Independence from Spain was a complex movement of civil confrontation and long and cruel wars of liberation. Human lives were lost, assets destroyed, capital fled, slavery abolished and public issues left to inexpert administrations, but at the same time there was an important reduction in the...

This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange -- that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492. We focus on the...

Recent research links the inequality across countries and regions to colonial institutions. This paper argues that trade shocks could alter the development path of a country or subnational units, in spite of its colonial institutions. This hypothesis is analyzed using state-level data for...

Inequality is the keyword to understand why Latin-America Left, restructured as democratic and dialogging, emerged after the sinking of communist bastions and their mutation, as the new Chinese "Market-based socialism". Latin-America history shows a strong and fighting Left, featuring the heroic...

The state of anomie that has characterised and still characterises most Latin American countries, resulting from the fragmentation of the social fabric, has encouraged the rise of successful personalist leaderships in the ‘90s. This paper aims at investigating how neopopulism developed in...

The sciences tell us that fears are physical feelings and mental emotions that play a key role in any society. Not many issues related to fear are explored by economists today. The aim of this paper is to go backwards through the history of economic thought, and examine if and how Adam Smith...

Classical, neoclassical and Austrian economists assume that self-interest in exchanges is alone sufficient to make markets work, because of the invisible hand of Adam Smith. This assumption has motivated market deregulation. On the contrary, we argue that Adam Smith was not assuming or...

Libertarians are inclined to view property as best dealt with through contract. They are hostile to IP rights in general, and copyright and patent rights in particular, because these aren't viewed as natural rights over tangible things stemming from the actions of individuals. Still these rights...

This text comprises chapter 13 of Marx and non-equilibrium Economics[1]. It provides a general mathematical specification of a non-equilibrium interpretation of Marx’s theory of value. It refutes the Okishio theorem and solves the transformation problem. It is a foundation work of scholarship...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the discussion among marxists about the rate of profit. This is done by the method of symptomatic reading, hence in a different way from what has become standard. Beginning from the fact that Marx and his critics draw diametrically opposite conclusions...