The paper studies how risks specific to a nuclear power investment in liberalised markets – regulatory, construction, operation and market risks – can be mitigated or transferred away from the plant investor through different contractual and organisational arrangements. It argues that significant risk transfers onto governments, consumers, and, vendors are likely to be needed to make nuclear po...

This paper outlines a research program comparing the economic organization of agriculture in the United States and European Union. Both have highly developed agricultural sectors but their organizational arrangements vary widely. Comparative analysis not only provides a broad set of firms and industries to compare, but also highlights the interaction between the institutional environment and th...

The traditional view that excise taxes are regressive has been challenged. I document the history of the term regressive tax, show that traditional definitions have always found cigarette taxes to be regressive, and illustrate the implications of the greater price responsiveness observed among the poor. I explain the different definitions of tax burden: accounting, welfare-based willingness to ...

Exploring an alternative way to approach famine relief interventions, this paper draws on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault and David Keen's recent work on south-west Sudan. It suggests that different discourses on 'famine' can lead to the dominance of certain kinds of institutional practices, and the prioritisation of special kinds of knowledge, at the expense of other modes of un...

Since independence, different institutional arrangements have been tried to reorganize the land and production relations for bringing change in farming systems and enhancing crop yield of small farmers. But, these interventions have not been successful in bringing any meaningful improvement. Non-viability of small landholdings, inadequacies in the availability of inputs, poor extension and infr...

This article explores the kinds of institutional arrangements most likely to be able to address sustainability issues. The term “institutions” is taken to mean the wide array of social, political, legal, and economic arrangements, structures, and rules—not simply institutions of the state, but of community and society more broadly. Of particular interest here is the interconnection of people an...

The designation of outer space as a global commons is contentious issue. Some argue that officially recognizing it such could discourage private investment, while others claim would not sufficiently promote sustainability. To address these debates, this article examines how actors use framework in their institutional arrangements. Based on collection 1042 arrangements, we characterize subset ar...

The objective of this article is to clarify the extent and the conditions under which the European Dnion (ED) induces changes in the policy arrangements of its member states. For an accurate measurement of our dependent variable, we distinguish between ED-induced policy expansion and ED-induced policy dismantling. We argue that the extent to which European requirements lead to an expansion or d...

Information Society Technologies affect eVoting, eParticipation and eGovernance. Collective governance engages public, private and civil domains. Societal decision-making arrangements involve division of responsibilities among them and (layered) governance and implementation in each. Technology changes both ‘optimal’ and actual arrangements – not always in the same direction. The paper discusse...

During the 1990s, wage setting increasingly became coordinated in many Member States of the European Union (EU), often through new arrangements involving broad encompassing social pacts between employers, trade unions, and governments striking deals across policy areas from wages to social and employment policies. We argue that the different forms of institutional innovation in wage setting fou...