This issue brings together five articles on the modern petroleum industry. Two cover the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century: Michael Adamson's study of the development by independent oilman Ralph Lloyd of California's coastal oil region; and the study by Lisa Bud-Frierman,...

It is an established fact that debt-ridden and peasant farmers who are highly productive who form the bulk of the population especially in developing countries and for whom marginal propensity to consume is highly with practically no saving capacity and for whom the allowances and reliefs...

This article reviews China's land tenure system, which is featured with differential treatment of rural and urban citizens with respect to three types of land tenure: urban land tenure, arable land tenure and rural residential land tenure. With the urban residents fully participated in the...

Based on the variable rate of GDP per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan and South Korean: M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (a la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...

Many rural poor people in developing countries depend on agriculture and are highly influenced by climatic change. Adaptation to climate change impacts is increasingly being observed in both physical and ecological systems as well as in human adjustments to resource availability and risk at...

Afghanistan's economic problems are often assumed to stem solely from the internal warfare that began in 1978. Is this assumption correct? I consider this question by comparing Afghanistan from 1961 to 2006 with Pakistan (a neighboring country with a similarly low level of development in the...

Agriculture around the world is going though many changes, including globalization, new emerging technologies, environmental concerns, tendency to produce highly specialized goods, and global merging of food producers and retailers. These changes follow political, institutional, technological...

About forty lakh hectare of land is under cotton cultivation in Maharashtra. Once known as the prosperous cotton-belt; today the irony is that the state tops the list when it comes to suicides by farmers. Further, almost all of them are cotton farmers mostly from Vidarbha. At present, Vidarbha...

This paper employs an economic approach to analyze the influence of Confucian filial piety on economic growth in ancient China. In the highly imperfect credit market of the time, filial piety, as a unique mechanism for fulfilling intergenerational contracts, could to some extent solve problems...