governmental intervention approaches to promote renewable energies special emphasis on japanese feed in tariff abstract almost all countries have issued laws and regulations to promote renewable energy re however the applications and motivations of such laws as well as achievements have been different currently the japanese government has announced its targets to expand the electricity feed in tariff scheme for solar power along with other energy sources within two years to meet the goal set by the japanese prime minister who in the 15th united nations climate change conference cop15 held in september 2009 proclaimed to cut 25 of greenhouse gas ghg emissions from the 1990 levels by 2020 in this paper the current japanese energy policies and measures for promoting re in comparison to popular methods followed worldwide are explored furthermore a least cost feed in tariff lcfit simulation model for japanese case was developed to calculate the optimal mix of technologies to reach certain targets the lcfit also calculates the tariff that should be proposed for each technology and the total cost for the program with and without a carbon tax and estimates the premium added to the bill of the customer every month

complexity and path dependence in biotechnology innovation systems in commercial applications of biotechnology there is no international convergence on many critical dimensions the united states is pulling ahead vis a vis most other developed or emerging countries in spite of the efforts made by the potential catching up nations the article argues that the explanation lies in the institutional fabric that fosters commercial biotechnology this institutional structure is too complex and costly it exists mainly in the united states and the followers either do not understand it or are trapped with more inefficient institutions the paper builds on biotechnology in order to theorize about institutions and their evolution in sectoral innovation systems it also applies concepts and models from complex system theory copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

alleviating rural poverty through agricultural growth the article examines the role of agricultural gdp growth in alleviating rural poverty in ldcs cross sectional regression analysis indicates that gdp growth by itself takes a very long time to reduce poverty significantly it suggests that decreases in land concentration could have a more immediate impact on reducing rural poverty the budgetary and other costs of implementing such changes are not however considered the preferred approach is a combination of equitable growth and redistributive measures

the collapse of purchasing power parities during the 1970 s one of the striking facts concerning the relationship beiveen prices and exchange rates during the 1970 s has been the dismal performance of the predictions of the simple versions of the purchasing power parity doctrine ppp that doctrine in its absolute version states that the equilibrium exchange rate between domestic and foreign currencies equals the ratio of domestic to foreign price levels the relative version of the doctrine relates equilibrium changes in exchange rates to changes in the ratio of domestic to foreign prices during the 1970 s short run changes in exchange rates bore little relationship to short run differentials in national inflation rates and frequently divergences from purchasing power parities have been cumulative this paper reviews and analyzes the empirical record of exchange rates and prices during the 1970 s and the analysis is based on the experience of the dollar pound the dollar frecch franc and the dollar dm exchange rates section 2 presents the evidence on ppp during the 1970 s and contrasts it with the evidence from the 1920 s a period during which the doctrine held up reasonably well this analysis is relevant for assessing whether the flexible exchange rate system was successful in providing national economies with an added degree of insulation from foreign shocks and whether it provided policymakers with an added instrument for the conduct of macroeconomic policy the evidence regarding devia tions from purchasing power parities is also relevant for determining whether there is a case for managed float section 3 attempts to explain what went wrong with

what impact does the choice of formula have on international comparisons in this paper an empirical comparison of a number of alternative multilateral index number formulae is undertaken the magnitude of the effect of choosing one formula over another is ascertained using an appropriate cross sectional data set constructed under the auspices of the eurostat oecd purchasing power parity programme to this end a new indicator is proposed that facilitates the measurement of the difference between two sets of bloc consumption shares each computed using a different multilateral comparison method jel classification c31 c43 c81 e31 f31 o57 quel impact est ce que le choix des formules a sur les comparaisons internationales ce memoire propose une comparaison empirique d un certain nombre de formules de nombres indices multilateraux on tente de jauger la magnitude de l impact du choix d une formule plutot qu une autre en utilisant une base de donnees transversales appropriee construite sous l egide du programme de parite du pouvoir d achat eurostat ocde on propose un nouvel indicateur qui facilite la mesure de la difference entre deux ensembles de patterns de consommation chacun calculea l aide d une methode de comparaison multilaterale differente

structural change and poverty in africa a decomposition anakysis for cote d ivoire abstract this paper provides evidence that economic destabilization and the absence of managed structural change in an economy can be more harmful to the welfare of the poor than the process of adjustment itself evidence comes from four consecutive years of household survey data from cote d ivoire spanning both a period of adjustment and destabilization these constitute a unique data base in africa to assess the impact of structural change on the poor the analytic methodology used is that of static and dynamic decomposition of poverty measures along policy relevant dimensions

food pricing policy in developing countries bias against agriculture or for urban consumers price policy discrimination against agricultural producers in order to provide cheap food for urban consumers has been widely cited in development forums as a cause of agricultural stagnation evidence is presented that suggests no consistent pattern of discrimination against producers for a major food commodity wheat however consumer subsidies and trade policies have reduced bread prices to urban consumers in many countries price data from the early 1980s are assembled for thirty one developing countries nominal protection coefficients for producers and consumers at official and corrected exchange rates and wheat fertilizer price ratios are estimated for each country price discrimination against agriculture arising from government policy interventions has been widely cited as a major factor in the poor agricultural performance of many developing countries several important studies published in the last five years have presented evidence ofgovernment policies that decrease prices re ceived by farmers for their produce peterson 1979 1983 analyzed official producer prices during the 1960s from a sample of twenty eight developing countries to show that producer price incentives in developing countries were consistently well below those in industrialized countries during the 1970s the world bank sponsored a series of case studies of agricul tural policy incentives in thailand pakistan egypt and argentina using data up to the mid 1970s which showed that governments of these countries were consistently taxing the agricultural sector through price policy see the authors are economists with cimmyt the international maize and wheat improvement centre based in pakistan and mexico respectively views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of

economic information versus quality variation in cross country data data quality in the penn world tables varies systematically across countries that have different growth rates and are at different stages of economic development thus intro ducing measurement error correlated with variables of economic interest we explore this problem with three examples from the literature showing that the problem appears to be minor in growth convergence regressions but serious in estimating the effect of income volatility on growth and in a cross country lest of the permanent income hypothesis the results suggest at the least a need for performing appropriate sensitivity tests before draw

a formalisation and test of the factor productivity explanation of international differences in service prices this paper extends and integrates previous models of the determinants of international differences in the prices of services relative to tradable commodities the authors provide a model capable of identifying the effects of differences in total factor productivity on service price differences separately from the effects of factor endowment differences they propose a method for measuring these factor productivity difference effects and apply this to a sample of sixty countries in 1980 the authors results provide support both for the endowment difference and productivity difference explanations suggesting that in this context at least the two hypotheses are complements rather than competitors copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a paradox regarding economic support to deploy renewable energy technologies abstract from an economic viewpoint a larger reduction in the level of economic support to facilitate renewable energy installations e g the purchase price of renewable electricity under a feed in tariff scheme is not necessarily rational in accordance with a larger decline in the observed cost of the installation if the expected cost decline of the renewable technology is to be revised in response to the newest statistical data observed during each passing time period this paper demonstrates this point through an analysis of a case of japanese photovoltaic power generation deployment

spatial collocation and venture capital in the us biotechnology industry biotechnology firms operate in a high risk and high reward environment and are in a constant race to secure venture capital vc funds previous contributions to the literature show that the vc firms tend to invest locally in order to monitor their investments and to provide operating assistance to their target firms further biotechnology is a knowledge based industry that tends to exhibit spatial clusters and the firms in such industries may collocate to benefit from gaining access to local markets for specialized inputs e g skilled researchers and from local knowledge spillovers and network externalities if such gains exist we expect that the collocated firms should exhibit positively correlated performance including in their ability to attract venture capital funds the purpose of this paper is to empirically measure the strength and spatial extent of the relationships among the amount of funds raised by proximate biotechnology firms we model these relationships with a spatial autoregression sar model and we control for characteristics of the biotechnology firms and the vc firms that provide their funds as well as site specific factors based on our fitted sar model we find that the amount of venture capital raised by a particular biotechnology firm is significantly influenced by the number of vc firms and the vc funding levels raised by biotechnology firms located within a 10 mile radius but these relationships are not statistically significant beyond this range

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

assessing the strength and effectiveness of renewable electricity feed in tariffs in european union countries in the last two decades feed in tariffs fit have emerged as one of the most popular policies for supporting renewable electricity res e generation a few studies have assessed the effectiveness of res e policies but most ignore policy design features and market characteristics e g electricity price and production cost that influence policy strength we employ 1992 2008 panel data to conduct the first econometric analysis of the effectiveness of fit policies in promoting solar photovoltaic pv and onshore wind power development in 26 european union countries we develop a new indicator for fit strength that captures variability in tariff size contract duration digression rate and electricity price and production cost to estimate the resulting return on investment we regress this indicator on added res e capacity using a fixed effects specification and find that fit policies have driven solar pv development in the eu however this effect is overstated without controlling for country characteristics and is concealed without accounting for policy design we do not find robust evidence that fit policies have driven wind power development overall we show that the interaction of policy design electricity price and electricity production cost is a more important determinant of res e development than policy enactment alone

ingredients in the early development of the u s biotechnology industry this paper explores the ingredients that stimulated the development of the biotechnology industry in the us and contrasts conditions with those in europe it examines relationships between established firms and new start ups the financing and managerial environment and the organizational environment whereby firms were able to set up networks of alliances its main findings are that 1 the funding of the medical science research base has been substantially more generous in the u s than europe it is the funding of the science base rather than of the biotechnology industry directly that has provided the foundations for start ups to be created out of the science base 2 it has been easier for u s academics to found start ups close to their research establishment and to retain their academic posts and status as well as be involved in a commercial enterprise in europe the scientific academic and commercial worlds have a wider divide 3 start ups have been concentrated in the therapeutics and agricultural fields with strong scientific research inputs into their commercialization in contrast to other sectors where downstream processing innovations have been more important which have been undertaken in house by the large incumbent companies 4 financing and managerial conditions have been significantly easier in the u s for start ups in terms of access to venture capital specialising in high technology ability to use the stock market to raise capital and access to people able to forge links between scientists and entrepreneurs and to introduce managerial expertise into new companies 5 there has been a greater facility in the u s than in europe for alliances to be formed between incumbent companies and indigenous u s start ups european start ups have not found similar backing from european incumbent companies

factor endowments nontradables prices and measures of openness abstract the familiar dollar index of country openness is obtained essentially by attempting to remove the influence of nontradables prices from data on country price levels with residual price differences hypothesised to measure trade impediments differences in nontradables prices are in turn hypothesised to reflect differences in factor endowments which dollar proxies by gdp per capita this paper examines both the theoretical and empirical biases introduced to estimates of nontradables prices by using this proxy we show that while the approach provides a reasonable approximation on average relatively agricultural land or labour abundant countries are particularly poorly captured by gdp per capita

the rocky road to reform trade industrial financial and agricultural strategies abstract this paper reviews recent issues of economic reform in developing countries based on studies undertaken for the world institute for development economics research wider emphasis is placed on a novel 3 gap adjustment model for savings investment trade and fiscal limitations at the macro level and a distinction between allocative and productive efficiency microeconomically issues of stabilization and adjustment and trade industrial policy financial reform privatization market deregulation and the agrarian question are discussed

a comparative study of national price levels agricultural prices and exchange rates abstract this paper attempts a comparison of national price levels agricultural prices and exchange rates across countries and over the years 1975 and 1980 using recently produced results from the united nations statistical office and the food and agriculture organization this paper suggests that in most developing countries official exchange rates are more overvalued relative to gdp based purchasing power parities ppps but less overvalued relative to agricultural output based ppps gdp based ppps in most developed countries are however closer to official exchange rates hence conventional opinion as to the existence of significantly lower agricultural output prices in most developing countries is not supported by this study at the same time protection afforded farmers in terms of higher agricultural output prices is indicated in many developed countries it is also observed that in asia agricultural output prices relative to nonagricultural prices have declined over the period 1975 1980 whereas the opposite trend seems to be the case in africa no distinct trend differences over the period are evident for the european experience however agricultural output prices in asia in 1980 were still higher than in africa a few policy implications of these observations are discussed briefly at the conclusion of the paper

embryonic knowledge based clusters and cities the case of biotechnology in scotland the cluster concept has been promoted in recent years as a panacea for economic development both locally and nationally one source of theoretical and empirical ambiguity in the concept is related to the spatial processes underpinning cluster development and to the relationship between cities and clusters in particular this paper examines the case of the biotechnology cluster in scottish cities with particular reference to glasgow and edinburgh the promotion of a biotechnology cluster has become a priority for scotland s economic development strategy because of its potential role in the knowledge driven economy the paper examines the major locational dynamics affecting biotechnology in scotland and interrogates the balance between the major forces driving the development of biotechnology firms in their urban location it concludes that the importance of cities to cluster growth lies mainly in the size and diversity of their labour markets in the presence of key research institutions and public sect

the contrasting roles of government in the development of biotechnology industry in the us and germany abstract during the last 30 years biotechnology development has charted different paths in the us and in germany even though in germany federal support programs started very early to target biotechnology the innovative performance of this sector has been lagging behind that of the us where the federal support was less direct this article compares the two national science and technology s t policies and analyzes the political economic and social factors that determined the different paths the paper concludes that an indirect s t policy that tries to spread the factors thereby enabling a preferable economic ecology for biotech development is more successful than an interventionist policy political action however is limited and can only enhance science and technology development if the policies mesh with the social and economic dispositions

privatization and economic growth an empirical investigation from a sample of developing market economies this paper explores the economic determinants of privatization programmes and the macroeconomic impact of this institutional reform on the growth rate of the gdp a sample of thirty five developing market economies is considered over the 1988 92 period probit and tobit models are used to identify the determinants of successful privatization programmes then regressions are run where probabilities probit and expected values tobit are successively included as additional regressors beside the potential influence of other economic policy variables a significant positive effect is highlighted giving evidence of the importance of divestiture the economic effect is found to be stronger when this institutional reform took place in industry or infrastructure

world product and income international comparisons of real gross product the volume reports on the third phase of the united nations international comparison project icp the main results provide comparisons of real gross domestic product gdp per capita for thirty four countries in 1975 quantity and price comparisons are given also for personal consumption capital formation and public consumption and further subdivisions of final expenditures on gdp are estimated