In our society today, money's value is measured by what it can buy—its purchasing power—not by its material worth, but it hasn't always been so. · My previous papers Impact of agriculture output on exchange rates and Currency competition-Survival of the fittest dealt with issues surrounding...

The movement of illegal goods and illegal migrants also points to the importance of Mexico. Ignoring Mexico leaves a large hole in the U.S. security perimeter. If it is so easy for goods and people to move across the border, how does the United States plan to improve security without Mexican...

Agriculture accounts for USD 547 billion (approximately) of international trade, which means 9.1% of world merchandise trade and it constitutes 40.9% of world exports in primary products.In the coming decades the agricultural sector faces many challenges stemming from growing global populations,...

This paper aims at analysing, both theoretically and empirically, possible determinants of firm's demand of occupations. Even if traditionally neglected within economics literature, this issue can, in fact, be very useful for Economics, as this paper tries to shows. The theoretical analysis...

This paper analyses the anti-corruption activities of 24 transition countries in the period 1999-2002. These activities are divided into omnibus anti-corruption programmes, legislative reform aimed at tackling corruption, and adherence to international anti-corruption conventions. The paper...

This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be...

This paper develops a proxy measure of the inequality of influence on the basis of survey evidence from 2002 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted among 6,500 firms in 27 transition countries. We refer to the resulting inequality as crony bias in the political...

Based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of firms in transition countries, which unbundles corruption to measure different types of corrupt transactions and provide detailed information on the characteristics and performance of firms, we find that: i)...

Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

In a series of classic works, most notably The Visible Hand (1977) and Scale and Scope (1990), Alfred Chandler focused the spotlight on the large, vertically integrated modern corporation. Put simply, Chandler’s argument is this. In the late nineteenth century, the large vertically integrated...