Most decisions involving risk are not taken in isolation. In addition to the risk from that decision, other independent, so-called ‘background’ risks, are considered. Our research adds to the growing evidence that this background risk influences risk-taking. We report results from a repeated lab-in-the-field investment task with Senegalese fishers in the presence of background risk related to their fishing income and their health. Our measure of background risk is the monthly wind condition. Without controls, we find that fishers act on average intemperately. Adding controls, we find that the impact of background risk on risk-taking—measured as the investment in the investment task—depends on the boat size of the fishers. When dividing the sample according to wealth, we find temperate behavior for the relatively poorer group and intemperate behavior that depends on boat lengths for the relatively richer group. Our results show the interrelations between background risk and context factors.

This article examines a case study of profound agricultural transformations along the Early Modern Age. Around the protoindustrial town of Alcoi there was an intense process of substitution of cultivations that altered the physiognomy of the rural activities of an area traditionally considered as poor from the agrarian point of view. The catalogue of these changes is substantial: the substitution of wheat for barley, the early introduction of corn and its strong spread, the advance of the cultivation of vine, and, finally, the adoption of crop rotations in the irrigable area that was part of a limited extension of land, though significant for a mountainous area. Throughout the text these changes are described and explained, keeping in mind the proto-industrial framework in which they appear, as well as their context in the Valencián and Spanish environment.

The impact that the new energy source, electricity, had on the economic growth of a number of countries –USA, UK, France, Italy, Spain and Canada– characterised by their different coal endowments is the principal objective of this article. The new energy, amongst its other advantages, reduced the dependence on natural resources of coal as it could be generated out of different primary energies: namely water or coal. In order to assess the importance of this reduced dependence, a coal-and-electricity energy database is presented for all six countries. We show that the relative prices electricity-coal were low in countries with poor coal endowments, and we find that there was a negative relationship between relative prices electricity-coal and economic growth. Moreover, there was a relationship between the industrial electrification process in countries with no coal deposits and their investment process, their labour productivity increase, their economic and manufacturing industry growth, and the structural change they underwent.

The aim of this paper is to study the water market in Canaries in the long run and to show how this resource was managed in the Canary Islands. In the first section, a theoretical model of operation is presented and then is tested to examine the evolution of water prices. We show that the evolution of waterprices is conditioned by the fact that the property of water has been concentrated only in few hands. Finally, we discuss if in the Canary Islands the water has been efficiently managed during XXth century.

Nous présentons un modèle « prospectif » avec deux économies. Le Nord a stabilisé son stock de gaz à effet de serre, alors que le Sud continue d'émettre des polluants sans moyen de lutter contre. Ces externalités ont un impact sur la production du Sud et sont source de désutilité au Nord. On montre alors que le Nord est conduit à les internaliser en investissant dans le patrimoine écologique du Sud. Ceci lui permet de converger vers un état stationnaire sur un sentier de croissance équilibrée le long duquel on vérifie un critère de soutenabilité, alors que ces « investissements verts » s'avèrent insuffisants pour que le Sud connaisse une telle issue.