The last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed only a miniscule growth in the agricultural output of the Cotton South.’ By the beginning of the twentieth century, all dreams of a “New South” had been dashed and the region would be characterized by any reasonable criterion as economically backward. In One Kind of Freedom (Ransom and Sutch, 1977) we argued that this inability of the S...

A number of cross-country comparisons do not find a robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. In part this may reflect the prediction in economic theory that a negative relationship should exist primarily for rich countries with large public sectors. In this paper an econometric panel study is conducted on a sample of rich countries covering the 1970–95 period. E...

What does this article offers? It raises questions on the assumptions of efficiency in agriculture, traces the history of the logic of scale replacing logic of scope, analyses its impact on sustainability and offers a framework to discern technical contradictions of efficiency across different sectors and find a balance for sustainability. It delves with a few basic questions: First, what is th...