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Corporate research and development should be an integral part of a company's strategy to innovate and to maintain technical and scientific support for its business activities. In most companies, corporate R&D is under pressure to develop longer range plans of higher quality and usefulness for their programs and projects. Although our study did not find much opposition to the concept of long‐range planning of corporate R&D, we did find subtle resistance to the concept of planning for “basic” or “exploratory” research (a small percentage of the total R&D budget).

The results of the DIALIB project are described. This three‐year experiment of on‐line bibliographic search in the public library had as major participants four public libraries in the San Francisco Bay area. Five other public libraries in other parts of the USA participated to a lesser extent. Evaluation results were obtained concerning the users of the system and their characteristics, the use of the data bases, and librarian reactions to the system. In addition, interesting data were gathered concerning the time and cost of on‐line search, both in a free and fee‐for‐service environment.

During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred years after his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this chapter, the authors discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf.

This paper introduces a hitherto unpublished 1970 paper written by Lauchlin Currie (1902–1993) on Paul Rosenstein Rodan’s famous 1943 paper on the “Big Push” which led to the balanced-unbalanced growth debate to which Albert Hirschman (1915–2012) was an important contributor. Both Currie and Hirschman had been key economic advisers to the Colombian government, and their respective views on development planning are contrasted. In particular, it is shown how Currie’s 1970 paper illuminates the theory behind the 1971–1974 national plan for Colombia that he prepared and helped deliver; and how the related institutional innovations have had an enduring impact on Colombia’s recent economic history.

This article explores the possibility of reducing mangrove degradation in the Philippines, and enhancing attempts to obtain wetland sustainability, through the introduction of an environmental accounting system based on the opportunity cost of mangrove development. Problems relating to this form of ecological accounting are recognised; however, it is argued that it is better to attempt such an accounting, erring on the side of caution with respect to the environment, than to ignore the issue of mangrove degradation through a fear that any monetary accounting will subvert the conservation process. Following a discussion of the costs of conversion caused by development, the article considers the case for introduction of an assurance bond for developers as part of a Rubensteinian accountability mechanism. It is concluded that although an environmental accounting scheme has much to offer there are other hurdles to overcome before improved accountability for mangrove development can be facilitated in practice.

Paul Samuelson was attracted to the irregular economic development pattern of some South American countries because of the links between economic performance and political factors. He discussed the influence of “populist democracy” on Argentina’s relative economic stagnation, which, he argued in the 1970s and early 1980s, served as a dangerous paradigm for the American economy under stagflation. Stagflation phenomena marked the end of Samuelson’s “neoclassical synthesis.” Moreover, he applied his concept of “capitalist fascism” to deal with military dictatorships in Brazil and (especially) in Chile. The Brazilian translation of his Economics in 1973 brought about a correspondence with Brazilian economists about the “fascist” features of the regime. The main variable behind the South American economic and politically unstable processes discussed by Samuelson was economic inequality, which became also a conspicuous feature of the American economy since the adoption of market-based policies in the 1980s and after.