Adam Smith proposed three contradictory theories of the British Empire in the Wealth of Nations. The first view holds that the empire was created for merchants eager to monopolize the colonial trade. Smith concludes that “Great Britain derives nothing but loss” from the colonies. In the...

Industrial revolution in the West was followed by a major decline in artisan activities in the colonies and semi-colonies in the East.This is known as de-industrialisation. This paper develops a two-sector neo-Ricardian framework to stylize the functioning of a pre-capitalist economy in those...

This paper proposes a new explanation for the emergence of democratic institutions: elites may extend the right to vote to the masses in order to attract migrant workers. I argue that representative assemblies serve as a commitment device for any promises made to labourers by those in power, and...

The United Kingdom (UK) officially left the European Union (EU) in January 2020. While the nature of its future relations with the rest of the EU Members is couched in a Trade and Cooperation Agreement concluded in extremis in December 2020, it will cease to be part of several agreements...

New institutional economics lacks a theory of state formation which could help us to deal with the mega question of why some states became more efficient than others at establishing and and sustaining institutions. Some kind of middle range theory could be formulated based upon historical case...

The return to economic liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon world was motivated by the apparent failure of Keynesian economic management to control the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the theories of economic liberalism, championed by Friederich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and...

This chapter offers a twofold shift in the application of the ‘credible commitment' concept laid down by North and Weingast in their classic 1989 article. It examines the concept in the context of charter-granting, rather than in that of the national debt and the government bond market, and...

This article analyzes the Directive on Temporary Agency Work (2008) in the face of a new internal market in services in the European Union. I argue that the adoption of this Directive is paradoxical: on the one hand, it breaks the lengthy stalemate characterizing workers' and employers' efforts...