This paper conceptualises foreign aid as a geopolitical form of rent in order to help distinguish the conditions under which aid is detrimental to sustained economic recovery from those where it is beneficial. Foreign aid shares with natural resource rent and contrived (i.e., government monopoly) rent the property of being a large revenue stream that is detached from the economic activity that ...

Over the past century, the tuna canning industry has been dominated by a few big companies, some of them having changed of ownership or merged: these oligopolistic firms are the “big three” in the USA, Van Camp, Star Kist, and Bumble Bee, the French Saupiquet, the Italian Trinity Alimentari and the Spanish Calvo in Europe, and, a bit later, the Thailandese groups Thai Union and Sea Value. Speci...

Regular polygonal complexes in euclidean 3-space E3 are discrete polyhedra-like structures with finite or infinite polygons as faces and with finite graphs as vertex-figures, such that their symmetry groups are transitive on the flags. The present paper and its predecessor describe a complete classification of regular polygonal complexes in E3. In Part I we established basic structural results ...

Fractions obtained from partitioning of aerial methanolic extract of Euphorbia Aellenii with chloroform (E2), ethyl acetate (E3), n-butanol (E4) and water (E5) were investigated in vitro for their phytotoxicity, insecticidal, anti-leishmanial, cytotoxicity, antibacterial and antifungal activities. Sample E2 appeared to have significant phytotoxic activity. In the insecticidal screening study o...

This a conceptual paper concerning the relation between innovativeness and monopoly rent/abnormal earnings. It discusses how these concepts can be measured and proposes that abnormal earnings are the result differentiation, by innovativeness (monopoly rent) or branding, by underor overvalued assets, or by imperfect market information (value irrelevance). Specifically, innovativeness as a driver...

This Briefing Paper describes the spatial pattern of housing association rents across England in the first year of the rent-restructuring regime. It examines the extent to which housing associations' current average rents for given property sizes differ within each local authority area; whether there is a geographical pattern in these differences across the country; whether rents within each pr...

Rent control is an economic abomination. It diverts investments away from residential rent units, it leads to their deterioration, it is responsible for urban decay such as in the South Bronx, it does not help poor tenants, it is a horrendous means of income redistribution. Yet this economic regulation is beloved of intellectuals (hot beds of pro rent control sentiment are Berkeley, Ann Arbor a...

This paper adds to the empirical literature on rent control. We hypothesize that rent control affects commute times. New Jersey census tract data (from the Urban Institute/Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database) show a positive and statistically significant relationship between rent control and commute times for 1980, 1990 and 2000. For 1980 and 1990, we confirm that it is a lack of household m...

We consider the effects of rent-seeking activities on resource allocation. Before rent-seeking activities take place, there are prior probabilities that an object will be given to one of several agents. The posterior probability depends on prior probabilities and the expenses incurred by all agents. In the case of two agents who equally value the object, prior and posterior probabilities coinci...