that the per capita productive base or comprehensive wealth of an economy should, at least, not decline over the period of time. This study provides estimates of the growth rate of per capita comprehensive wealth for the Indian economy for the period 1991-2006. The growth rate of per capita comprehensive wealth is estimated to be 4.39 percent whereas the growth rate of per capita GDP is 4.42 percent. We find that though the growth rate of manufactured and human capital has been more than enough to offset the decline in natural assets, thereby leading to an improvement in the productive base of the economy, the growing resource and energy use intensity remains an issue of major concern.

The aim of this work is to analyze the evolution of agricultural production in Europe after World War Two. To study the evolution of production, we want to find the causes of its growth. We will start with the role played by the factors of production. We will also want to estimate the contribution to output growth from improvements in efficiency, for which we will calculate the total factor productivity growth. Preliminary results show three possible patterns to explain the evolution of agricultural production. The first one which included Western countries and Germany based their growth in the raised efficiency and a higher use of capital. The opposing model is that of the countries with centrally planned economies. In this group of countries the use of capital was crucial. The efficiency of the system improved, but by considerably less than in the rest of Europe. The intermediate situation is that of the lesser developed countries in the southern European periphery and the Nordic countries, but in distinction to those of the Soviet bloc, they tended to converge much earlier with the model of the Western countries.

High and volatile food prices pose a significant policy challenge around the world, and an understanding of the dynamics of food price inflation and volatility is essential in designing appropriate policy responses. Using the panel data for 72 countries from 2000 to 2011, the paper assesses the international transmission of food price inflation and volatilities as well as the effects of various internal and external factors on domestic food price inflation and volatility. The paper offers evidence in support of the international transmission of food price inflation and volatility. Specifically, the paper finds that the domestic food price inflation in Asia is strongly associated with the lagged value of global food price inflation (using the FAO food price index), while volatility spillovers from global to domestic food prices are rather contemporaneous. The paper also finds that both national food price inflation rates and volatilities are strongly associated with both intra- and extra- regional food price inflation rates and volatilities, respectively. The findings also suggest that higher economic growth rates, greater shares of food in merchandise imports, and smaller increases in the share of food in merchandise imports lead to lower domestic food price inflation. An appreciation of local currency, greater political stability, and higher income level are also found to lower domestic food price inflation. On the other hand, higher economic growth rates lead to lower volatilities of food prices.

The present research continues a European project on “sustainable exploitation of bioactive components from the Black Sea Area traditional foods”. Known as Base Food, it was a collaborative program, funded by European Union under the 7th Framework Programme, few years ago. The initial research brought together scientists from countries situated around the Black Sea together with consultants from Italy, United Kingdom, Greece, Portugal and Serbia. Farther the medical, nutritional and technological approaches (Campos S., Doxey J., & Hammond D., 2011, pp. 1496-1506) in the initial project, the Romanian team initiated a unique and outstanding valuable contribution and extended the local research towards socio-economic tracks. Thus, specific aspects were analysed and detailed within certain doctoral programmes. The present paper is emphasizing farther elements, remained collateral, when the main research was considered.

This paper offers a long-term analysis of agricultural labour productivity differences in Europe using econometric techniques. The results show the crucial importance of the land/labour ratio. The continuous exit of manpower from the sector, coupled with increased use of productive factors originating in other sectors of the economy, caused the efficiency of agricultural workers to rise. The different relative importance of these processes across countries largely explains why labour productivity did not converge. In turn, institutions have apparently conditioned differences in productivity, as a direct and inverse relation is detected between membership of the EU and the Communist block and the productivity of agricultural labour.

The volume contains the papers accepted and published in the proceedings of the 3rd International symposium entitled: ‘Agrarian Economy and Rural Development - realities and perspectives for Romania’, organized by the Institute of Research for Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Bucharest in cooperation with, Institute of Agricultural Economics, Belgrade – Serbia, Institute for Economy, Finance and Statistics, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, Academy of Economic Studies - The Faculty Of Agro-Food And Environment Economy, Bucharest, Romania, University of Agrarian Sciences and Veterinary Medicine – The Faculty Of Management, Economic Engineering in Agriculture and Rural Development, Bucharest, Romania, Petroleum and Gas University of Ploiesti - Faculty of Economic Sciences, Romania, University “Dunarea De Jos”- Faculty of Economy and Business Administration Galati, Romania, under the high scientific patronage of Academy of Agriculture and Forest Sciences "Gheorghe Ionescu Sisesti" and The Balkan Scientific Association of Agrarian Economists, held in Bucharest, Romania, October, 11- 13, 2012 The proceedings are structured in accordance with the sessions of the conference and it includes papers and relevant contributions on plenary speakers, Economy, management and agricultural marketing and Rural development and agricultural policies. Publishing this volume represents a term of the interest expressed by the highest academic and research groups in Romania and EU with interests in the agricultural sector. In the symposium proceedings are shared knowledge, experience and the newest results of your research in the agrarian economy and rural development domain related to the food quality and security, innovation and struggle against climate changes, biodiversity conservation, enhanced competitiveness and efficiency in agriculture and rural development, etc.

This paper addresses critically, from the standpoints of social history and sociology, dominant views on path dependence, institutions and property in the New Institutional Economics and Law and Economics literatures, which we find lacking in what concerns the analysis of concrete social relationships and processes. We argue for an approach to property rights, specifically in land, that goes beyond the perspective on property as an institution and builds on the analytical potential of the definition of property rights as social relations, as well as for the view of property as a bundle of rights and against the revival of the absolute concept of property under a juridical numerus clausus of property forms. We submit that it is at this more concrete level of social relations that we may detect the historical sequences of events and outcomes generating path dependence.

Business as usual will not be enough to tackle the critical issue of having sustainable increase in agricultural productivity and food security, which Pakistan is facing at the moment and in future it can become very alarming. Innovative approach is essential for food policy, for enhancing agriculture productivity on sustainable basis and ensuring food security. This paper figures out how sustainable increase in agriculture productivity and food security is linked with a comprehensive food policy. Agriculture productivity respond to the external environment more than tailor made targeted schemes for agriculture. New Growth Strategy GOP (May, 2011) includes all the basic ingredients, which are important for changing this external environment. These include growth of prosperous cities which derive demand for food upward and compel market activities sequentially create employment, connectivity which makes the flow of market information process efficient besides reducing the cost of transportation as well as reduce post harvest losses, entrepreneurship in agri-business leads to fair market competition and standardization and certification of products. These external aspects complement in enhancing productivity as well as solve the problem of food insecurity by augmenting the purchasing power of the masses. In addition there should be a National strategy in which federal and provincial governments should develop a strategy of bringing hunger to zero level in next 5 to 8 years.

The ramifications of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into economic, political, and cultural history. The LIA has spawned a series of resonant images that range from frost fairs to contracting glaciers, and from disappearing vineyards to disappearing Viking colonies. This paper takes issue with these images, and argues that the phenomena they describe can be explained without resort to climate change.

While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I re-examine the theories put forward by La Porta et al. (J Law Econ Org 15(1):222–279, 1999 and Acemoglu et al. (Am Econ Rev 91(5), 1369–1401, 2001. I find strong support for both theories, but also evidence that the authors’ estimates of the impact of colonization on institutions and growth are biased, since they confound the effect of the historical determinants of institutions with the direct impact of geographic endowments on development. In a baseline estimation, I find that the approach of Acemoglu et al. (2001) overestimates the importance of institutions for economic growth by 28 %, as a country’s natural disease environment affected settler mortality during colonization and also has a direct impact on prosperity. The approach of La Porta et al. (1999) underestimates the importance of colonization-imposed legal origin for institutional development by 63 %, as Britain tended to colonize countries that are remote from Europe and thus suffer from low access to international markets.

This chapter deals with the central question in the book: "Rural Economy and Society in Northwestern Europe, 500-2000. Volume: Making a living. Family, income and labour" What happened to family forms in the rural societies around the coasts of the North Sea in the last one and a half millennium? How did resources become available to the rural family and to its members, and what strategies were employed to generate these resources? The approach of this book is based on an analysis of long-term changes in household formation and in the economic behaviour of its members within a social and regional context.

Recent distressing trends in climate change, population explosion and deforestation inspired this paper, which completes existing literature by providing empirical justification to hypothetical initiatives on the impact of population growth on forest sustainability in Africa. Using three instruments of forest exploitation, the study shows how rural, agricultural and national population growths affect forest-area and agricultural-land. In this particular study the findings indicate that instruments of forest exploitation do not explain changes in forest-area and agricultural-land beyond population growth mechanisms. Hence, population growth channels are a driving force by which forest-area and agricultural-land are depleted and expanded respectively. As a policy implication in the process of deforestation, a balanced approach is needed to take account of the interests of both; a green economy promoting sustainable development and the growing population needs.

This paper examines the effects of deforestation on the welfare of rural communities in the Congo Basin. Using moment conditions of agricultural and forest exploitations, findings indicate deforestation significantly improves welfare both at overall-rural and agricultural household per capita income levels. As a policy implication, in the process of forest exploitation a balanced approach is needed to take account of the interests of both rural communities, timber companies and international forest-sustainability standards. This should require among other things, the development and implementation of sustainable forest management plans by timber companies, exclusion from harvesting species that are important to local communities, compensation of timber companies for compliance with management plans as well as involvement of rural communities in monitoring the activities of timber companies.

This paper examines the effects of deforestation on the welfare of rural communities in the Congo Basin. Using moment conditions of agricultural and forest exploitations, findings indicate deforestation significantly improves welfare both at overall-rural and agricultural household per capita income levels. As a policy implication, in the process of forest exploitation a balanced approach is needed to take account of the interests of both rural communities, timber companies and international forest-sustainability standards. This should require among other things, the development and implementation of sustainable forest management plans by timber companies, exclusion from harvesting species that are important to local communities, compensation of timber companies for compliance with management plans as well as involvement of rural communities in monitoring the activities of timber companies.

Its diverse agroecology has endowed Ethiopia with enormous honey production potential in Africa. Nevertheless, due to the undeveloped production system and poor market linkage with the global arena, the country could not fetch proportional benefits from this resource. To enhance better understanding on the problem and recommend appropriate improvement measures for the sector, prevailing opportunities and constraints were explored in relation to honey export to Denmark. Major honey stakeholders were contacted to assess the opportunities and constraints of Ethiopian honey export. Semi-structured interview, participatory appraisal technique and short questionnaire interview were adopted for data collection. The results show improving opportunities for exporting companies through creating conducive policy and support from the government of Ethiopia and NGOs. On the other hand, current supply of honey by producers in terms of quantity and quality are major constraints for the exporters. In relation to importer, there are growing demands for Ethiopian honey due to its organic source. Similarly, consumers. survey showed that the demand for organic honey has the highest priority in contrast to origin and price. However, most consumers lack information and have concern over Ethiopian honey; especially in terms of quality and characteristics. Development strategy that improves smallholder honey production capacity, better business communication with potential Danish honey importers and promotion of organic honey to consumers may make a significant contribution to enhance Ethiopian honey export to Denmark.

The volume contains the papers presented during the International conference entitled:’ Agro-food and rural economy competitiveness in terms of global crisis’, organized by the Faculty of Agro-Food and Environmental Economics from Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Institute Of Agricultural Economics, Belgrade – Serbia, Faculty Of Agriculture, Zemun – Serbia, Institute Of Agricultural Economics, Romanian Academy, Bucharest – Romania, Institute of Research for Agricultural Economics And Rural Development, Bucharest – Romania and The Balkan Scientific Association Of Agrarian Economists, held in Bucharest, Romania, September, 23- 24, 2011 Structured in accordance with the sessions of the conference, the volume includes papers and relevant contributions on plenary speakers, rural and agro-food economy, economy of knowledge transfer in agro-food sector and rural economy, rural development, agricultural systems, environmental protection, more generally, agricultural policy. Publishing this volume represents a term of the interest expressed by ythe highest academic and research groups in Europe with interests in the agricultural policy and systems, rural development, as well as states’ bodies that develop specific empirical studies or field studies.

This paper looks at the evolution of the world wine industry in the period 1961-2005. A particular stylized fact is the appearance of non-traditional producing and exporting countries of wine from the beginning of the nineties. We show that the success of these new producing and exporting countries can be explained by the importance of the demand from non-producing countries with little or no tradition of wine consumption, relative to the world demand. This stylized fact is consistent with a testable implication of the switching cost literature and to the best of our knowledge this is the first time that this implication is tested.

Recent research has examined the relationship between natural resources and economic growth. Considered vitally important, not only for humanity’s well-being but also for ecosystem integrity, the relationship between water use and economic growth has traditionally garnered little attention by analysts. This paper studies water use trends from 1900 to 2000 throughout the world, and their main determinants. To do this, we first analyse historical water use trajectories. Second, to proceed with the determinants of water use, we reformulate the IPAT equation (Ehrlich and Holdren, 1971; Commoner et al. 1971), decomposing water use trends into changes in economic demands and in water use intensity. Finally, a simple scenario analysis is conducted, to project future water use trends under different economic, demographic and technological assumptions. The empirical evidence shows that economic and population growth have been crucial for explaining the increase in water use over the past 100 years, with significant regional differences. Nevertheless, the decline in water use intensity has been responsible for a significant reduction in the growth of total water use.

Why was the Black Death followed by the decline of serfdom in Western Europe but its' intensification in Eastern Europe? What explains why involvement in Atlantic trade in the Early Modern period was positively correlated with economic growth in Britain but negatively correlated in Spain? Why did frontier expansion in the 19th Century Americas go along with economic growth in the United States and economic decline in Latin America? Why do natural resource booms seem to stimulate growth in some countries, but lead to a 'curse' in others, and why does foreign aid sometimes seem to encourage, other times impede economic growth? In this paper we argue that the response of economies to shocks or innovations in economic opportunities depends on the nature of institutions. When institutions are strong, new opportunities or windfalls can have positive effects. But when institutions are weak they can have negative effects. We present a simple model to illustrate how comparative statics are conditional on the nature of institutions and show how this perspective helps to unify a large number of historical episodes and empirical studies.

The main objective of this work is to analyze the measures implemented during the Franco dictatorship over the period 1939?1959 to revive the exports of cork products, which had fallen sharply since the beginning of the crisis of 1929. The first measure, implemented in 1939 and 1940, was granting tax reliefs to exporters of several cork products; its impact on commercial traffic of cork was very low. The second measure was the establishment, between 1946 and 1950, of a subsidies system for cork exports, which allowed the recovery of the Spanish cork exports. Yet, these were classified as dumping by the United States and created a trade conflict, which forced its repeal. Immediately after this repeal, cork products were incorporated into the multiple exchange rates mechanism in force in Spain since 1948, a system of hidden subsidies that allowed an improvement in cork exports during the 1950's. The work also examines whether the objective of protecting domestic industry, through the promotion of cork manufactures exports, was limited by the need of obtaining foreign exchange from exports. The incentives that the dictatorship applied for the export of raw cork that was in turn needed by the industry to work with, seems to point to such limit. (Main text in Spanish)

This study explores the determinants of ethnolinguistic diversity within as well as across countries shedding light on its geographic origins. The empirical analysis conducted across countries, virtual countries and pairs of contiguous regions establishes that geographic variability, captured by variation in regional land quality and elevation, is a fundamental determinant of contemporary linguistic diversity. The findings are consistent with the proposed hypothesis that differences in land endowments gave rise to location-specific human capital, leading to the formation of localized ethnicities.

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's 'grand escape' from hunger, and the peasantry and 'depeasantization' as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.

The unimpeded growth of greenhouse gas emissions is raising the earth’s temperature. The consequences include melting glaciers, more precipitation, more and more extreme weather events, and shifting seasons. The accelerating pace of climate change, combined with global population and income growth, threatens food security everywhere. Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures eventually reduce yields of desirable crops while encouraging weed and pest proliferation. Changes in precipitation patterns increase the likelihood of short-run crop failures and long-run production declines. Although there will be gains in some crops in some regions of the world, the overall impacts of climate change on agriculture are expected to be negative, threatening global food security. This paper provides an insight into the different climate change-related challenges that the agricultural sector will face and explores opportunities for emission reductions and adaptation. Agriculture has not figured very prominently in the climate discussion so far. This paper clearly indicates that the sector deserves more attention when it comes to both climate change threats and opportunities. Understanding interrelations and interactions in the agricultural sector and considering its implications for development cooperation is crucial for adequate development responses.

The paper analyses the decline and final close down of the European Antarctic whaling industry in the 1950s and -60s. This industry had been led by British and Norwegian companies, which were now challenged by Japan and Soviet Union that completely took over Antarctic whaling for the next decades. The decline most severely affected Norway where the whaling industry was relatively more important than in any other country. The decline was also disproportionally felt in Norway because the country provided crew and equipment to many foreign whaling companies. The paper will therefore have a special focus on the Norwegian industry and how the challenges were faced there. The analysis reveals that the decline did not develop into a crisis for the companies involved or in the wider economy. One main explanation was that business cycles in shipping and in the general economy were very favourable during the years when the whaling industry was wound up.

In the natural-resource literature, conventional wisdom holds that weak property rights will cause a resource to be over-exploited. This is because weak property rights are typically perceived as a problem of input exclusion – or theft of un-extracted resources. We present evidence to the effect that weak property rights often take the form of contestable outputs – or output theft – and that this has an impact on resource use. We propose a model of resource use under generally weak property rights – or weak state presence – when resource users face the dual problem of input exclusion and output appropriation. We show that introducing the possibility that outputs be contested acts as an output tax, with the added twist that resource users effectively determine the tax level. This tax has a depressive effect on input use. Whether the resource is under- or over-exploited depends on the relative severity of output appropriation and input exclusion problems. Increasing enforcement measures against theft may lead to severe resource overuse. Efficiency considerations require to account not only for direct resource input use, but also for thieves’ efforts and gains as well as the costs of enforcement against theft and trespass.

This publication discusses the institutional foundations of governing common property. The author reviews various theoretical approaches considering the relationship between private and common property regimes and land use sustainability. The social and environmental outcomes of changing property regimes are illustrated by analyzing the implementation of land reforms in pastoral sector.

Indian economy is still an agrarian economy more than 50% of people in India are still dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. Rainfed areas without any source of irrigation in the country still accounts for 60% of the cultivated area and these areas are home to majority of rural poor and marginal farmers. Food security of small and marginal farmers in these regions are greatly jeopardized by the lack of assured irrigation. In this backdrop, there is an urgent need to explore the possibilities of sustainable and innovative forms of irrigation. One such innovative experiment is happa experiment which is viewed as Integrated Natural Resource Management( INRM) emphasizing both water and soil management. A happa is a mud-excavated small water harvesting structure with the average size of 50ft× 45ft×12 ft. The programme is going on in some dry zones where the happa is being excavated in the private land of the farmer wherefrom the farmer can irrigate his own agricultural land with average command area of happa being 0.6 – 0.75 acres. The construction cost one happa is being funded from NREGS scheme, the flagship programme of Government of India for employment generation. After the construction of happa, it is managed by the farmer himself and all the operational expenditure is being incurred by the farmer for mainataining these. This model has got success in some dry zones. We have selected a village for our primary survey of households in the Bankura district which is located dry zone of West Bengal. There is specific geographical concentration of backwardness and poverty in these areas and these regions are affected by continuous degradation of natural resources. The main objectives of the study are as follows: (1) To judge the economic viability of the project using standard cost benefit analysis tools like NPV, BCR and IRR. (ii) Assessment of ecological and social impacts of the project, (iii) Identifying of different kinds of benefits accrued from the project, (iv) scope of upscaling of the project with the identification of problem areas in upscaling Our analysis reveals that the small irrigation program like happa has made a strong impact on the livelihood of rural people. The environmental impacts include soil and moisture conservation of the watershed area. The economic benefits include incremental production from paddy production and vegetable production through irrigation. The success and upscaling of the programme depends very much on the system of planning, application, execution, monitoring and fund-flow.

This Working Paper joint two previous articles by the authors: The economic theory of exhaustible natural resources, in “Enciclopedia degli Idrocarburi”, vol. IV, Istituto della Enciclopedia Treccani, Roma, 2008, pp. 3-10;Technological innovation, relative scarcity, investments, in “Enciclopedia degli Idrocarburi”, vol. IV, Istituto della Enciclopedia Treccani, 2008, pp. 11-22. In the first one (cap. 1-4), we consider the contribution of economic theory (partly through a reevaluation of history) in order both to interpret and predict events, and to identify economic policies; this happens especially when the world economy feels the significant constraints imposed by some natural resources and raw materials, partly due to the rapid growth of a number of developing countries, and when there is an urgent need to increase resources rapidly to ensure continuing availability. Even if the problem of scarce resources (of which natural resources are the most obvious category) has been central to analysis for centuries, natural resource economics is contradictory. The main reason for this is that economic theory is out of step with prevailing economic conditions, as a consequence of the varying concern for a crucial phenomenon in the dynamics of economic systems: the opposition-coexistence of the scarcity of natural resources and the producibility of commodities. Natural resource economics can be summarized by dividing it into three main lines of thought: the theory of producibility and scarcity developed by classical economists; the theory of general and natural scarcities developed by marginalists and neoclassicals; the theory of dynamics with and without natural scarcities developed by macroeconomists, structuralists and empirical stylizers. Using this three-way subdivision, which is not clearly codified in economic theory, the basic features of each approach will be examined with special attention to its early exponents. The historical starting point is the second half of the Eighteenth century, although we will ignore contributions such as those made by the Physiocrats who, during the same period, developed a theory of production based on the surplus generated by agriculture. In the second one (cap. 5-6), we consider that the role of technological innovation for resources use and conservation is often measured by empirical indicators of intensity or efficiency which express the evolution of resource use in relation to variables such as population and GDP. The historical evolution of these indicators tends to indicate a process of decoupling – in other words, a decrease in the energy/emissions intensity of economic activity or an increase in the efficiency/productivity of resource use. These empirical regularities have led to the proposition of stylized facts representing the relationships between resource-use efficiency and economic growth known as environmental Kuznets curves. However, the economic interpretations of the innovation mechanisms underlying the progress suggested by efficiency indicators, nonetheless, remain open and complex at the very time when there is increasing demand for further substantial advances in resource-use efficiency. We will survey the empirical evidence on the medium- and long-term dynamics of these indicators and will discuss their significance. This will be followed by an analysis of the possible role played by economic factors (especially resource prices and markets) and institutional factors (especially climate policy) in triggering and supporting progress in the use efficiency of energy resources.

El siguiente texto tiene dos objetivos complementarios: por un lado, revisar los múltiples estudios realizados sobre el pensamiento económico de Jovellanos desde la publicación del Informe de Ley Agraria en 1795 hasta el presente y, por otro, exponer nuestra propia visión sobre el entramado analítico y el significado del pensamiento del asturiano. El trabajo se ordena en cinco secciones: la reseña de las reacciones iniciales al Informe, la primera; las reflexiones aparecidas desde las Cortes de Cádiz hasta las de la década de 1980, la segunda; los estudios actuales, destacando la obra Economía y economistas españoles, la tercera; y, por último, en las dos secciones finales, se presenta nuestro propio análisis, sin duda favorecido por las visiones anteriores. Se concluye destacando que Jovellanos no fue un liberal en sentido estricto ni un epígono de Adam Smith; la letra y el espíritu de sus escritos económicos, le caracterizan como un “liberal intervencionista”, bien alejado de las usuales nociones de mercantilismo, fisiocracia y liberalismo económico

This working paper quantifies, at a regional level (NUTS3), terrain ruggedness, and compares it with the average altitude of the region. Altitude is an often-used variable introduced in gravitational models of population or activity location as a measure of physical geography, to pick up a general idea of difficult terrain. Using geographical information systems and the high resolution digital elevation model: Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), developed by NASA, we construct a terrain ruggedness index that quantifies topographic heterogeneity, and is based on the slope with respect to neighborhood cells. From the digital model of ruggedness we build up zonal statistics at a NUTS3 regional scale. We show that ruggedness and altitude are almost completely unrelated at this level of geographical aggregation (NUTS3) and both variables have a very different spatial distribution. Hence, ruggedness has informative content beyond altitude, and our index is a natural variable to be considered as a covariate in location models. The main conclusion is that the ruggedness index provides a summary of a useful geographical feature of the landscape, in the same way as altitude or proximity to the coast.

This working paper looks at a geographical feature that, to our knowledge, has not been investigated in Spain so far, terrain ruggedness. Using geographical information systems and two public access digital elevation models we construct a terrain ruggedness index that quantifies topographic heterogeneity, and is based on the slope with neighborhood cells. Focusing on the higher resolution Digital Elevation Model, we show that ruggedness and altitude are almost completely unrelated and both variables have a very different spatial distribution. The main conclusion is that the ruggedness index provides a summary of a useful geographical feature of the landscape, in the same way as altitude or proximity to the coast. In addition, the Digital Terrain Model of ruggedness can be used to obtain average values of ruggedness at any level of geographical aggregation we desire, such as regions or municipalities.

We estimate a seven-variable-VAR for the U.S. economy on postwar data using long-run restrictions, taking changes in long-run interest rates and inflation expectations into account. We find a strong connection between oil prices and long-run nominal interest rates which has lasted throughout the entire postwar period. We find that a simple off-the-shelf theoretical model of oil prices and monetary policy, where oil prices are flexible and other prices are sticky, in fact predicts a strong relationship if inflation and oil prices were driven by monetary policy. The observed magnitude of this relationship is still a bit of a puzzle, but this finding does call into question the identification techniques commonly used to identify oil shocks

We investigate by how much the Little Ice Age reduced the harvests on which pre-industrial Europeans relied for survival. We find that weather strongly affected crop yields, but can find little evidence that western Europe experienced long swings or structural breaks in climate. Instead, annual summer temperature reconstructions between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries behave as almost independent draws from a distribution with a constant mean but time varying volatility; while winter temperatures behave similarly until the late nineteenth century when they rise markedly, consistent with anthropogenic global warming. Our results suggest that the existing consensus about a Little Ice Age in western Europe stems from a Slutsky effect, where the standard climatological practice of smoothing data prior to analysis induces spurious cyclicality in uncorrelated data.

The objective of this study is to determine the causes of the loss of share of agricultural products and food in international trade. The article compares, using a gravity model, the impact of various factors upon bilateral trade in agricultural products, in manufactures and in total trade, between 1963 and 2000 for a representative sample of 40 countries. The results clearly demonstrate how the low demand elasticity for agricultural products and food, the high degree of protectionism to which they were subjected and their meagre share in intra-industrial trade are the principal causes of their relatively slow growth.

This paper summarizes a new database that sheds light on the impact of trade-related policy developments over the past half century on distortions to agricultural incentives and thus also to consumer prices for food in 75 countries spanning the per capita income spectrum. Price-support policies of advanced economies hurt not only domestic consumers and exporters of other products but also foreign producers and traders of farm products, and they reduce national and global economic welfare. On the other hand, the governments of many developing countries have directly taxed their farmers over the past half-century, both directly (e.g., export taxes) and also indirectly via overvaluing their currency and restricting imports of manufactures. Thus the price incentives facing farmers in many developing countries have been depressed by both own-country and other countriesÂ’ agricultural price and international trade policies. We summarize these and realted stylized facts that can be drawn from a new World Bank database that is worthy of the attention of political economy theorists, historians and econometricians. These indicators can be helpful in addressing such questions as the following: Where is there still a policy bias against agricultural production? To what extent has there been overshooting in the sense that some developing-country food producers are now being protected from import competition along the lines of the examples of earlier-industrializing Europe and Japan? What are the political economy forces behind the more-successful reformers, and how do they compare with those in less-successful countries where major distortions in agricultural incentives remain? And what explains the pattern of distortions across not only countries but also industries and in the choice of support or tax instruments within the agricultural sector of each country?