The author of this paper intends to compare two industrial territories from western France: Chateau-Renault and Surgères. Chateau-Renault is a tanning center, and the city of Surgères houses a vast dairy. The industries of both areas deal with products of animal origins deriving from...

Abstract (English) In recent years there have been major advances in our historical knowledge of regional disparities in Italy; as a consequence, the debate on the causes of the North-South divide (and thus, ultimately, on strategies and possibilities to overcome it) has also revived. By mainly...

The recent work by E. Felice, Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro, il Mulino, Bologna, 2013, is rather a pamphlet than a book of economic history. In the present article, we discuss both the statistical series of regional GDP from 1871 until 2001 worked out by Felice (section 1), and the...

George Orwell is famous for his two final fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These two works are sometimes understood to defend capitalism against socialism. But as Orwell was a committed socialist, this could not have been his intention. Orwell's criticisms were directed not...

Understanding the degree and evolution of competition across industries is an important step towards understanding the impact of economic reform and competition on economic growth in Vietnam during the economic transition. In this paper, we investigate evolution of competition in Vietnam during...

We discuss the typical mistakes in carrying out reforms that promote redistributive activities and give rise to redistribution cycles; each cycle includes the stages of reform, stabilization and recovery. We provide arguments that show that a possible way out of the institutional backwardness...

Any legislative framework is likely to generate different institutions or norms of behavior which the legislator occasionally could have never foreseen. I suggested a general pattern, on which inefficient, if stable, norms or institutions called institutional traps would form.

The theory of institutional traps, i.e. ineffective but stable institutions or behavior norms, is develope din connection with economic reforms. Mechanisms are described that cause a system to get into a trap and ways of going out of it are analyzed. Concepts of transformation costs and...

Orwell's famous fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four criticized totalitarian forms of socialism from a Public Choice perspective, assuming that socialism would work as an economic system as long as the proper political institutions were in place to curb the potential for the abuse of...