The aim of this study is to assess the relationship between tariff barriers and world trade growth from a comparative and historical perspective, and –to derive some useful indications for evaluating the effectiveness of the current multilateral trading system for promoting world trade. The...

The distributive incidence of environmental policies has not been widely investigated whereas more attention has been focused on the efficiency of environmental reforms. According to the Kyoto Protocol, domestic policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions can include carbon/energy taxes,...

The increasing attention given to global energy issues and the international policies needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have given a renewed stimulus to research interest in the linkages between the energy sector and economic performance at country level. In this paper, we analyse the...

We introduce notions of increasingness for the best reply of a game that capture properly the intuitive idea of complementarity among players’ strategies. We show, by generalizing the fixpoint theorems of Veinott and Zhou, that the Nash sets of our games with increasing best replies are...

One of the foundations of the labour theory of value used by Ricardo in the Principles is that rent does not enter into commodity prices. In response to objections raised by Malthus and Say, Ricardo defended this idea by arguing that even where all cultivated land pays rent, the last dose of...

In this paper we analyze whether and which political institutions are important for famine prevention and for keeping the levels of inequality low. While famines are sudden crises hitting a country, inequality is a structural problem. As a consequence, the institutions needed might be very...