The 30-year rule governing the release of Cabinet papers means that the British people only learned of a covert 1980s policy to manage the decline of northern England in early 2012. We can only guess at what is really being said behind closed doors today. There are some clues in a series of...

Social justice poses the question of the mutual commitments to which members of society can be bound, and the reasons for this. Elmar Nass examines whether or not this is true and if so, which social standards may counteract discretion. (Published in German.)

This paper aims to explain the significant variations in the social contracts which can be observed across nations. It shows in particular how countries with similar technologies and preferences, as well as equally democratic political systems, can sustain very different avrage and marginal tax...

If poverty and nutrition are issues also of social justice and the commitment that a democratic state makes to its citizens (namely, ridding the country of hunger and malnutrition and also of ensuring food security) then the discipline of economics needs to pose its problem differently. The...

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor – their ‘morals’ and ‘culture’ – responsible for their own situation and b) positioning...

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor – their ‘morals’ and ‘culture’ – responsible for their own situation and b)...

Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor -- their "morals" and "culture" -- responsible for their own situation and b) positioning the causes...

The general idea is to follow the Varieties-of-Capitalism literature on generating indicators on the economic systems actually implemented. However, this literature mostly concentrates on the enterprise (or micro) level in traditional OECD countries, categorizing countries between the extremes:...