In this paper human subsistence is used as focal perspective. Working on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Mandeville’s Fable we speculate on the role of passions in shaping the structural dynamics of the economic system. Subsistence is here seen as a historical process of ‘making’ an...

Feminist studies have developed several tools to assess the gender impact of public policy and of budgets in particular. In this paper we introduce an innovative approach to the gender auditing of public budgets inspired by the capability approach. First, we expand the scope of the assessment of...