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This paper argues that rural opposition to land reform in transition Russia is a consequence of individually rational decisions by members of former state and collective farms about whether to support further land reform, or preserve the status quo, collective farming. Evidence from survey data shows that despite the government’s efforts to promote a land market and independent farming in the 1990s, preferences in 1996 still favoured the largely unreformed status quo. The observed retention of collective farming is so widespread as to block both the development of a land market and restructuring. The visible consequence of stalemated reform has been persistent agricultural output decline and widespread bankruptcy of large farm entities, without any significant rise of independent farming. This paper formalises a dynamic argument for rational opposition to land reform, given the existence of uncertainty about the costs that individual cultivators will incur. It turns out that the consequences of initial decisions could have decisive impact on rejection of reform later on. The paper discusses, further, the relevance of the historical parallel during the post-Emancipation and Stolypin eras when peasant communes resisted enclosures and restructuring of rights to land. Opposition, seemingly irrational, recurred and lasted throughout the reform era. It can be seen that opposition to reform at that time, too, was individually rational, given incomplete property rights reform; the state also bears responsible in contemporary and historical times for policies that tended to help preserve the status-quo. The state failed to improve the unclear property rights which dampened reform incentives early on in the reform process both historically and in the rural transition environment.

The classical view of BulgariaÕs failed industrialization prior to the Second World War was established by Alexander Gerschenkron. According to his interpretation, an inherently backward small peasant agriculture and well-organized peasantry not only retarded growth in agriculture but obstructed any possible industrialization strategy. Following Hayami and Ruttan, we utilize the decomposition of farm labor productivity into land productivity, and land-to-man ratio to analyze the sources of growth in BulgariaÕs agriculture 1887-1939. Our results show that BulgariaÕs peasants did cross the threshold to modern growth during the Interwar period. Rich qualitative evidence supports the findings of our quantitative analysis that contrary to GerschenkronÕs view and conventional wisdom, BulgariaÕs peasants substantially contributed to the modernization of BulgariaÕs economy and society. We interpret our results in light of modern development economics, and conclude that agriculture formed no impediment to BulgariaÕs industrialization. The reasons that a Ôlarge industrial spurtÕ did not occur in Bulgaria until 1945 are not to be found in the agricultural sector.

This paper reveals some historical aspects and some common traditions of German and Romanian economies, justifying some of the trends of contemporary decades underlying the statistical gap. The specific method used in this article is a statistical confrontation based on historical variables and statistical data, graphs emphasizing the abnormalities in evolution, etc. After a brief introduction, inside the major part of the structure of this paper some selected economic and social evolutions are presented together for both German and Romanian economies, somehow becoming the limits of the European Union construction. Few general gaps of the two economic marginal models as performance and cohesion are detailed during the historical and statistical investigation and the conclusions anticipates some expectations in the medium term dynamics of these economies. At the same time the article discusses Berlin’s position within EU and argues that Germany remains a selective continental hegemon, bent on securing national primacy and profit more than generating win-win solutions for its neighbours.

The objective of this study is to make a further contribution to the debate on the causes of economic growth in the European Continent. It explains why agricultural labour productivity differences did not converge between 1950 and 2005 in Europe. We propose an econometric model, one combining both proximate and fundamental causes of economic growth. The results show that the continuous exit of labour power from the sector, coupled with the increased use of productive factors originating in other sectors of the economy, caused the efficiency of agricultural workers to rise. However, we offer a complete explanation of the role played by institutions and geographical factors. Thus, we detect a direct and inverse relation between membership of the EU and the Communist bloc and the productivity of agricultural labour. In addition, strong support for agriculture affected productivity negatively.

This paper attempts to analyze the short-and long-run causal dynamic interactions between energy consumption, CO2 emissions and economic growth in Greece, using time-series techniques. To this end, annual data covering the period 1980-2012 are employed and tests for unit roots, the ARDL-bounds approach of cointegration, and Granger-causality based on error-correction models are applied. The results reveal strong feedback in the long-run between all the examined variables. For the shortrun, there is evidence of two-way causality in all examined pairs with only exception the direction CO2 towards GDP., peer-reviewed

As it is well known, after the collapse of the totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the economic development of the former communist states in the region was subject to a series of systemic transformation. One of the most important was the large-scale abandonment of state ownership in the agricultural sector, a transformation that was essential for boosting economic development. Our article aims to present the land property privatization process in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, pointing out the obstacles which hindered this action and represented barriers of the reform process. By using a comparative approach, the paper will also underline the main challenges in the land privatization process: state owned land reserves, farm restructuring, land transaction, mortgage, role of public and private sector.

This paper sheds new light on the agricultural side of the Italian regional divide from an econ- omic geography perspective, following a Von Thunen approach. The central hypothesis is that the development of the nonagricultural economy in the Northern cities drove the location of agricultural output and inputs during the interwar years. A new database on Italian agriculture around 1930 fully confirms the key role of access to domestic markets in shaping agricultural activity. Thus, the causes of Southern agriculture falling behind are revealed: it is not very surprising that an agricultural divergence joined an already ongoing industrial divergence during a period in which international markets collapsed. It was the growth of Northern industry that led to the growth of Northern agriculture, and not vice versa. This paper takes an economic geography approach to explore the patterns of Italian interwar agriculture and its role in the long-lasting Italian regional divide. After framing the Southern falling behind, I turn to an explanation of the divergence exclusively based on factor accumu- lation, building upon a neoclassical version of the Von Thunen model of land use. Hence, I introduce a new cross sectional database of Italian agriculture around 1930 at a fine geographi- cal level of disaggregation. Using this database, I first estimate the agricultural total factor productivities (TFP) throughout the country, which suggest that efficiency differences did not drive the Southern agricultural failure during the interwar years. Indeed, econometric results indicate that the geographical allocation of factors of production was shaped by the access to domestic nonagricultural markets, which in turn shaped output and land rents, as predicted by the Von Thunen model. Hence, the initial industrial divergence is causally con- nected with the subsequent agricultural one by a simple demand mechanism: it was the growth of Northern industry that led to the growth of Northern agriculture, and not vice versa.

Biological living standards stagnated or even declined during the transition to modern economic growth. Although income per capita was increasing, other indicators, such as mortality rates or heights, portrayed a completely different image. This paper adds to the standard of living debate by analysing the potential effect of the privatisation of common lands. Although highly controversial regarding its impact on the modernisation process itself, its contribution to human welfare has somewhat received much less attention. Focusing on the Spanish experience, this paper exploits geographical variation over time by collecting a panel data set at the provincial level on three different periods: 1860, 1900 and 1930. The empirical analysis shows that the persistence of these collective resources is related with higher life expectancy and heights, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Biological human welfare also seems to have been negatively influenced by the progressively decreasing role that local communities played on the management of these resources. The survival of common lands in some regions provided peasants with mechanisms different from the market, thus making the transition to a market economy more socially sustainable.

The whole social and economic life is based on some form of association. People live in societies, so the idea association appeared in the most natural way, at first in an unconscious form, moving later towards the conscious and organized association. Seeing that through the association they were able to defend their professional interests, fulfil their economic goals and meet their common needs, peasants adopted its formula with confidence. The ways in which the association spread were diverse. Depending on the economic, social and moral circumstances and on the habits and goals of the various masses of peasants, there have been developed mainly one of the three forms: trade unions, cooperatives, and mutuality. The peasant associations helped the rural communities everywhere and were the object of interest of many theoreticians, who sought their roots, their forms, presented their principles and analyzed their results. One of them was Professor Nicolae Ghiulea, a Romanian economist and sociologist, fervent supporter of the association idea. Nicolae Ghiulea was among the most important representatives of the cooperative doctrine of the interwar period and was well-known for his prestigious academic career. He filled several administrative and social leading functions and had a rich publishing activity in the areas of statistical theory, social economy, cooperatives and sociology. This article sets out to present his view upon the history of the peasant association, as exposed in one of his books entitled „The peasant associations”. The author focuses on the various forms of peasant associations, their history and their practical results in interwar Romania, explaining why they were beneficial. At a closer look, peasant associations are still a viable solution to many current social issues, especially those concerning agriculture.

This paper analyzes wood consumption in Britain over the period 1850–1938. We calculate the apparent consumption of wood, taking into account both net imports of wood and the home harvest. We then develop some quantitative exercises that correlate wood consumption with GDP, with prices of wood and iron (as an alternative material to wood) and with other measures. The main conclusion is that, although wood had lost its economic centrality after the energy transition, wood consumption continued to grow in Britain both in absolute and relative terms, showing a positive elasticity to GDP superior to the unit. This result allows us to reach a more complete understanding of the socio-metabolic transition associated with the Industrial Revolution. Britain faced the increase in wood demand by relying almost entirely on imported wood, reinforcing the idea that the decoupling of economic growth from land use must to be handled with care, and should be observed not at the national level but on a global scale. Although British economic development was to a great extent focussed on what has been called the “subterranean forests” of coal, it simultaneously supported large tracts of surface foreign forest.

After the publication of the IPCC reports on climate change, the Dutch Meteorological Institute of the Netherlands (KNMI) conducted a study on the consequences of climate change for the Netherlands. Four different scenarios regarding the rise in temperature and their consequences have been developed. Other institutes have elaborated more on these scenarios, making predictions on the effects of climate change on nature and agriculture for the Netherlands. Overall conclusions are that climate change will have dramatic consequences for nature, agriculture and Dutch society in general, being so exposed to rising sea levels. Depending on the scenario, consequences have various gradients of impacts and effects. In general, it is estimated that winters will be softer and wetter, and that summers will be hotter and drier with intermittent torrential rains that can have dire consequences for agriculture and nature. Growing seasons will start earlier and will last longer which could lead to mismatches in species interaction. Species of various kind will suffer the effects of climate change and will disappear from the Netherlands altogether, either through extinction or by moving away north. Other warmth loving species from the south of the Netherlands will move upwards towards the country leading to possible threats to indigenous species.

It is usually taken for granted that the existence of water markets allows economic efficiency gains to be achieved at the expense of equity losses. This paper addresses the issue by analysing the functioning of the irrigation communities in pre-1950s eastern Spain. While in some of them the water inhered in the land and could not be sold, in others there were tradable water rights. In the paper it is shown that in the former not only was equity greater, but in fact the resource was also used more efficiently. This article stems from the research project ECO2009-10739, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

Since its inception, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been discussed controversely. Data from the OECD and the World Bank show that the protectionist effects of the CAP between the 1960s and the 1980s were larger than those of its national predecessors. Moreover, there is evidence that already the piecemeal reforms of the 1980s re-duced the level of protection and support in the EU, that is prior to the MacSharry reform of 1992.

Wine cooperatives were relatively scarce in Europe before the Second WorldWar, but accounted for more than half of all wines made in France, Italy, and Spain, thethree major producer countries, by the 1980s. This article argues that their initial slowdiffusion was caused by the difficulties in measuring and controlling grape quality, andthat this provided incentives for members to produce large volumes of poor fruit whichadversely affected the wines. Cooperatives only became popular when the state offeredmaterial incentives to growers that helped compensate these problems of collectiveaction. This initially involved cheap credit to help build wineries but, from the 1950s,growers enjoyed additional incentives to join cooperatives as governments attempted toregulate wine markets and provide income support. The problems associated with grapequality were never resolved and, with the major decline in consumption from the 1980sand move away from bulk towards premium wines, cooperatives became increasinglyuncompetitive in the market place.

This article takes Spain’s dairy chain as a study case of the transformations in the political economy of the food system in the West since the Second World War. I find that there is much to support the prevailing narrative in food regime analysis: the organised capitalism of 1952-1986 was gradually weakened by a policy agenda of deregulation stemming from both internal and external pressures. I also find, however, a thread of continuity between the period 1952-1986and the post-1986 period – in both periods there were strategies of supply chain management by means of which the power of political or business elites joined the market as a mechanism for the coordination of decisions. I argue that there is a case for reassessing the degree up to which the term “neoliberalism” does a good job at describing the new historical era that started in the food system in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century winegrowersin Europe faced a crisis of overproduction, with steeply falling prices and sharp increases in wages and production costs. Since the markets showed no signs of correcting themselves, the winegrowers called for state intervention. In the major wine producing countries such as France and Spain, large winegrowers’ associations were created which lobbied their governments to regulate domestic wine markets through tariffs, quality controls, the creation of regional appellations and bodies investigating fraud in winemaking, and also promoted other measures to increase the consumption of unadulterated wine. However, while winegrowers in France were highly successful in obtaining government support to protect their market interests, in Spain the legislation introduced was much more eclectic; it aimed to satisfy on the one hand the winegrowers and on the other the alcohol producers, wine merchants and exporters, even though the interests of these groups often clashed head on. This paper aims to explain the differences in state intervention and wine market regulation in these two major producer countries in the early twentieth century, by analysing the particular features of their markets and productive systems in the aftermath of the phylloxera plague, as well as the winegrowers’ collective action and the political framework in each country.

Agriculture posed considerable tensions for the processes of enlargement of the European Union, because of its continuing importance both in the economies of the applicant countries of Central and Eastern European countries which have joined EU on the 1st may 2004., and in the EU budget and acquits communautaire. The preparation of agriculture in the candidate countries to join the EU was rendered more complex by the fact that the Community's Common Agricultural Policy was a moving target. The aim of this paper is to show the bases elements of the Common Agricultural Policy, but also to provide a survey of recent developments relating to agriculture in the EU and new member states of the EU before their accession to EU and their preparation to access on the enlarged market, in order to indicate the main challenges and difficulties posed by enlargement. It seems likely that agricultural policy in the enlarged EU will attach increased priority to objectives such as rural development and the environment. However, these new priorities may be expensive to realize, and may impose a growing burden on the national budgets of EU member states.

The objective of this paper is explore the roots of the co-operative movement in the food oil sector from a historical perspective through a bibliographical review of the diverse studies carried out at the regional and provincial levels in Spain. It explores the causes of co-operatives’ creation and the profile of the farmers who benefited from the experience. It ascertains the level of business development in the organisational, human and technological spheres, analysing the conditioning factors limiting co-operative action to the stockpiling and production areas, with little penetration in cooperation at the second level of bottling and refining. An empirical study is made of evolution in one of the Spanish provinces where the incidence of this type of co-operative is significant.

The aim of this research is to examine the economic effects of natural resources in Basilicata, a southern region of Italy. The paper focuses on the economic effects of large-scale oil extraction that started in 1999. I proceed by systematically constructing a comparison unit for Basilicata using synthetic control techniques. The comparison unit's economic parameters capture how Basilicata's economic activities would have evolved in the absence of the oil extraction industry. The comparison between real GDP per capita in Basilicata and in its comparison unit suggest that a large amount of oil extraction, at times peaking at 50 barrels per capita per year, has no detectable effect on Basilicata's economic performance.

This working paper discusses how natural resource scarcity (aridity, in the case of Spanish agriculture) encouraged the process of frontier expansion defined by Barbier, meaning the exploitation of new, relatively abundant resources (water) for production purposes. Water for irrigated agriculture was obtained from both ground sources, identified as 'vertically downward' sources (i.e. wells, which were mainly funded by private initiative), and 'horizontally extensive' surface sources, such as dams and canals, primarily paid for by the public sector. Although the processes involved in obtaining water can be traced back over the centuries, it was really not until the 20thcentury when they became truly important. The growthof agricultural production was deeply influenced by this process. The main result is the mismatch between areas of high current agricultural productivity, and better initial endowment of natural resources.

From 1860 the Spanish agricultural sector has gone through an intensive process of development resulting in important structural changes, not only in the sector itself, but also regarding the relationship of the agrarian system with natural resources. These changes were closely related to the growing per capita income in the long term, an increasing degree of integration in international markets and profound political changes. During the last 150 years, the volume of Spanish agricultural production experienced a great increase, notably affecting the consumption of domestic water resources and entailing the need for the construction of waterworks, key for the development of irrigation. In this context, this paper studies the evolution of domestic water consumption as a consequence of the increasing agricultural production, as well as the impact that the growing needs for water had on the construction of infrastructure for irrigation. To that aim, we estimate the water footprint of the Spanish agricultural sector, that is, we will try to obtain the water consumed in the production of vegetal and animal goods for five different years: 1860, 1900, 1930, 1962 and 2010. From these results, a detailed analysis of the trends on water consumption and changes in compositional patterns is carried out. Moreover, we collect the available information on the building of new irrigation infrastructure to examine to what extent the development of the agricultural sector conditioned the construction of new irrigation infrastructure. Finally, a Decomposition Analysis (DA) is applied to analytically identify and quantify the main explaining factors behind the evolution followed by the increase in agricultural water consumption in the long term.

The report summarizes the agenda, scientific contents, results, contribution to the future direction of the field, and outcomes of the Exploratory research workshop held in Rome and Sabaudia (Italy) on Octobre 7-10th 2013.Le rapport synthétise le déroulement, les contenus scientifiques, les résultats, les contributions aux directiosn futures dans le champ, et les résultats du séminaire de recherche exploratoire tenu à Rome et Sabaudia (Italie) les 7-10 Octobre 2013.

In the 19th Century the Spanish State privatised large areas of common lands and took over management of common wastelands and woodlands, thus stripping the peasants of all the control they had over them. Just as in many other parts of Spain, State intervention in wastelands and woodlands in León was a controversial issue because it was a symptom of conflicting visions or interests: between the State that promoted forestry uses and the peasants whose livelihood, based on agriculture and cattle, depended on common lands. The aim of this paper is to study the motivation behind peasant resistances to State intervention in Northwest Spain in the period 1870-1936. Although the conflicts have been explained from different perspectives (as resistance to market penetration, as "weapons of the poor", or as environmental conflicts), here we argue that the tensions and disputes over the common lands represent the peasants' defence of their livelihoods as well as the struggle for the "opportunities" the market offered.

This paper introduces a new database on Irish land bonds listed on the Dublin Stock Exchange from 1891 to 1938. It outlines the nature of these bonds and presents data on their size, liquidity and market returns. These government-guaranteed bonds arose during a period when the possibility of Irish secession from the United Kingdom appeared ever more likely, and were used to finance the transfer of land ownership from landlords to tenants in Ireland (North and South). Movements in the prices of these bonds can help financial historians understand how financial markets responded to events in the early economic and political history of the Irish Free State, including Irish partition, Independence, Civil War and de facto default. Additionally, understanding these issues has contemporary relevance for regions in Spain (Catalonia, Euskadi), Great Britain (Scotland) and Belgium (Flanders).

This article reconstructs the evolution of disparities in the consumption of dairy products in Spain from the late 1950s to the early twentyfirst century. At the start of the period, there were strong regional disparities, as well as a clear pattern of social hierarchization in the consumption of milk and milk derivatives. These gaps were (totally or substantially) narrowed during the phase of great expansion in consumption that took place until the 1980s. From then on, a new regime of consumption began to take shape and its segmentation pattern consisted mainly of a social re-hierarchization in the consumption of the newest and most dynamic products (refrigerated derivatives) and a significant generational factor in the contraction of milk consumption.

This paper analyses rural conflict in one of the most volatile areas of interwar Europe, the latifundia regions of the South of Spain. The historical and economics literature argues that rural conflict was a bottom-up, spontaneous response of landless peasants to unemployment, bad harvests, land ownership inequality, changes in property rights, and the lack of enforcement of pro-worker legislation. A second generation of historical studies has focused on democratization and concomitant changes in collective bargaining and labor market institutions. Was conflict caused by structural factors like poverty, inequality or unemployment or was conflict an endogenous response to political change? This paper analyzes the pattern of conflict in in three Andalusian provinces (Córdoba, Jaén and Seville) in the early 1930s to argue that the timing and geographical distribution of conflict is consistent with a wave of mobilization linked to greater political opportunities favored by lower repression, pro-worker institutional change, and labor market intervention. Time-series and cross-sectional variation in levels of rural conflict suggest conflict was not a spontaneous response to dismal living standards and inequality. Rather, it emerged in large, fast growing towns of Andalusia and was mediated by the strategic interaction of authorities and experienced rural unions. The instances of rural conflict analyzed here suggest it is very difficult for new democratic governments in agrarian societies to stave rural conflict off with labor-friendly intervention. It is often argued that conflict precedes political and institutional change, but it is shown here that conflict can emerge abruptly as a response to those changes.

Mercury has been one of the most persistent cases in contemporary history of international market regulations and this in spite of its having been affected by important technological changes and the regular discovery of new deposits. This paper offers an approach to the least known period, although perhaps the one in which the greatest rises in process and production occurred as a consequence of market manipulation. The period coincides with a series of agreements between the Spanish and the Italian producers and the outcome was a worldwide cartel known as “Mercurio Europeo” which came into being in 1928. The aims of this work will, therefore, be first to describe the features of the various stages of development of the international mercury market during the first half of the twentieth century, with emphasis on the characteristics and conditioning factors in each period. Secondly, the objective is to analyze the various market agreements that came about, the effectiveness of the clauses therein, the construction of distribution networks and the influence that the increase in production had on other mines and on certain technological developments.

Under weak law-enforcement institutions, a positive shock to the value of natural resources can increase demand for private protection and opportunities for rent appropriation through extortion, ultimately favoring the emergence of mafia-type organizations specialized in such activities. Using a newly collected municipal level dataset, we test this hypothesis by investigating mafia’s emergence in XIX century Sicily, where a severe lack of state property-right enforcement coincided with a steep rise in international demand for sulfur, Sicily’s most valuable export commodity. Consistently with this hypothesis, we find robust evidence of significantly higher early mafia activity in municipalities with greater sulfur availability.

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.

Up to the end of World War II, the political-economic framework had been relatively similar all over Germany. However, the farm structure was different. While in both parts, the West and the East, about 90 per cent of all farms cultivated less than 20 ha and about one per cent more than 100 ha, the large fams cultivated about 7 per cent of the agricultural area in the West, but about 30 per cent in the East. Following the unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945 and its division by the four Allies, the differences in the organisation of agricultural production between East and West became more pronounced. In the Soviet Occupation Zone and then with the creation of the German Democratic Republic in October 1949, the socialist model of agricultural production was introduced in three phases: (1) an enforced land reform between 1945-49; (2) the repression of farmers cultivating more than 20 ha, starting in 1949, and finally (3) the collectivization of agricultural production starting in 1952 and finalised in the Socialist Spring in April 1960. While socialist agriculture had been built up on blood and tears, it came to be fully accepted by the East German population over time and heavily defended also by those political forces which pushed for a regime change in 1989. With the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, socialist agriculture had to be transformed into a system compatible with pluralistic democracy and market economy. Similarly, those whose assets had been confiscated were supposed to be restituted. However, the legal system at reunification differentiated between those who were expropriated either before 1945 or after 1949 and those between 1945 and 1949 under Soviet occupation. While the first group was entitled to restitution, the latter group received little compensation. At the time of transition, most politicians and agricultural economists assumed that family farming would re-emerge in the East and the modes of agricultural production would adjust between the two parts. However, even more than two decades after reunification, German agriculture is characterized by two distinguished different agricultural production systems. While West German agriculture continued the tradition of small-scale family farms relying on family labour, East German agriculture is characterised by large-scale corporate farms relying on permanently employed labour. In this way, German agriculture can be characterised as One country - Two systems.

Under weak law-enforcement institutions, a positive shock to the value of natural resources can increase demand for private protection and opportunities for rent appropriation through extortion, ultimately favoring the emergence of mafia-type organizations specialized in such activities. Using a newly collected municipal level dataset, we test this hypothesis by investigating mafia’s emergence in XIX century Sicily, where a severe lack of state property-right enforcement coincided with a steep rise in international demand for sulfur, Sicily’s most valuable export commodity. Consistently with this hypothesis, we find robust evidence of significantly higher early mafia activity in municipalities with greater sulfur availability.

The Water Framework Directive defines common objectives for water resources throughout the European Union (EU). Given this general approach to water preservation and water policy, the objective of this paper is to analyse whether common patterns of water consumption exist within Europe. In particular, our study uses two methods to reveal the reasons behind sectoral water use in all EU countries. The first method is based on an accounting indicator that calculates the water intensity of an economy as the sum of sectoral water intensities. The second method is a subsystem input-output model that divides total water use into different income channels within the production system. The application uses data from the year 2005 on water consumption in the production system of the 27 countries of the EU. From our analysis it emerges that EU countries are characterized by very different patterns of water consumption. Mediterranean and central/eastern European countries use water mainly for agriculture whereas northern European countries use it mainly for electricity, gas and water supply. In most countries, the water used by the fuel, power and water sector is consumed to satisfy domestic final demand. However, our analysis shows that for some countries exports from this sector are an important driver of water consumption. Focusing on the agricultural sector, the decomposition analysis suggests that water usage in Mediterranean countries is mainly driven by final demand for, and exports of, agricultural products, whereas domestic final demand is the main driver of water consumption in central/eastern European countries. Given these heterogeneous water consumption patterns, our analysis suggests that Mediterranean and central/eastern European countries should adopt specific water policies if water consumption in the European Union is to be efficient.

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.

Still in recent research a low productive peasant economy and traditional peasant society are often made responsible for Southeast Europe's economic backwardness prior to 1945. However, the radical change of paradigm after 1960 in the view of peasants as agents of economic growth and of their ability to adjust to markets has surprisingly never been realized in economic history research on the Balkan-states (Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece). Interpreting agricultural development as a mainly demand-driven process this paper argues that the potential for agricultural growth was much more restricted in Southeast than in Northwest Europe but Balkan peasants seem to have exploited their growth potential as far as possible. There is a lot of evidence that the reasons for sluggish growth before 1940 were definitely not rooted in any 'peasant traditionalism' as often claimed by Balkan elites and many scholars.

This paper explores a simple though neglected mechanism linking land inequality and inefficiency: market power. In underdeveloped economies with serious constraints on labour mobility, high ownership concentration will endow landowners with market power in local labour markets. The resulting equilibrium explains many of the often criticised features of pre-war Italian latifundia, without the need to factor in irrational behaviour (the preferred explanation of Italian traditional historians) or social institutions and capital market imperfections (explanations advanced by economists in different contexts). According to the model here explored the main effects of inequality are of a distributive rather than of a productive nature. The market power hypothesis is strongly supported by the available quantitative evidence provided by an unexploited dataset on all local labour markets of Italy at the end of the 1930s.

From an extensive dataset of wheat yields at municipal level in mid eighteenth-century Spain, a detailed statistical analysis indicates that the differences in wheat yields were mainly a consequence of different natural conditions, and that demand did not have a significant influence. Counterfactual exercises show that improvements in rainfall, altitude or roughness of terrain would have a significant impact on average yields. The paper concludes that, although grain markets in the mid-eighteenth century were well integrated, producers addressed the growing demand not by investing in increasing yields, but by extending the area of cultivated land using the still abundant pastures. The low grain yields in Spain were in part a consequence of the rational behaviour of producers who faced an economic environment characterized by an elastic supply of land

This paper estimates the yields for five grains in 33 provinces of Spain in the mid-18th century. The results show that yields were higher in the north of the country, and that the most fertile provinces of Spain were not far behind the most advanced agricultural regions of the world. Average wheat yields in Spain remained stagnant between 1750 and the late 19th century when they doubled, only to remain stagnant again until the modernisation of the primary sector in the 1960s. Our results show that, in the very long run, yields between provinces tended to converge, and this was the case until the 1960s when the traditional differences in provincial yields began to disappear. The use of artificial fertilisers or new wheat strains were key improvements that helped low yield provinces to break with severe natural constraints such as lack of rainfall or low-quality soils.

This paper evaluates the impact of the rapid growth of mining on the Cypriot economy during the period 1921-1938, with special focus on the expansion of copper sulphate mining. During this period the industry was transformed by companies such as the Cyprus Mining Corporation (CMC) and this affected the whole economy and society. The island was for the first time inundated with substantial foreign direct investment, which encouraged technological adaptation and altered labour relations; as such there has been a debate on how beneficial was mining for the economy at that time. Using substantial primary data we estimated output (GDP share), employment and productivity estimates for the mining industry, as well as profit estimates for the foreign mining firms through the use of a counterfactual. The data allows us to argue that mining was very beneficial in increasing labour productivity and earning foreign exchange, but also highlights that the economic and social benefits for the economy were less than those suggested by the colonial authorities due to mass exports of profits.

This paper addresses the issue of environmental policy instrument choice for achieving deep emissions reductions in the industrial sector. Specifically, it provides: (a) a theoretical review of the conditions under which performance standards can provide efficient incentives for environmental compliance and innovation; and (b) an analysis of the design and the outcomes of the standards-based regulation of industrial pollutants in Sweden during the period 1970- 1990. The empirical findings suggest that the Swedish regulatory approach comprised many key elements of an efficient policy-induced transition towards radically lower emissions in the metal smelting and pulp and paper industries. The regulation relied heavily on performance standards, thus granting flexibility to firms in terms of selecting the appropriate compliance measures, and the standards were implemented in combination with extended probation periods. R&D projects and the new knowledge that was advanced incrementally in interaction between the company, the environmental authorities and the research institutions provided a direct catalyst to the regulatory process. As such the Swedish regulatory approach provided scope for creative solutions, environmental innovation, and permitted the affected firms to coordinate pollution prevention measures with productive investments.

Individuals’ decision to use a particular coastal beach is influenced by their preferences and perceptions as well as beach’s characteristics. This study examines visitors’ attributes and desired site specific characteristics in order to determine the factors affecting willingness to pay for an improvement quality (environment, water as well as recreation activities) program. A contingent valuation survey is carried out in order to evaluate the economic benefits of improving coastal quality of beaches in a coastal line of an area in Central Greece (Volos) where persistent failures to meet the standards of the Blue Flag program are observed. Our empirical findings suggest that the major variables affecting respondents’ willingness to pay were related to income, age, gender, coastal recreational activities and environmental quality of the site as well as to previous environmental behavior and mainly if they had paid for environmental protection in the past.

Alan S. Milward was an economic historian who developed an implicit theory of historical change. His interpretation which was neither liberal nor Marxist posited that social, political, and economic change, for it to be sustainable, had to be a gradual process rather than one resulting from a sudden, cataclysmic revolutionary event occurring in one sector of the economy or society. Benign change depended much less on natural resource endowment or technological developments than on the ability of state institutions to respond to changing political demands from within each society. State bureaucracies were fundamental to formulating those political demands and advising politicians of ways to meet them. Since each society was different there was no single model of development to be adopted or which could be imposed successfully by one nation-state on others, either through force or through foreign aid programs. Nor could development be promoted simply by copying the model of a more successful economy. Each nation-state had to find its own response to the political demands arising from within its society. Integration occurred when a number of nation- states shared similar political objectives which they could not meet individually but could meet collectively. It was not simply the result of their increasing interdependence. It was how and whether nation-states responded to these domestic demands which determined the nature of historical change.

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

IThis article: a) analyzes the evolution of biological innovations in wheat varieties from the middle of nineteenth century to the end of twentieth century, in Britain, France, Spain and Italy, and b) shows that when we consider that aspect of the technological changes in agriculture, it explains better the evolution of grain yields in that cereal. The article also shows the impact of the following four variables on these innovations: scientific advances in biology; and other environmental, institutional and technological factors. The article also provides a new indicator on the evolution of these innovations, which can be particularly useful to better determine the distribution in time of short-stemmed and semi dwarf wheat: wheat production per weight unit of the hay harvested.

In Spain, land reform involving the break-up of large southern estates was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century. It was justified on the grounds of economic efficiency, social equity and the distribution of political power. This paper uses new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was desirable because land redistribution did not take place. Our evidence shows that the relative amount of landless workers decreased largely from 1890 to 1930. This was due to two interrelated market forces: structural change that drained rural population and a decrease in the ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made land cheaper for landless workers. So, given that rural markets did not restrict access to land, the government-initiated land redistribution had no clear-cut justification.

The aim of this article is to assess the empirical evidence of the nexus between aggregate income and energy consumption for Italy during the period 1970-2009, using a time-series approach. After a brief introduction, a survey of the economic literature on this issue is shown, before discussing the data and intro-ducing some econometric techniques. Stationarity tests reveal that both series are non-stationary, or I(1). Moreover, we found a cointegration relationship between the two variables. The short-run dynamics of the variables show that the flow of causality runs from energy use to GDP, and there is a long-run bi-directional causal relationship (or feedback effect) between the two series. Consequently, we conclude that energy is a limiting factor to GDP growth in Italy.

This paper discusses the development of environmental economics from the Industrial Revolution in Europe to today. Specifically, it comments on the general similarities and differences between the representatives of the schools of economic thought concerning the environment. Among others, the issues of scarcity of natural resources, of population growth as well as the limits to growth are discussed and the various views are presented. The paper also comments on the trends of environmental, evolutionary and ecological economics.

Este trabajo tiene como objeto realizar un primer diagnóstico del comportamiento de las cooperativas españolas desde mediados del siglo XX hasta los primeros años de la actual centuria. Muestra cómo reaccionaron las cooperativas ante las trasformaciones estructurales de la economía española donde el impacto de los cambios políticos internos, así como una mayor apertura del país que culminó con la entrada en la Comunidad Económica Europea, modificó un marco normativo que afectó a las empresas cooperativas. Se utiliza el método transversal dejando a un lado el análisis por etapas tan característico en el discurso histórico. La idea es explicar al lector como las empresas cooperativas han ido respondiendo a los vaivenes de los ciclos de la economía española, qué sectores de la actividad productiva se vieron más afectados, y cómo se inició la modernización cuyo resultado fue la aparición de empresas de mayor tamaño. Se quiere indagar si los ciclos de creación de las cooperativas guardan relación con los períodos de expansión o contracción de la economía española. Se trata de conocer si en períodos de dificultades económicas son las empresas con perfil solidario las que mejor reaccionaron

The proliferation of regional trade agreements in the last decades of the 20th century has intensified the debate about the different processes of regional integration. This study contributes to this debate by analysing the principal determinants of the growth in trade flows of the countries making up the European Union. The work analyses EU agri?food trade from a disaggregated perspective, by products, imports and exports, from 1963 to 2000. An extended gravity equation model is estimated employing Prais? Weistein estimation and fixed effects in order to improve on the results reported in previous studies. The results of the present study show that in EU countries the growth of per capita income stimulated exports and reduced imports. Specifically, its exports were positively influenced by the presence of the home market effect, while its imports were strongly influenced by the effects of the liberalisation of intra?EU trade, as also occurred in the case of intra?EU trade flows.

In recent years the European winegrowing regions have been carrying out deep changes in response to increasing international competition, outstanding the case of Spain. This study analyses the main sequences of changes the Spanish wine industry has undergone: the evolution of consumption; the role of exports; the spread of marketing and business organization; the factors that have been involved in the modernization of the wineries. An initial valuation leads us to conclude that it has been an authentic wine revolution in reference to the transformations that have occurred in a period of farming changes and technological modernization for the businesses