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This paper analyses the joint evolution of the urban and agricultural systems in the community of Madrid. The study is based on the information obtained directly with the interpretation of aerial photograph in 1956, 1980 and 2005. This has made possible to crate a geographic system of information very appropriate to obtain cartographic and statistical information about the evolution and quality of the agricultural land. The scale of the work is 1:25.000. The text analyzes this evolution, pointing out the key factors of the tendencies and processes observed in the period of time. It analyzes in depth the events occurred from 1930 to 2005, giving more detailed information about the quality and use of the involved agricultural land. In conclusion, it can be said that the introduction of the model of urban sprawl speeded up the destruction of good quality agricultural land, and the disorganization of the agricultural systems in the last period of time analyzed (1980-2005). This has been influenced by the last two building booms that have taken place in Madrid. This work is much more significant than a mere regional study, since it has established the rules of behaviour that have defined the interaction of the urban systems with the surrounding urban areas in Spain.

This article compares the effects of weather shocks on agricultural production in Britain, France and Germany during the late nineteenth century. Using semi-parametric models to estimate the non-linear agro-weather relationship we find that weather shocks explain between one third to two thirds of variations in agricultural production. Given the large size of the agricultural sector during this period, the high variance of agricultural production and the cyclical nature of weather shocks, the agro-weather relationship transmitted large effects on macroeconomic fluctuations over much of the period.

This study examines the historical relation between carbon dioxide emission and output growth in the Swedish pulp and paperindustry 1973-2006. We find that the industry achieved an 80 per cent reduction in CO2 emission. Foremost energy substitution but also efficiently improvement contributed to the reduction. Growing prices of fossil fuel due to market price change and taxes and subvention, explains most of the efficiency improvements and substitution. Taxes on energy explain 40 per cent of the total reduction in CO2 intensity. Most of the reduction took place before the implementation of active climate policy in 1991.

This paper reviews the environmental record of the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia since the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a focus on areas of key concern to public policy at the present time. With the impacts of environment on public health being given the highest priority, we examined several associated health indicators at the national level, as well as looking at important environmental issues at the local level. In this respect, we focus on environmental problems related to air and water quality, land contamination, and solid waste management. Despite showing a highly differentiated performance across the region, the results suggest that inadequate environmental management seen in several of the transition countries in the past 20 years has put people’s health and livelihood under huge threats. Moreover, this paper looks at the development of policy responses and resources, i.e. environmental expenditures, in these countries, during the process of transiting from centrally planned economies to market-based one. Similarly, we identify various degrees of progress across the region. The findings reinforce the need for better coherence between national environmental expenditure and international environmental assistance, as well as the actual enforcement of national regulations and international agreements in those non-EU transition countries.

In the first post-war period in Europe the governments proceeded to redistributive reforms of the earth, in Italy tried the way of the reclamations through the Opera nazionale combattenti. In this context the Sicily was the main testing ground in order to overlap to latifondistici orderings lacking in investments a modeled system of economic conduction on the tradition of the cooperativismo, plus correspondent to the requirements of a modern capitalist society. The plan of requalification of the territory was set the objective to assault latifondo with a modern legislation on the expropriations and the contracts to improvement. However the sicialian example allows us to shortly conclude that the based project on the diffusion of the management cooperativism and sustained by the public intervention it was shipwrecked because of a local political rank little equipped to receive the challenges of the capitalistic development.

Russia is often considered a perfect example of the so-called "resource curse"--the argument that natural resource wealth tends to undermine democracy. Given high oil prices, some observers see the country as virtually condemned to authoritarian government for the foreseeable future. Reexamining various data, I show that such fears are exaggerated. Evidence from around the world suggests that for countries like Russia with an established oil industry, even large increases in the scale of mineral incomes have only a minor effect on the political regime. In addition, Russia--a country with an industrialized economy, a highly educated, urbanized population, and an oil sector that remains majority private-owned--is unlikely to be susceptible to most of the hypothesized pernicious effects of resource dependence.

The economic and social problems of the rural areas had considerable impact on the making of the 1948 Constitution and subsequent legislation. The paper reviews the important supporting role of the Economic Commission highlighting two outstanding features of the Republican Constitution: (i) the power of the law to ensure that private and public economic activities be consistent with the pursuit of social ends; (ii) the explicit reference to size limits and other obligations for private landed property. Finally, it describes the scope and degree of success of the agricultural policies approved after the Constitution enactment.

This paper examines the development of carbon dioxide emissions in Sweden, especiallyn with a focus on the absolute reductions during the post-war period, during the 1970s and 1980s. The paper shows that the largest reductions were achieved before the introduction of an active climate policy in 1991. This was in turn the result of significant improvements in energy efficiency and energy conversion, while structural changes were considerably less important. One reason behind this decoupling process may be that the active energy policy put pressure on households and industries to conserve energy and to substitute from oil to electricity and biofuels. The process was substantially reinforced by the development of world oil prices in combination with the development of domestic electricity prices, where nuclear power seems to have played an important role.

Between 1300 and 1500 the French agricultural economy was subjected to massive demographic, political, fiscal and monetary shocks. Despite these shocks, the seigniorial system of property rights governing the ownership and use of land remained largely unchanged. This paper describes the shocks and analyes the responses to them.

This paper examines the role of innovation brokers in stimulating innovation system interaction and innovation capacity building, and illustrates this by taking the case of Dutch agriculture as an example. Subsequently, it reflects upon the potential role of innovation brokers in developing countries' agriculture. It concludes that innovation brokerage roles are likely to become relevant in emerging economies and that public or donor investment in innovation brokerage may be needed to overcome inherent tensions regarding the neutrality and funding of such players in the innovation system. The Dutch experience suggests that innovation brokers need to be contextually embedded, and are unlikely to become effective through a centrally-imposed design. Hence, we conclude that stimulating their emergence requires a policy that supports institutional learning and experimentation. In the evaluation of such experiments, it is important to note that innovation brokers tend to play intangible roles that are not easily captured through conventional indicators.

Historians have long recognized the role of economic resources and organization in determining the outcome of World War II: the Nazi economy lacked the economic resources and organization to oppose the combined might of the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. A minority view is that the Germans were defeated not by economics, but by Hitler's many strategic and tactical mistakes, of which the most important was the invasion of the Soviet Union. Compared to this debate about the outcome of the war, there has been less attention to economics as the cause of World War II. This is a review article of a new economic history of the Nazi economy by Adam Tooze which cuts through the debate between economics and Hitler's mistakes as fundamental causes of the outcome. Instead, Tooze argues that the invasion of the Soviet Union was the inevitable result of Hitler's paranoia about the land-starved backwardness of German agriculture as contrasted with the raw material and land resources of America's continent and Britain's empire. The American frontier expansion that obliterated the native Indians provided Hitler with a explicit precedent, which he often cited, for pushing aside the native populations in the east to provide land for German Aryan farmers. Germany's agricultural weakness is summarized by its low land-labor ratio, but Poland and the Ukraine had even less land per person. Thus simply acquiring the land to the east could not solve Germany's problem of low agricultural productivity without removing the native farming populations. Far better than other histories of the Third Reich, Tooze reveals the shocking details of General Plan Ost, the uber-holocaust which would have removed, largely through murder, as many as 45 million people from eastern agricultural land. Tooze, like the Nazis before him, fails to emphasize that the solution to Germany's agricultural problem was not acquiring more land for the existing German farm population, but rather by raising the land-labor ratio by making the existing German land more efficient, mechanizing agriculture and encouraging rural-to-urban migration within Germany.

The paper is part of an ongoing process of estimating the GDP of Cyprus and Malta for the interwar period. The islands of Cyprus and Malta have always been considered as similar economically to other South-Eastern European states, despite the lack of historical evidence to prove it. The paper uses recently complied primary sector output estimates for the interwar period (1921 – 1938) to evaluate that the economic structure of the islands was different from each other, as well as from other South-Eastern European states. The output of the agricultural sector per capita indicated that the islands were not keeping up to other Southern-European States. Recovery of the primary sector in Cyprus came from the rapid expansion of copper mining and not from the growth of agriculture. The different growth trajectory of the islands lies partly to their differing economic structure. Malta’s economy was exceptional due to the high urbanisation of the island, leading to the economy’s dependency on the presence of the British navy. Cyprus shared the South-Eastern European problems of high population growth rates, fragmented land holdings, and poor rural credit institutions which combined in such a way to prevent a shift towards other agricultural products. The inefficiency of the credit system in Cyprus was particularly important in checking the agricultural sector’s growth.

Several studies have examined the link between climate and health, mainly focusing on the short term impacts of extreme temperatures. This paper analyzes instead the long term relation between climate variability and health using Swedish temperature and mortality data for the period 1751-2004 using different time scales. We find that periods with higher temperature are associated with lower mortality. The results indicate that long term climate variations in annual mean temperatures and not short term variations explain the connection between temperature and mortality. Considering annual extreme temperatures, we find that extreme low winter temperatures are correlated with higher short term mortality. We identify the impact of the 11-year solar cycle on crop yields as a possible explanation for our findings. The results have besides their economic-historical merits implications for modern day policy for developing countries, especially since the correlation with solar activity implies predictability.

This study is a first attempt to clarify major trends and factors of changes in production and productivity in Post-Second World War Bulgarian agriculture. It incorporates an interdisciplinary approach and specifies crucial institutional, economic, organizational, technological etc. factors affecting development of agricultural production and productivity. Firstly, evolution of agricultural production and productivity is analyzed, and effect of labor, land and livestock productivity on different productions assessed. Secondly, evolution and impact of main technological factors (application of chemicals, mechanization, irrigation, introduction of new varieties etc.) are examined. Third, stages in property rights development and restructuring of farms are presented, and their effects on production and productivity evaluated. Forth, paces in modernization of public policy, its key elements (central planning, price and trade regulations, support programs etc.) and implications for agriculture are identified. Fifth, evolution and role of the demands for farm products is assessed. Next, changes in labor quantity and composition, and their impact on agricultural production and productivity are scrutinized. Finally, effects of climate changes and weather extremes on agriculture are underlined.

This paper analyzes evolution, implementation and impacts of state agricultural policies in Bulgaria during post Second World War years now. Firstly, it presents agricultural policies development during 1950s and 1960s (post war nationalization, cooperation of peasants, central planning and price control, support to agriculture) and its impacts on farming modernization and improvement of peasants welfare. Second, it analyzes reforms in 1970s and 1980s (concentration of farming in large agro-industrial complexes, experimentations with “economic” mechanisms of governance) and their effects on agriculture. Third, it evaluates policies during post-communist transition and EU integration, and their consequences for agricultural development.

A greater emphasis in mathematical and statistical rigour is now expected in economics and economic history. Ad-Hoc procedures and guestimates are unpopular and considered unreliable. Yet a substantial amount of research relies on historical national accounts (HNAs) that would not satisfy criteria of robustness that the overall research itself entails. One could argue in order to have in order to have reliable results in one’s research, the underlying dataset needs to be reliable. This paper will present the gross output and value added of Cyprus and Malta in the Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing sector and the Mining sector. Such an exercise is fraught with difficulty. The dataset was fragmented and unreliable. As a result methodologies were employed that would not be acceptable in current national accounting. Here such methods are made explicit as the good, the bad and the ugly.

Richard Tawney (1880-1962), who taught at the London School of Economics from 1917 to 1949, was unquestionably one of the very most important economic historians that England has ever produced: so much so, indeed, that the era of his major research and publications, 1540 - 1640, has justly come to be known as �Tawney�s Century�. Those publications, and the debates that they provoked, concern the origins or roots of modern capitalism and (implicitly) capitalist entrepreneurship that were supposed to have been established in this century. Though the roots of those economic developments, in particular those leading to more modern forms of industrial capitalism, may indeed lie in that century, nevertheless the main thesis of this study is that most of their positive fruits are instead to be found in the ensuing century of 1640 - 1740, the century preceding the advent of the modern Industrial Revolution. Tawney�s seminal scholarship, towards these ends, was concerned with two major issues. The first considered in this study is his 1926 monograph: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which in part was designed to promote, in the English-speaking world, Max Weber�s famous thesis (1905) on �The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism�. Both works focused on how three elements of one Protestant sect in particular, the Calvinists (from 1536), came to influence so deeply that Protestant Ethic and new ethos of modern capitalism: Predestination, the Calling, and �Worldly Asceticism�. The significance of this form of Protestantism in England is that Calvinists and other Non-Conformists or Dissenters, those who refused to conform to the Church of England after the 1660 royalist Restoration, constituted about one half of the known scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs from the later 17th century and through the Industrial Revolution era (1760-1820), though constituting only 5 percent of the population. The debate concerns the roles of their restricted (legislated) minority status and of schools and superior educational systems that they had to establish, but also the applicability of the Weber-Tawney thesis, in explaining their superior economic performance. Tawney�s second major issue was that of �agrarian capitalism�, along with the supposed �rise of the gentry�: involving the transfer of vast amounts of land from the old aristocracy, the crown and church together, and finally the free-holding yeomanry into the hands of a non-aristocratic upper class who were far more predisposed and able to engage in profit-maximizing agriculture, especially through enclosures and the technology of the New Husbandry. But if Tawney dates this shift from Henry VIII�s Dissolution of the Monasteries, in 1536, this study contends that the real shift, but certainly a major shift, to �agrarian capitalism�, involving enclosures and the New Husbandry, again came only after the 1660s. To provide a contrast to Tawney�s work, this study examines two alternative theses on the origins of modern industrial capitalism within Tawney�s century (1540-1640): (1) Earl Hamilton�s thesis of �Profit Inflation�, one fully endorsed by Keynes; and (2) John Nef�s �Early Industrial Revolution in Tudor-Stuart England�. The Hamilton thesis is rejected in this study, with the contention that its true importance was to inspire Nef�s counter-thesis: on the decisive shift from wood and charcoal fuels to coal fuels, which in turn required very major technological changes (in furnace designs), which in turn led to major increases in industrial scale, and (for Nef) to true �industrial capitalism�. This study, noting the importance of Wrigley�s similar thesis on a shift from an organic (wood-based) to an inorganic (coal-based) industrial economy, supports the essence of the Nef thesis � but only for the period after 1640 (with new data). Finally, this study considers two other related changes so necessary for the development of early-modern capitalism, in this era: the development of the Full Rigged or Atlantic Ship (but from the 1450s) and the overseas joint-stock trading companies. Again, their major impact came after 1660, with the �New Colonialism� (Hobsbawm) or �Commercial Revolution� (Davis). The study also considers the history of the English joint stock companies, from the first joint-stock company, in overseas trade (the Muscovy Company of 1553) to the Bubble Act of 1720, which restricted their formation until 1825. Also included is their role in the so-called �Financial Revolution� from 1694 to 1757 (�Pelhams�s Conversion� of the national debt).

“Being rich in energy resources – a blessing or a curse” finds that an energy resource curse plagues many EU supplier states. This in turn directly affects Europe’s energy supply security and threatens to engulf Europe in unwanted hostilities at home and abroad. The study addresses seven issues including the evidence suggesting that a curse exists among Europe’s external energy suppliers, active programs to limit that risk, the significance of economic diversification, the applicability of dividend programs, the link between corruption and security of energy supplies, additional possible actions of the Union, and further threats posed by resource cursed countries. It establishes a definitive links between corruption and supply security, poor transparency, and inequality, and proves that a low level of economic diversification is a reliable indicator for the existence of the curse. It also finds that there are examples of excellence in recovering from and even converting the curse to a blessing. In looking at the policy instruments available to the Union, the study determines that the Union does have the technical expertise and financial means to restructure political and economic systems and strengthen public administrations and institutions and found that Europe’s successful implementation of similar past programs could be taken, at least in part, as models for future efforts. Finally, the study recommends the controversial approach of conditionality in the use of aid and finds that the Union should legislate standards for the reporting and auditing of energy exports and imports at home and abroad.

The aim of this paper is to explore the potentials of typical middle sized dairy farms (with 22 cows) to absorb the quotas and market shares released by the small scale farms after the EU accession in 2007. The hypothesis is that quota introduction combined with high quality standards for raw milk will significantly reduce the share of small scale farms in milk production for processing. If different opportunities for alternative income-generating activities become available for small farms (as a consequence of the EU accession), their willingness to give up dairy farming will increase. Middle sized farms will benefit from an improved access to resources and also from more favourable conditions for economic growth. In this paper the analysis was made on the International Farm Comparison Network (IFCN) concept of typical farm. The Trade Implication and Policy Implication CALculator (TIPICAL) modelling program provides financial statements and most of the calculations for business’ profitability, solvency, liquidity, cost analysis and comparisons. The results of the financial analysis show the poor credit power of farms, when calculated only on farm assets market price. In the same time, it reveals the potential of growing and carries out an economy of scale when both financial and farm management are improved.

The aim of this work is to elaborate series of deflators, for whole twentieth century, of three representative products in the cork business: raw cork, corkwood in planks and stoppers of natural cork. Given that prices of these products are not available, the data bases for reconstruction are, on one hand, unitary values of production and exports from Portugal and Spain and, on the other hand, unitary ones of United Kingdom’s imports. By using these values, selected after different tests of coherence and credibility, Laspeyres, Paasche and Fisher’s indexes and a “synthetic cork deflator” are calculated. Then, a preliminary analysis about the unitary values as a proxy to the prices during the second half of twentieth century is realized. At last, the main figures which have been employed to the building of the deflators are shown in a statistical appendix.

The main objective of this paper is to contribute a continuous annual series of timber consumption in Spain for the period 1860-1935, an unexplored topic in Spanish economic history. Then the paper estimates a standard consumption function trying to explain the behavior of the serie. The main conclusion is that Spanish timber consumption had a positive GDP elasticity (0,47) with a growth in both traditional and new utilities of timber, regardles of the evolution of the prices of the product. This suggests that the economic growth of the period was not only based on new technologies and new raw materials, but also on a growing use of an organic and traditional product like timber.

El presente trabajo analiza y compara, desde la perspectiva analítica del metabolismo social, los usos del suelo y los balances energéticos derivados de estos usos de los sistemas agrarios de cinco municipios de la comarca catalana del Vallès, en dos momentos históricos que ilustran las características y magnitud de las transformaciones que se han producido en los sistemas agrarios catalanes durante los últimos 150 años. El primer corte corresponde a mediados del siglo XIX, representativo del funcionamiento de una agricultura orgánica avanzada; el segundo, a finales del siglo XX, representativo de un sistema agrario industrializado donde la energía fósil y otros inputs externos al sistema tienen una presencia determinante. A partir de la información contenida en los amillaramientos, los censos ganaderos y las cartillas evaluatorias disponibles para los municipios estudiados, y los datos actuales de los censos agrarios, forestales y de rendimientos y aprovechamientos de los distintos productos, se han construido los balances energéticos de los dos periodos analizados. A partir de estos balances hemos constatado como en los 150 años transcurridos se ha producido una espectacular pérdida de eficiencia energética y de sostenibilidad de los sistemas agrarios, a pesar de los grandes incrementos de la productividad por ha. de los diversos cultivos y de la producción ganadería, que se atribuye totalmente al paso de una agricultura orgánica avanzada a unos sistemas agrarios con un elevado consumo de combustibles fósiles en forma de carburantes, abonos de síntesis y fitosanitarios y, especialmente, al peso descomunal de la actividad ganadera, desarrollada completamente al margen del territorio.

The article is the introduction to the volume edited by the author with the same title on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Manlio Rossi-Doria. The volume is a collection of selected writings published between 1929 and 1986 divided in four thematic sections: agronomic modernization, land amelioration, natural disasters and human action, ecology and energy. Prevailing contents by section are as follows: first, land management, pasture improvement, soil protection, upland and lowland integration; second, land reclamation and land tenure; third, natural and man made disasters and related policies; fourth, ecology, energy sources, including nuclear, and related policy issues. After presenting the structure of the selection, an overview of selected writings emphasizes the continuity of Manlio Rossi-Doria committment with agriculture environment natural resources and related policies.

The main aim of this paper is to check one of the few existing theories regarding the factors that can explain the historical dissolution of collective rustic property, namely the Neo-Malthusian thesis which underlies the so-called “tragedy of the commons”. This old interpretative proposal, originating in the field of Biology, but rapidly adopted by Economy, not only continues to be explicitly present in some manuals of natural resources management, but also persists in those works that, from Economic and Social History, attempt to understand the reasons of the decline of communal systems in the Western world. Leaving aside the revision that, in the last decades, New Institutional Economy has advanced in this respect through the “property rights theory”, which is difficult to contrast, my paper tries to test the applicability of the Neo-Malthusian schema with the help of elementary econometric methods. The testing ground chosen for this purpose is the process of disintegration of communal lands which took place in Spain since the middle of the 18th century and, especially, the process of privatisation promoted by the Law of General Disentitlement of 1 May 1855. In no way does this analysis attempt to create a refined econometric model with which to explain the changes in collective patrimony during the last centuries. The inclusion in the test of other factors, different from the ones emphasised in the “tragedy of the commons”, suggests and advances some possible approaches to assemble an alternative theoretical schema, but does not endeavour to offer a global mechanical explanation. tragedy of the commons, Neo-Malthusian thesis, privatisation process, collective rustic patrimony, Spain, Extremadura, econometric methods

This article seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the 'nouvelles draperies' chose to use them, and why their resort to such merino wools allowed at least some of them to escape the current crisis afflicting the traditional ‘old draperies’, and indeed to expand to become the chief producers of woollen cloths in the southern Low Countries during the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although the merino have been by far the world’s finest wools, since at least the seventeenth century, English wools had enjoyed that supremacy in the medieval era. The Spanish sheep breeds that produced the first merino wools did not emerge until or after the 1340s; and it took many decades of experimental breeding and improved flock management to produce better quality wools in sufficient quantities for export (first to Italy). Before the introduction of merinos, the indigenous Spanish sheep had produced some of the worst wools in Europe. In the thirteenth century, they were used only in making very cheap, coarse, light cloths, when north-west Europe was producing a wide range of textiles, from such coarse light generally worsted-style fabrics to the most luxurious woollens. For reasons that I have elaborated elsewhere, the onset of a spreading stain of chronic and debilitating wars, from the 1290s, throughout the Mediterranean basin and north-west Europe, resulted in a sharp rise in transaction costs that made long-distance trade in cheaper textiles unprofitable. Consequently, by the 1330s, most north-west European draperies had abandoned export-oriented production of cheaper line textiles to concentrate on very high priced luxury woollens, those that could so much better ‘bear the freight’. Furthermore, in Flanders, a considerable number of small-town and village producers engaged in precisely the same industrial re-orientation; but in producing genuine heavy weight woollens, they sought to imitate those of the large Flemish towns; and, in selling their cloths at lower prices, came to be known as the nouvelles draperies. This industrial reorientation meant that cloth producers in the Low Countries became all the more reliant on English wools, above all the traditional urban draperies (who came to use such wools exclusively). The English crown was quick to exploit this dependency by sharply raising export taxes, which, by the 1390s, constituted half of the sales price; and that in turn accounted for up to 70 percent of production costs in the Low Countries’ urban draperies. Meanwhile, English cloth exports, very lightly taxed, gained an enormous cost and thus price advantage, but one not fully exploited until the fifteenth century. The catalyst for the final economic crisis, one that brought about the irredeemable decline of most of the urban draperies in the Low Countries, and the expansion of the nouvelles draperies, took place from 1429 to 1473, when the English crown sought to exploit the wool trade even further, in pursuing ill-advised bullionist policies: by requiring that the Calais Staple wool cartel sharply raise prices, that it seel all wools only for ‘ready English money’ without credit, and that it deliver one third of the sales receipts to the mint in gold bullion. Not until the 1470s did the Burgundians succeed in having these bullionist ordinances revoked. Meanwhile the traditional Flemish and Brabantine draperies, in continuing to use such high-cost English wools exclusively, for fear of losing customers, ensured their own rapid decline, indeed losing markets to both the English cloth trade and the nouvelles draperies, who also acquired considerable capital and labour from the declining draperies. Their success, as less quality-conscious imitators, lay in their willingness to use the far cheaper but now improved Spanish wools. An historic prejudice against pre-merino Spanish wools probably explains whey even they had not used these wools before the onset of this crisis. Having displaced the traditional draperies, the nouvelles draperies reached their apogee in the 1540s, when they were superseded by the sayetteries, after international market conditions had once more favoured long-distance trade in truly cheaper, light textiles.

In this work it is analyzed the evolution and composition of the foreign Spanish trade of cork products during the second half of the XIXth century and the XXth century. For it there has been in use the Estadística del Comercio Exterior de España, elaborated from 1849 up to the current importance. The above mentioned analysis sets up important changes in the characteristics that the cork business has had in Spain during the considered period, at least from a commercial point of view, emphasizing the major relevancy acquired by the import trade in the last quarter of the XXth century and the return to the stopper, which has frustrated the diversification process of the cork industry and trade, initiated in the first years of last century. For countries, Portugal has turned, from the civil war, into the first world power to the detriment of Spain. Our country could not have recovered the commercial leadership, that had during the second half of the XIXth century and the first third of the XXth, on the principal cork markets and, at present, it has small presence, in relative terms, on the markets of the new wine countries, great buyers of cork stoppers.

The Rapporto sulla Federconsorzi (Report on the Italian Confederation of Agricultural Unions), published in 1963, is one of Manlio Rossi-Doria’s better known works. The book prompted widespread debate, not only among agricultural economists but, even more, in the national political arena. The reprint of the Report is therefore relevant for an understanding not only of how the huge economic and political patrimony built during the fifties an sixties was dissipated with the bankruptcy of the Federconsorzi in 1993, but also of the changes in Italian agriculture over the last few decades. The introduction to the reprint of the Report underlines the particular contribution offered by Rossi-Doria for a better understanding of the recent structural changes in the Italian agriculture and the agri-food system.

The crisis of the 'chaise vide' (empty chair), July 1965-January 1966, represented the greatest danger of break-up for the EEC. Its fundamental cause was the collision between two opposite ideas about the process of European integration: the view of intergovernmental, confederal cooperation, as General Charles de Gaulle imagined it, against the project of a supranational and federalizing integration, professed by the then-president of the EEC-Commission Walter Hallstein. The starting-point of the crisis was the failure of the Council of Ministers in Brussels of June 28-30, 1965, that had to decide about the Commission's package for the financing of a common agricultural policy, the Community's direct budgetary revenues, the rule of the majority decision and the extension of the European Parliament's powers. As a result of the non-financing of a common agricultural policy de Gaulle ordered the withdrawal of the French delegation from the EEC. The French chair was empty for six months. De Gaulle wanted to solve once and for all the problems of the Council-Commission relations and of the majority vote. The crisis was settled by the Luxembourg agreement (January 29, 1966). As a matter of fact, this agreement restored normality in the Community, but caused a limitation of its dynamism, particularly in the Commission's proposal power and in the Council's decision-making, that was mantained until the Eighties under the implied threat of the member states' veto power. Rethinking about those weighty events can be interesting in these days of reform of the EU institutions, because the intent of the Luxembourg compromise has not been cancelled completely and lives on the spirit of present euroscepticism.

This study explains the emergence of the Sicilian mafia in the XIX century as the product of the interaction between natural resource abundance and weak institutions. We advance the hypothesis that the mafia emerged after the collapse of the Bourbon Kingdom in a context characterized by a severe lack of state property-right enforcement in response to the rising demand for the protection of sulfur - Sicily's most valuable export commodity - whose demand in the international markets was soaring at the time. We test this hypothesis combining data on the early presence of the mafia and on the distribution of sulfur reserves across Sicilian municipalities and find evidence of a positive and significant effect of sulphur availability on mafia's diffusion. These results remain unchanged when including department fixed-effects and various geographical and historical controls, when controlling for spatial correlation, and when comparing pairs of neighboring municipalities with and without sulfur.