Business Groups collect and coordinate legally autonomous firms spanning both within and across national borders . They represent a lion's share of value added generation on a world scale, and yet they received little attention in economics literature, probably due to a lack of detailed data. In...

Between now and 2050, humanity must face a double problem: the growing scarcity of oil and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These “bathtub problems” cannot be considered independently as hydrocarbon scarcity paves the way to coal, while climate policies open the path...

As stated by Jonathan Stern in his foreword to the volume "The Globalization of Natural Gas Markets: New Challenges and Opportunities for Europe" by Manfred Hafner and Simone Tagliapietra, the terms "globalisation and "gas markets" could only have been placed in the same title of a book on this...

Thomas Friedman’s so-called First Law of Petropolitics (FLP) hypothesizes the existence of a causal relationship between oil prices and “the pace of freedom”. Such a principle has attracted considerable attention, as well as criticism. This paper argues that, in order to firmly establish...

Iran is the perennial “elephant in the room” of international gas trade. The country could well become, one day, a major game changer of international gas markets but today its potential still remains fundamentally untapped due to a number of geopolitical and commercial reasons. Iran owns...

The geographical distribution of African natural gas resources is going through a period of profound change as new gas discoveries in East Africa emerge to reshape the continent's energy landscape. This region is rapidly establishing itself as a world-class natural gas province and two countries...

Can the boom in oil prices be explained in terms of tightened market fundamentals? Or has the oil market been distorted by the entry of financial players? This article will try to shed light on the marked increase in volatility during the latest 2008-2009 price cycle and on the role of...

This article describes future energy and emissions scenarios in China. Using the scenarios on future economic development, energy use and emissions generated by the Integrated Assessment Model WITCH, a few key messages are highlighted. In particular, for the crucial role that China has and will...

How may tension and conflict in oil, gas and mineral markets undermine future global peace and economic development? Which new modes of behaviour can promote an appropriate balance between competition and collaboration? Possible answers to these key questions stem from the EU project on the...

Today’s world is dramatically different from what it was forty or even only twenty years ago. The population and primary energy consumption figures have shot upwards, and global future perspectives are changing, because the world needs more and more natural resources to keep up with its high...