The economic literature of property rights has been assessing the impact of different community based arrangements on the efficiency of natural resource management of specific areas. Differently, other strands of development economics and policy-oriented research have been concerned with issues...

Over a quarter of the world's population lives in economies that have undertaken transitions from central planning to market economies. These transitions entail far-reaching and complex changes in social, economic and political institutions and have had widely divergent outcomes. Important...

The paper focuses in the calculation of the oil capital value in a small open economy depending on oil rents. The Venezuelan case is used as an example. In valuing the oil capital, two issues are recalled and discussed: how should the exploration costs and the capital gains be treated? It is...

There are more and more industries in which firms are specialized in the production of a component of the final good. This is especially true in high-tech industries. The basic question is why don't these firms merge? We paradoxically show that industries which are typical candidates for...

The paper is an overview of diversity in history, starting as far back as the societies in classical Ancient Europe and traditional non-European societies, where differentiation was basically between the enslaved and free population and the out-of-caste in India. With the end of slavery the...