Spanish Bureaucratic-Patrimonialism in America

World Trade in Medicinal Plants from Spanish America, 1717–1815

This article outlines the history of the commerce in medicinal plants and plant-based remedies from the Spanish American territories in the eighteenth century. It maps the routes used to transport the plants from Spanish America to Europe and, along the arteries of European commerce, colonialism and proselytism, into societies across the Americas, Asia and Africa. Inquiring into the causes of t...

Constructions of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

Development of Electronic Commerce in Spanish-Speaking Latin America

This paper surveys management and policy issues concerning the development of electronic commerce in Spanish-speaking Latin America. The region has the world’s fastest growth rate of Internet connectivity, and firms in several countries are positioning themselves to quickly take advantage of electronic commerce. Presently, electronic commerce capability is concentrated among export-oriented fir...

Bureaucratic Responses

This paper’s interest is in understanding how bureaucracies should respond to their clients. I claim that because many services are not priced, bureaucratic responses to their clients will often be the opposite of the reactions of “normal” firms. Specifically, they ignore the most credible complaints from clients, provide the poorest service to clients to value the service most, and require mos...

Aspects of bureaucratic corruption

This review attempts to identify treatments of corruption that draw upon characteristics of underdevelopment either as causes or as consequences. It focuses on three aspects of corruption in developing economies: red tape, rent-seeking, and the abundance of intermediaries. Red tape is presented as arising from differences in abilityto-pay and willingness-to-pay, which is a consequence of incomp...