This paper revisits old questions of the proper subject and bounds of economics: Does economics study “provisioning”? or markets? or a method of reasoning, self-interested rational optimization? A variety of scholars and others in many fields make use of a taxonomy of society consisting of...

The three “spheres” of society (governments, markets, and communities) are widely acknowledged yet the overall organization is analyzed only rarely, and interactions between the spheres have perhaps never been modeled. Fiske’s four relational models (community-sharing, authority-ranking,...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the effects of specific economic freedom categories on both economic growth and the environment, and present some important considerations for cross-country regressions. First, there is a survey of arguments for positive as well as negative effects of...

Politics and economics are inextricably linked. Government establishes and enforces the rules of the game for the economy, thereby determining not only how much wealth is created, but also how wealth is distributed across society. The primary question of political economy is easily stated: for...

This paper examines the most productive authors, institutions and countries in regional and urban science from 1991 to 2000 using information on published articles (and pages) from a sample of widely recognized journals in this field: ARS, JUE, JRS, IJURR, IRSR, PRS, RSUE, RS and US. We also...

Different recent works have shown that Spanish economic research has increased its international presence during the nineties. These works have also found that there is a duality in the diffusion of the research through national or international journals in function of the considered research...

The current state of regional and urban science has been much discussed and a number of studies have speculated on possible future trends in the development of the discipline. However, there has been little empirical analysis of current publication patterns in regional and urban journals. This...

The pioneers of Swedish economics at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century were to a large extent influenced by German ideas and German academic life. They went to Germany to study, and their scientific works were usually written in German or Swedish. During the 20th century the...

In this paper we examine, in some depth, the research practices of New Zealand’s academic economists. To date, virtually all published work in this area has focussed on the overall productivity of the country’s economics departments. However, such rankings give little information on the...

The ranking of an academic journal is important to authors, universities, journal publishers and research funders. Rankings are gaining prominence as countries adopt regular research assessment exercises that especially reward publication in high impact journals. Yet even within a...