Human Gene Patents and the Question of Liberal Morality

Since the establishment of the Human Genome Project and the identification of genes in human DNA that play a role in human diseases and disorders, a long, moral and political, battle has began over the extension of IPRs to information contained in human genetic material. According to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, over the past 20 years, large numbers of human genes have been the subject of thousands of patent applications. This paper examines whether human gene patents can be justified in terms of liberal theories of morality such as natural law, personality development, just reward and social utility. It is argued that human gene patents are in conflict with fundamental principles of liberal morality and justice because they result in “genetic information feudalism”

Finance and growth: a macroeconomic assessment of the evidence from a European angle

This paper reviews the literature on the finance-growth nexus within a neoclassical growth framework, placing an emphasis on the policy implications in the current European environment, that has placed financial reforms high on the policy Agenda. While more research is needed to establish causality and verify the theoretical channels linking access to finance and growth, firm-level, industry-level, macro, and country-specific studies all tend to show a significant correlation between financial efficiency and economic performance. The empirical evidence hint that in underdeveloped and emerging countries financial development fosters aggregate growth mainly by lowering the cost of capital, while in advanced economies by raising total-factor-productivity. JEL Classification: G00, O00Development, Europe, finance, Financial Institutions, Financial Intermediation, Growth Decomposition, productivity

Adjustment to target capital, finance and growth

Does financial development result in capital being reallocated more rapidly to industries where it is most productive? We argue that if this was the case, financially developed countries should see faster growth in industries with investment opportunities due to global demand and productivity shifts. Testing this cross-industry cross-country growth implication requires proxies for (latent) global industry investment opportunities. We show that tests relying only on data from specific (benchmark) countries may yield spurious evidence for or against the hypothesis. We therefore develop an alternative approach that combines benchmark-country proxies with a proxy that does not reflect opportunities specific to a country or level of financial development. Our empirical results yield clear support for the capital reallocation hypothesis.Financial development, sector analysis, growth, measurement error, investment opportunities

The long-run effects of the scramble for Africa

We examine the long-run consequences of the scramble for Africa among European powers in the late 19th century and uncover the following empirical regularities. First, utilizing information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization, we show that apart from the land mass and water area of an ethnicity’s historical homeland, no other geographic, economic, and historical trait, including proxies of pre-colonial conflict, predicts partitioning by the national borders. Second, we exploit a detailed geo-referenced database that records various types of conflict across African regions and show that civil conflict is concentrated in the historical homeland of partitioned ethnicities. We also document that violence against civilians (child soldiering, village burning, abductions, rapes) and territorial changes between rebel groups, militias, and government forces are more prevalent in the homelands of split groups. These results are robust to a rich set of local controls, the inclusion of country fixed effects and ethnic-family fixed effects. The uncovered evidence brings in the foreground the violent repercussions of an important aspect of European colonization, that of ethnic partitioning

Neoliberalising technoscience and environment: EU policy for competitive, sustainable biofuels

This chapter discusses how EU biofuels policy: stimulates new markets for knowledge as well as resources; assumes that markets drive beneficent innovation; and thus deepens links between markets, technoscience and environment. The theoretical concept ‘neoliberalising the environment’ is extended to links between technoscience and natural resources

An Investigation of the Environmental Turbulence Factors and their Sources in the Collaboration - Post-harvest Food Loss Relationship

Recent studies suggested that collaboration among upstream agricultural supply chain (ASC) partners will impact and possibly reduce postharvest food loss (PHFL) levels; a possible direct relationship between collaboration and PHFL was indicated. There have been many changes in the ASC’s environment related to globalization, changing consumer attitudes and concerns, changing markets, increased competition, new technologies, commodity price fluctuations, food safety and quality standards and regulations, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform in EU. The aforementioned changes cause turbulence in ASC’s environment and possibly impact both collaboration level among upstream partners and PHFL levels. The Greek ASC environment is characterized as being highly turbulent due to the changes in EU’s ASC environment. Contingency theory (CT) is utilized to conceptualize the different environmental turbulence factors in the Greek ASC. This research aims to identify the relevant environmental turbulence factors in the Greek ASC that might moderate the collaboration-PHFL relationship in the Greek ASC