The aim of this text is to review the research undertaken in Portugal on the question of the medieval royal chancellery and diplomacy and their relationship with the study of royal bureaucracy. In this sense, we characterize the lines of development that are to be noted in the research undertaken into political societies and royal power based on the records of the royal chancellery in the last ...

This paper proposals are: first, to show how the utilization of common resources can carry important ethical problems; second (and mainly), to stress that the many attempts to solve tragedies in fisheries, by creating interesting projects in aquaculture, are confronted with many obstacles and barriers in the approval process. These obstructions conduct to inefficiencies and carry out also impor...

In this paper the authors examine the relationship between local corruption and multinational investment. They construct a model of regulatory capture that highlights the interaction between a corrupt regulator, a local dominant …rm and a multinational …rm. The model suggests that entry by a multinational could have a variety of e¤ects on corruption, both positive and negative. These include: d...

A well functioning bureaucracy can promote prosperity, as advocated by Max Weber. But when bureaucracy gets jammed, it causes stagnation, as described by Franz Kafka. We propose a dynamic theory of the interaction between the production of laws and the efficiency of bureaucracy. When bureaucracy is inefficient the effects of politicians legislative acts are hard to assess. Therefore, incompeten...

We have a dream that within ten years, patients admitted to teaching hospitals will long to be enrolled in “researcher driven”*randomized clinical trials. Patients will be fully aware of the reduced complication rates and the improved outcomes that occur in patients involved in randomized clinical trials, the so-called “Hawthorne effect”. We have a dream that within ten years scientists will no...

Available online 21 October 2009