Valentin Cojanu

This research note addresses the current lack of a comprehensive economic framework for analysing power in international trade. The paper traces the historical understanding of trade dependency from mercantilist doctrines, which focused on the "balance of trade," to modern analyses incorporating concepts like national power, game theory, and international political economy/geoeconomics. It highlights that "critical" trade links are those that could cause significant economic or societal damage, be used for coercion, or threaten national security. The core of the document outlines five categories of methodologies to understand power relations in trade. The conclusions emphasize that in an era of global economic disturbances, understanding trade dependencies and power is crucial.

A philosopher and an economic historian collaborated on a concise publication documenting their conversation held at the Paris School of Economics on May 20, 2024 . This work extensively explores the discipline of economics, which is about the distribution of income and wealth prioritizing central themes such as monetary systems, market dynamics, globalization, and fiscal policy. The economic dimension is complemented with the political one, about voice and power and participation, traversing philosophical reflection, to create a highly enlightening conversationthat is captivating due to its argumentative force in laying out the basic framework to think about why equality matters.

Although the limitarian reflection may revise its applied ethical objectives, we believe it will remain fertile ground for the study of ideas on democratic participation from the point of view of material possession. The merit of this volume is that it illustrates this conclusion with in-depth and comprehensive studies that also shed light on the steps to be taken.

This paper aims to align historical reason with the debate on freedom and liberalism in social science. We subject our criticism of liberalism to two intellectual traditions, economism and the eclectic view, which are divided by the role freedom plays in the unfolding of economic events. Drawing on lessons from the historical nature of liberalism, we conclude with two implications for understanding the value of freedom in socioeconomic research. First, the value of freedom, as well as other social values such as equality and justice, cannot be defined within the exclusive scope of a social discipline, but must capture the epistemological diversity of what is known as the common nature of peoples. Secondly, this modified principle of liberalism manifests itself as a circumstantial deliberation that belongs to a carefully constructed causal history of social processes. The logic of historical reason reflects a shared epistemological predilection in social sciences to search for evolutions of dual character whose meaning can be revealed only in the historical circumstances of their emergence.

This is a conceptual paper, which contributes to the debate on the measure of intergenerational sacrifice and advances a post-growth theoretical framework that becomes intelligible within a wider space of deliberation, at once economic, social, and moral. We explore the three-pronged argument in two parts. First, we examine the implications of the socio-economic mechanism of the transition of the production mode from extractive to generative, which is envisaged to replace the market automatic response by allocative efficiency. A second part tackles the moral reason underlying decision-making. Drawing on the lessons of the post-growth debate, we propose and defend a working definition of the moral reason of intergenerational justice that should also underpin our rationalizing about other issues of similar importance regarding the obligations we owe to future people, such as passing on languages or containing epidemics.

The paper addresses the sustainability of the European Union’s food consumption through a water footprint assessment of selected vulnerable agricultural imports from a two-pronged perspective: (1) the degree of the EU’s dependence on global green water resources embedded in the apparent consumption of selected water-intensive agricultural products and (2) the degree of commitment of countries of origin to sustainability policies. The study argues that the vulnerability of the EU’s agricultural imports to water risks can be estimated based on the amount of green water consumed in producing crops in the countries of origin. The results show that the EU’s consumption of agricultural goods is highly dependent on virtual water imports for all six selected vulnerable agricultural products, from the lowest footprint for bananas (5 mil. km³) to the largest for coffee (69 mil. km³). The analysis also points to a greater concern for quality issues in the countries of origin (56.53%) relative to management (26.52%) and availability issues (16.85%), but the latter are to arise in importance for sustainable production in the years to come. Our conclusions contribute to building up a responsible commitment towards (1) development of environmental policies and the design of practical measures by providing quantitative information that makes problems more clearly defined and tangible, and (2) assessing the outcome of policies and practical measures by understanding their effects on the sustainability of food consumption.

Purpose: Criticism directed at neoclassical economics has failed to replace it with a similar grand theory. The authors argue that one possible explanation may lie in the failure of economists to formulate an opinion as to the philosophical foundations of the author’s object of study. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: The argument proceeds in two steps. First, the authors review the prevailing philosophical view of “the self-interest theory (S)”, which is one of the most powerful constituents of today’s economics, and social theorizing in general. Second, the authors present a reasoning framework in which rationality becomes intelligible within a schema of integrating the self’s external and internal conditionalities into a unified view of human reasoning. Findings: Self-interest has been supposed to give the authors direction about what, concretely, to do, but, on the way, the authors have learned that defining rationality is necessarily a life-dependent process. The conflicts of reasons call for a revised S according to which rationality implies consistency among a person’s competing behavioural drivers rooted in three ontological realms, natural, social, and cultural. Originality/value: First, understanding the purpose of one’s actions in rational terms demands redirecting attention from outcomes in terms of utility, profits, or welfare to a social profile of a rational person, with real life coordinates in space and time, as well as the personal histories of that individual. A change in explaining aspirations leads, and this is the second implication, to change in defining the meaning of economic (or social) behaviour. Decision making is not necessarily a process of virtuously selecting the best available options, but assessing and acting according to the opportunity of choice; it is not about freedom of choice, but about the degree of freedom a person is willing and is able to take advantage of.

This paper suggests that the benefits of market integration project reach an asymptotic limit in the realm of close communities when adherence to the same values is critical to achieve internal market reform rather than the other way round. An optimal context of market integration is hypothesized as a territory circumscribed by economic frontiers within which jurisdictions are willing, on the one hand, to share resources with other members to reap the benefits from externalities and economies of scale, and, on the other hand, are able to target policy initiatives at a geographical scale that reflect directly regional commonality. This theoretical framework is illustrated with a discussion of Romania as a country case by drawing on cluster analysis and trade integration data.