This article aims to investigate the multiple meanings of "économie sociale" ("social economy"), a term which first appeared in France at the founding moment of modern capitalism, both as a concept in the framework for the creation of a social science in close relation with the tradition of...

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) proposes an original way to solve the incentive dilemma for the production of information goods, based on von ippel's user-as-innovator principle (1988): as users benefit from innovation, they have incentive to produce it, and as they can expect cumulative...

The financial crisis has turned into a real economic crisis and then into a public finance crisis: its political and social implications show very obviously, even to the most unaware people, how much economic matters are a social and political phenomenon. Is political economy going to be more...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between inequality and the environment in a growing economy from a political economy perspective. We consider an endogenous growth economy, where growth generates pollution and a deterioration of the environment. Public expenditures may either be...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the international trade cooperation in order to determine the sustainable cooperative tariff rates in a political economy perspective. This paper establishes a tariff-setting game among two countries as a two-phase game : negotiation phase and...

A vast recent literature has stressed social fragmentation's negative impact on the provision of public goods. This is a key issue, given that public goods availability has been reckoned as crucial to economic development, while developing countries' societies often exhibit high degrees of...

This paper discusses how the economic structure and asset ownership shape economic and political outcomes. Using a simple model of the productive sector, I provide theoretical evidence that complementarities between productive assets reduce the stakes of political competition, and therefore...

An unfunded Social Security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as "political risk", that future generations modify or even suppress the contributions. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked...

A vast recent literature has stressed social fragmentation's negative impact on the provision of public goods. It has been established theoretically that social fragmentation engenders discord and thereby undermines public goods provision. Empirical research has produced mixed results about this...

The funding of social protection has strongly evolved in Bismarckian countries : whereas social protection used to rely on social contributions, since the 1990s most of the new expenditures have been funded through taxation, leading to a more balanced mix in the structure of social protection...