This paper comments on a number of social obstacles to the economic growth and technological change of African economies from the perspective of economic history. Economic history is full of evidence about what held African economies back for years. Some obstacles are of domestic origin such as...

In the very popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top twenty-four contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, Simon...

Media companies from all over the world are undergoing a digitalization process, forced by the rapid distribution of technologies and by the proliferation of computer networks. The multimedia newsroom has become a reality in less than a decade even in media companies that were reluctant to the...

There is no doubt; consumer credits are more and more present in the economic life of the Chileans. It is enough to go to any shopping mall, supermarket or even medical centre to realize that today it is possible to buy almost everything with some kind of loan. The expansion of consumer credit...

Divorce, common-law marriage and illegitimacy (irrespective of its forms) were, no matter the society typology as the phenomenon is approached, forms of social deviation that entailed the dilution of the family image and norms. We do not discuss here about a dilution of the traditional norms...

The image of the European culture is given by the association of the concepts people-culture-history-territory, which provides certain local features. From this relation, we identify a cultural area with local, regional and national features beyond a certain European culture. Thus, we identify...

I maintain that fatalistic tendencies are the output of the interaction between cultural factors (and in particular of religious beliefs) and historical Institutional experience. Using WVS data this idea has been tested against two well known sociological theories on the origin of fatalism:...

The employability of graduates remains a concern, most particularly at times like the present where the unemployment rate tends to rise, and that higher education graduates are facing greater difficulties in accessing the labour market in Europe. Notably, women are characterized by higher...

The proposed book represents a serious, thoughtful and original contribution to the study of the political economy of Punjab, and more generally to the analysis of regional economic development in federally organised states in the developing world. It focuses on the Punjab, a geo-politically...

The reasons why inventions that shaped industrial revolutions, occurred in the UK and in the USA, have been suggested by economic historians. For the first time,we access the determinants of more than a hundred inventions around the world, explaining why they occurred in a given country and why...