This article is based on the lesson presented in the scope of academy activities in the area of Sociology (at FCT-UNL). It is intended to approach the controversies concerning the relation between technology and society (technological determinism, effect on employment, importance of the social...

A growing number of Africans flees from their desolate economic situation or violent conflicts and political persecution at home to Europe. The European Union shares responsibil-ity for this growing economic misery, in view of its egoistic external trade policy. Neverthe-less, it intensifies the...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the state of corporate governance as a major factor affecting the growth performance of the private sector in MENA countries. For this purpose both country-specific assessments, carried out by World Bank-IMF teams (so-called ROSC’s assessments) and...

The concern of this paper is to highlight time use as a valuable resource and important factor in the development process of Less Developed Countries. It propounds time use,that is neglected in Development studies, as an important factor in human development index. The role of time management as...

Growth rate of real GDP per capita is represented as a sum of two components – a monotonically decreasing economic trend and fluctuations related to a specific age population change. The economic trend is modeled by an inverse function of real GDP per capita with a numerator potentially...

The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and derives the welfare criterion that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these...

Abstract This article is a part of a twin study. Drawing on the available evidence, in this paper the author examines the cost of compliance with Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures for poor countries with reference to Africa. He shows that the burden of cost of compliance is entirely on...

The relationship between financial development and economic growth were the subject of many recent theorical and empirical works [Shepherd, Hasan and Klapper, 2004; Gylfason, 2004; Rioja and Valev, 2003; Driffill, 2004; Haas, 2002; Carlin and Mayer, 2000]. These authors generally focused their analysis of the link...

This paper investigates whether the ‘Kuznets hypothesis’, that economic growth from low levels of GDP per capita is initially associated with an increase in income inequality and later followed by a decline in inequality, is supported by evidence for a less-developed country, Indonesia. The...

We study the impact of foreign banks' presence in Central and Eastern Europe's countries on their economic development and on the financial crisis they went through. We show that, despite a certain vulnerability of the domestic banking systems, the consequences of the opening of the banking...