The world raw material market has undergone a great change in the recent years. One of the essential reasons is the rapid economic growth of many former developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, etc. These countries were historically and typically producers and...

The aim of the paper is to set the agency problem into a broad context of New Institutional Economics with an emphasis on historical connections. In the first section, I explain the historical evolution of basic theoretical concepts like the theory of firm, the theory of market process and the...