Rent, resources, and technologies are three crucial issues to the understanding of history and economics. The scarcity of resources, its interplay with technology, and the role of rent in explaining both economic growth and income distribution are investigated by adopting a multi-sectoral and non-proportional model, where scarce resources impose several scale constraints that may slow growth, but may contribute to further development of new technologies. In this dynamic framework the category of rent acquires new dimensions with far-reaching implications for both the system of prices and the distribution of income. The analytical and formal-theoretical perspective of this book could be used as a basis for future historical and quantitative studies.

Brings together considerations of the strategic relationship between technology and other resources, such as production capabilities, marketing prowess, finance and organisational culture.

This volume is a history of economics – as it was interpreted, discussed and established as a discipline – in the 20th century. It highlights the pluralism of the discipline and brings together leading voices in the field who reflect on their lifelong work. The chapters draw on a host of traditions of economic thought, including pre-classical, classical, Marxian, neoclassical, Sraffian, post-Keynesian, Cantabrigian and institutionalist traditions in economics. Further, the volume also looks at the history of economics in India and its evolution as a discipline since the country’s independence. This book will appeal to students, researchers and teachers of economics and intellectual history, as well as to the interested general reader.

This research deals with the increasingly complex issues of waste generation, waste management and waste disposal that in less developed industrialised countries present diverse but critical concerns. It takes a socio-economic and policy-oriented perspective and provides empirical evidence at EU and regional level. The EU and Italy are taken as relevant case studies given the disparities in environmental performances between less and more developed areas. The rich and various empirical evidence shows that a robust delinking between waste generation and economic growth is still not present, thus future policies should directly address the problem at the source by targeting waste generation in EU countries. Some structural factors like population density and urbanisation present themselves as relevant drivers of both waste management and landfill diversion. Nevertheless, economic and structural factors alone are not sufficient to improve waste performances. Though waste policies are to be redesigned by covering the entire area of waste management, some first signals of policy effectiveness are arising. This work will be of most interest to those students of environmental economics and environmental sciences, as well as policy makers, waste utility managers and companies in the waste management sector.

Economists since the First Industrial Revolution have been interested in the links between economic growth and resources, often pointing to resource scarcities as a hindrance to growth. Offering a counter perspective, this volume highlights the positive role that scarcities can play in inducing technical progress and economic growth. It outlines a structural framework for the political economy of scarcity and rents, and offers a novel way of organizing the evidence concerning the role of resources in industrial growth. This book proposes a major shift in the treatment of scarcity issues by focusing on bottlenecks and opportunities arising within the production system, and will appeal to economists and policy makers interested in the role of resources as triggers of structural change.