After more than half a century, the reflections of Albert O. Hirschman on development assistance, the role of consultant 'experts' in providing policy advice and the 'visiting economist's syndrome' are still very current. In as much as Hirschman argued against all-encompassing policy frameworks,...

Among the many studies on migration before the Great War, Italy has received little attention, with a few notable exceptions and without providing a convincing explanation of its economic and demographic determinants. Standard neoclassical approaches explain emigration as driven by relative...

The Capability Approach argues individual advantage should be evaluated in the space of freedom of choice, that is in the space of capability. Yet, empirical applications are hampered by the lack of appropriate data and indicators. This paper aims at providing a reliable and valid indicator...

The existence of linkages between the agricultural sector and the rest of the economy points to the specificity of that sector and justifies why we can conceive of a macroeconomics of agriculture. The primary sector is characterized by product homogeneity, a pre-condition for the absence of...

Structural time series analysis, which requires no prior assumptions regarding stationarity and allows for a wide variety of behavior, reveals that the net barter terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures has a negative deterministic trend over this century as hypothesized by...