Diversity of Contract Law and the European Internal Market

This contribution discusses the question whether diversity of contract law among the European member states is a barrier to cross-border trade. This question is important in view of the ongoing debate about the need for a unified European private law. It has tried to answer the question by building upon insights from psychology, economics and law. It turns out that no definitive answer can be given to the question whether the savings in transaction costs through the removal of legal diversity are greater than the losses caused by the termination of competition of legal systems.Unification; Contract Law

Business cycles in the Netherlands, 1815-1913

This article exploits a unique new dataset containing information on the economy of the Netherlands to date business cycles turning points in the 19th century (1815-1913) using a modern econometric technique. The business cycle in the Netherlands is compared to the international (UK and US) business cycle for the second half of the sample. We conclude that business cycles do exist in the Netherlands in the 19th century – even before 1870. The Netherlands follows the international business cycle before 1870 and after 1890. In the in-between period the Dutch production could not meet both domestic demand and export demand.

Consumer demand in the Industrial Revolution: The Netherlands, 1815-1913

The industrial revolution is mostly seen as a supply side phenomenon. Ever since Gilboy stated that factors of demand may have been equally important, scholars have stressed the importance of investments and technological change. This paper re-considers Gilboy?s ideas, using the dataset of the Dutch historical national accounts for the nineteenth century. Using a counterfactual VAR analysis, it is investigated to what extent changes in (determinants of) consumer demand may have affected patterns of industrial development.

The necessity and nuisance of survival, or how to keep our senses

There are analogies between the transition from manuscripts to printed material and from analogue to digital material. When we observe the transition from manuscripts to print materials we see first a degeneration in expression, because woodblock printing was a crude technology compared to the stylus or goosefeather. Lines and symbols especially are broader and irregular. Only when technology permitted a sharper definition of the expression (e.g. with copperengravings or lithography) there came the time that it overreached the possibilities of the manuscript stage. Though digital cartography permits depictions on the scale 1:1 most expressions appear crude compared to the analogue expression. Also because of the colour regime, and partly due to the VDU we have to work with, it offends our esthetical taste a lot of the time. Simultaneously there is a transition in map-content. Manuscript maps are often working survey documents, symbolic, judicial, etc. and mainly give a local view. The printed map tries to give a static view of the earth and the influence of mankind on it as well as mankindâs own interaction, but also gives better possibilities to envisage more realistically remoter (ideas about) space. The digital map will show most probably a more dynamic view of what is represented on the printed map, and carries the danger of disenfranchising the viewer from its base in reality by its inherent virtuality and possibilities for pure abstractions. But the ongoing transition in technology also makes it possible to increase diversity of content and increase the complexity of symbolisation in every consecutive stage

Can a map be a geographic information retrieval tool?

This paper is intended to open up discussion on potential co-operation, which would enable participants restricted by unequal resources and technologies to participate in a pan-European project. The idea has not yet been fully developed but the purpose of the project is to allow digital maps to function not only as geographic resources and educational tools, but to act simultaneously as an interface to metadata-databases. These would contain de-scriptions of maps and spatial databases, as well as locational or geo-referenced resources in books, periodicals, and the Internet