Political Economy of Resources, Technologies, and Rent

This contribution focuses on the relations between scarce resources, technical and technological progress, rents and income distribution, structural changes and economic dynamics trying to understand facts and deliver interpretive paradigms and policies about economic dynamics, combining facts and history, theory and policy. Our main thesis is that resource scarcities have so far been of the relative type due to technical innovation. However, structural and technological transitions leading to the relaxation of scarcities is a complex process with often unforeseeable results and new scarcities, in particular environmental scarcities, are increasingly complex and it must be accepted that a world without natural or legal scarcity constraints does not exist.