Outlines the background and aims of the Millennium Development Goals. Presents a brief introduction to the articles in this special issue.

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Keynes's practical writings on the crisis in the Lancashire cotton spinning industry in the 1920s were consistent with the 1930s theoretical conceptualisation of user costs in the General Theory. It is suggested that the key (common) link between these...

Purpose – With globalisation pressures and increasing burdens on governments to provide comprehensive social services, there is now a need to better understand how firms play their part in sharing these burdens. Views vary from those who believe that CSR and CSI are distractions from profit...

This paper contends that concerns with excess, alongside scarcity, have been present in the work of key analysts in economic thought, from Adam Smith to today's models of 'resource curses'. In the context of climate change, Bataille's vision of the 'accursed share' raises an important issue on...

What binds most of the disparate writings by institutional economists (broadly defined), from the earlier progenitors, such as Veblen, Keynes and Galbraith, to the modern institutionalists, including Means, Fusfield and Hodgson, is their questioning of many of the tenets of neoclassical theory....

Given the role of foreign direct investment in the development process, one of the most important challenges facing Africa is how to attract foreign direct investment. A number of attempts have been made, but most have been unsuccessful because of various factors that work against the business...