Governments can grant political concessions to induce quasi-voluntary compliance with taxation, yet empirical evidence probing the taxation–representation connection remains inconclusive. We contend that this association remains valid but it is primarily confined to business elites in nondemocratic regimes because the same wealth that exposes them to state predation also incentivizes them to endorse tax policies that offer greater political representation. We test our argument by evaluating preferences for hypothetical tax reforms in separate samples of business elites and ordinary citizens in China. We find that business elites show stronger preference than nonelites for tax policies that include advances in political representation. We explore various mechanisms for our results and find support for government credibility, tax ownership, and tax salience considerations.

This letter provides firm-level evidence that policy makers tailor trade policy to suit selected firms. It argues that firms with higher levels of specific assets find it more costly to reorganize production, and are hurt more by international competition. In response, policy makers grant more trade protection to firms with fixed assets. Since protectionism is costly, firms compete for it, which creates diffusion dynamics in which the protection granted to one firm affects the protection granted to others. This claim is tested utilizing the special role antidumping duties (ADDs) play in international trade, and combining petitions for ADDs with financial data on the firms filing them in a unique dataset. Using spatial autoregressive models, the authors find that firms with specific assets are granted more protection. However, diffusion dynamics differ within and between groups of firms producing the same good. This suggests that firms can partly shape their own level of trade protection.

Iran's subjection to Russo-British influence has received the bulk of attention of modern scholarship dealing with the country's interaction with the outside world in the nineteenth century. This article, while not denying the central role played by these two powers in Iran’s domestic affairs at the time, draws attention to a third power with long-standing claims to influence in the country by way of trade policies—France. From the fall of Napoleon in 1815 until the French Revolution of 1848, the French monarchy was especially keen to encourage commerce with Iran, less as a source of increased wealth than to restore and expand French prestige and political influence. This strategy became more significant, when the British and Russian superpowers opposed an active French presence in Iran and prevented France from asserting influence in the country. To contain those powers, France pursued its plan of reaching a trade treaty with Iran as a means of obtaining commercial concessions and privileges as well as to secure its permanent presence in the country. France also aimed to connect Iran to its network of regional trade extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

In one broad construal, corruption consists of deriving benefit from power over others in morally objectionable ways. The charge that capitalism is corrupt is usefully understood as a claim that modern capitalist economies inevitably and pervasively generate corrupt gains, in this sense, through conduct that does not transgress capitalist norms for individuals’ economic conduct. Modern capitalism has two features that would figure prominently in such an indictment: gains from the inferior bargaining power of most workers and gains from the superior political influence of those in the best economic situations. The taint of corruption should be reduced by political measures that move capitalist commerce toward Adam Smith’s commercial ideal of gains from exchanging help for help and that show appreciation of the equal importance of everyone’s presumed desire to have a life shaped by directives that he or she willingly accepts. Through such measures, capitalism could, in principle, become non-corrupt. In practice, unequal political influence will prevent this. Ending the corruptness of capitalism is an unattainable yet productive goal of reform.

This paper reviews developments in both environmental economics and ecological economics with respect to their progress towards environmental interdisciplinarity and towards providing solutions to environmental problems. The concepts, methods, theories and assumptions of each field of knowledge are reviewed and the extent to which they depart from the dominant neoclassical paradigm of economics is assessed. The contribution that interdisciplinarity has made to the success of each field is analysed in terms of understanding, influence and effectiveness and the constraints that it has imposed upon that success. Environmental economics has adopted the dominant economic neoclassical paradigm, including the power of the market to allocate environmental resources efficiently and in a socially optimal way. The solution to environmental problems is thus seen as a matter of ensuring that the environment is properly priced to reflect the relative scarcity of natural resources and assets and to ensure that environmental values are incorporated into the market. This specialized view of environmental problems is now reflected in government policy around the world including the use of extended cost benefit analyses, contingent valuations, environmental charges and emissions trading. Nevertheless, environmental problems continue to grow in severity and the solutions provided by environmental economists have proven ineffective. Thus lack of interdisciplinarity does not prevent a field of knowledge from gaining influence and dominance, however its effectiveness in terms of understanding environmental problems and solving them is impeded. Ecological economics seeks to incorporate the research of economists, ecologists, philosophers and social scientists, however its influence seems to be have been limited to areas in which it retains the standard economics framework, and this limits its effectiveness in terms of environmental solutions. Thus interdisciplinarity may increase understanding of the real world but it cannot overcome political and social barriers to translating that understanding into the widespread implementation of effective environmental measures.