IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-02879195.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Artificial Scarcity, Power, and the Italian Mafia

Author

Listed:
  • Clotilde Champeyrache

    (LED - Laboratoire d'Economie Dionysien - UP8 - Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis)

Abstract

This paper contributes to an institutional theory of crime. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of the Mafia and the infiltration of legitimate businesses. In legal markets, the Mafia resorts to artificial scarcity as a functioning principle. Although scarcity and its consequences for market economies are key aspects of mainstream economics, they have been insufficiently analyzed because the emphasis is only on 'natural' scarcity. The Mafia phenomenon reveals that scarcity can also be institutionally created. This type of scarcity encourages the process of market collectivization and empowers those generating it. The Mafia's legal activities establish a system of waiting-lines and monitored access to goods. Instead of being merely coercive and openly violent, the Mafia builds a new lasting order, producing its own rules and even breeding social legitimacy.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Clotilde Champeyrache, 2014. "Artificial Scarcity, Power, and the Italian Mafia," Post-Print hal-02879195, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02879195
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vahabi,Mehrdad, 2019. "The Political Economy of Predation," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107591370, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02879195. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.