François Facchini

Greening Up or Not? The Determinants Political Parties’ Environmental Concern: An Empirical Analysis Based on European Data (1970-2008)

Why do parties offer environmental policies in their political programs? While a number of papers examine the determinants of citizens’ pro-environmental behaviour, we know little about the extent to which political parties adjust their platform towards environmentalism. We investigate this process through data provided by the Manifesto Project Dataset (CMP) for 20 European countries over the period 1970-2008. Following the literature on public concern towards environment, we examine economic, environmental and political determinants. Our findings provide evidence that political parties’ environmental concern is strongly correlated with their political ideology and with country-level economic conditions.

Complex Individualism and Legitimacy of Absolute Property Rights

In this article my purpose is to go thoroughly into the ideas expressed by economists regarding the legitimacy of absolute property rights. I visit the Lockian argument taken up by Murray Rothbard (1.1) and the principle of the finder keeper clarified by Israel Kizner (1.2). I argue that it is impossible to legitimate either the property of the finder keeper or the property of oneself if man does not think of himself as an individual. Indeed individualism becomes the cultural prerequisite required to acknowledge the rights of the finder keeper and the goods obtained through labour. Here, Hayeks complex individualism is akin to the hypothesis of the social animal of Benjamin Constant and the work of Gabriel Tarde on the transformation of law. The individual is both an effect and a cause of property rights.

Labour Costs and the Size of Government

Given inelastic demand for labour-intensive public services, the size of government dependspositivelyonlabourcosts.OECDdataexhibitastrongstatisticalassociationbetween government size and the business-sector labour share of income.When the labour share is instrumented with measures of technological change, institutional variation and predetermineddataitcontinuestopositivelyimpactgovernmentsize.Incontrast,transferspending is unaffected by the labour share.The evidence is consistent with the idea that the recent decline in the labour share has contributed to the slowdown in the growth of government witnessed in much of the post-war era.

Political ideological shift: A theoretical approach

The author explains ideological change using a theory justifying an individual’s grounds for action. If an individual prefers ideology A to ideology B, it is because the costs of justifying A are less than the costs of justifying B. On this basis, the dynamic behind ideologies is explained partly by their justification context and partly by rises in justification costs. The context for their rationale plays a not insignificant role, as it qualifies the type of event capable of generating a change. An event generates a change because it makes an ideology problematic and places the individual in a situation of cognitive dissonance. This event is an experiment in an empiricist justification context, a logical factor in a rationalist context and an interpretative inconsistency in a religious context. The event that generates change is qualified thus; it might be argued that an event makes an ideology problematic when it increases its justification costs. Logically, its rationale costs should increase with the quality of alternative ideologies, the position of scientific or religious authorities – depending on the rationale context – the number of people who decide to revise their ideology or to abandon it, and the entire body of knowledge deemed to be non-problematic by individuals.

What Does Money Tell Us

The book entitled Money talks. Explaining how money really works and edited by Nina Bandelj, Frederick F. Wherry and Viviana Zelizer is a collection of 14 articles classed around 5 parts : over and above the fungibility of money (Part I), beyond the special funds (part II) monetary creation (Part III) contested money (Part IV) and future money (Part V), this book is also an anniversary book. It celebrates the 20th birthday of the publication of Viviana Zelizers work, The social Meaning of MOney. All the articles in it were discussed and presented during a conference on September 12, 2014 on the pertinence of the thesis of the sociology of money by Viviana Zelizer. In her book published in 1994, Viviana Zelizer criticized economist and sociologist approaches to money. It is impossible then to understand the scientific, political and social stakes of this anniversary book without placing on the one hand, the criticisms of Viviana Zelizer in their intellectual context; in other words the arrival in the United States of a new economic sociology, and without remembering on the other hand that by highlighting the role of social standards and emotions which determine the use of money it must be shown that the economic agent is not rational and that market economy in fact is not or not only, the nuance is important, governed by perfectly rational actors, which challenges its efficiency. This is what this review would point out before presenting an outline of the contents of each chapter and concluding with a few critical comments.

Non-Neutral Money: A Market Process Perspective

Abstract This article studies the impact of a credit expansion monetary policy on output and unemployment rate. In the introduction the history of the Phillips curve and its interpretation are presented to understand why New Consensus Macroeconomics argues that monetary policy is neutral in long-run i. e. has no effect on economic activity and natural unemployment rate. This New Consensus Macroeconomics supports the independence of the Central Bank, inflation-targeting and the strategy of constrained discretion model and influences strongly the monetary policy of central bank today. The second section critics these three principles of the new consensus. It opposes free-banking to central banking system, and takes the defense of deflation to critic the inflation-targeting. Then the third section deals with long-run neutrality of monetary policy. In an Austrian Business Cycle perspective, there is neutrality of monetary only if the production structure must always return exactly to its level of before the boom. It is improbable, because the monetary policy via tax inflation and artificial variation of real interest rate has a long-run effects on the conditions of financing of entrepreneurial project and in fine all the market process dynamic.

Le syndicalisme agricole

Cette entree en matiere se propose de presenter les raisons du colloque dont sont issus les articles de ce numero special d’Economie rurale sur le syndicalisme agricole, de situer les textes publies dans leur contexte scientifique et de donner aux lecteurs de la revue un certain nombre d’informations sur le travail des economistes qui font l’hypothese de l’homo oeconomicus pour expliquer l’action collective, l’elaboration des politiques publiques et le vote. A l’origine de ce colloque il y a...