As stated in the preamble of the founding Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC) of 1957, the essential goal of European integration, is to improve the living and employment situation (usually measured in terms of per-capita GDP and unemployment rate) of EU citizens. From an economic...

We develop a formalism to study linearized perturbations around the equilibria of a pure exchange economy. With the use of mean field theory techniques, we derive equations for the flow of products in an economy driven by heterogeneous preferences and probabilistic interaction between agents. We...

The sovereign debt crisis, which currently affects especially the European Union, challenges on the one side the actuality of hard borders and the reexamination of soft borders (Horga & Brie, 2008), and on the other side the need for the European Union to deal with an even more complex global...

In this paper technical standardisation is understood and explained in a model where economic analysis is coupled with an analysis of the political system as proposed in rational choice theory. The aim is to answer both the question why various countries (e.g. the United States versus European...

This paper discusses possible ways to overcome the situation of physical isolation and the multiple failures that pervade Andean villages. Specifically, it studies a training program developed by a Peruvian NGO, which aims at triggering the development of a market for agricultural services that...

The social capital has strengthened the solidarity funds when the legal mechanisms and institutions for monitoring and assistance would not have been present. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of social capital on productivity and performance of the Mexican solidarity funds. For...

This paper explains the notion of market in historical perspective and the role markets play in free enterprise economies. It lists the major market failures and the role governments are expected to play in regulating and supplementing markets including the promotion of CSR from Islamic...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...