on the estimation of an implicitly additive demand system motivated by a lack of engel flexibility in commonly used demand systems rimmer and powell developed a new demand system this system referred to aidads is implicitly directly additive possesses marginal budget shares and thus engel elasticities that vary nonlinearly with expenditure such that predicted budget shares are restricted to the 0 1 interval due to these attractive engel properties aidads represents a significant contribution to the literature on demand analysis this paper presents an alternative estimation procedure to the one used by rimmer and powell and examines its properties via a case study the proposed approach avoids a linear approximation employed in rimmer and powell s estimation framework based on a small monte carlo study it appears that the approach produces more accurate estimates of the parameters and engel elasticities

the future of food demand understanding differences in global economic models understanding the capacity of agricultural systems to feed the world population under climate change requires projecting future food demand this article reviews demand modeling approaches from 10 global economic models participating in the agricultural model intercomparison and improvement project agmip we compare food demand projections in 2050 for various regions and agricultural products under harmonized scenarios of socioeconomic development climate change and bioenergy expansion in the reference scenario ssp2 food demand increases by 59 98 between 2005 and 2050 slightly higher than the most recent fao projection of 54 from 2005 2007 the range of results is large in particular for animal calories between 61 and 144 caused by differences in demand systems specifications and in income and price elasticities the results are more sensitive to socioeconomic assumptions than to climate change or bioenergy scenarios when considering a world with higher population and lower economic growth ssp3 consumption per capita drops on average by 9 for crops and 18 for livestock the maximum effect of climate change on calorie availability is 6 at the global level and the effect of biofuel production on calorie availability is even smaller

do big countries win tariff wars yes it is widely believed that tariffs invite retaliation and that the postretaliation equilibrium l eaves all countries worse off than they would be at free trade the a uthors present a simple pure exchange model with two countries and t wo goods and show which endowment patterns are consistent with this belief they find that if one country is substantially bigger than th e other it can expect to gain from a tariff war despite retaliation the model can be extended to show that the advantage obtained by bei ng part of a large trading unit can help explain the formation of cus toms unions copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

short versus long run implications of trade liberalization for poverty in three developing countries the impacts of global trade reform on poverty are a key concern in the current trade negotiations under the doha development agenda the aggregate poverty impacts of trade reform are in turn strongly linked to the impacts of such reforms on the rural population as they constitute the overwhelming majority of the poor in almost all developing countries this paper uses a new micro simulation methodology designed to analyze this critical issue the methodology is first explained and then applied to three developing countries of particular interest chile malawi and vietnam a key feature is the distinction between the short run impacts of reform where many factors most importantly selfemployed labor of the poor tend to be immobile between sectors and the longer run impacts when factors find their highest return regardless of the sector of employment this distinction makes an enormous difference and

understanding the determinants of structural change in world food markets american journal of agricultural economics 80 december 1052 1062 this study assesses the interaction between climate change and agricultural trade policies we distinguish between two dimensions of agricultural trade policy market insulation and subsidy levels building on the previous work of tsigas frisvold and kuhn 1997 we find that in the presence of current levels of agricultural subsidies increased price transmission as called for under the uruguay round agreement on agriculture reduces global welfare in the wake of climate change this is due to the positive correlation between productivity changes and current levels of agricultural support increases in subsidized output under climate change tend to exacerbate inefficiencies in the global agricultural economy in the absence of market insulation however once agricultural subsidies have also been eliminated price transmission via the global trading system contributes positively to economic adaptation under climate change products this may partially explain the relatively slow growth of world grain import demand in recent years in addition bilateral agreements with east asia nafta and the evolution of the cap have all had important impacts on the structure of world food and agricultural trade the objective of this paper is to assess the relative role of each of the major forces consumer demand factor accumulation transport costs and policy change in driving changes in the composition of world food trade in 1980 1995 to do so we employ a modified version of the global trade analysis project gtap model of world trade which permits us to isolate the contribution of each of these related factors to the changing composition of world food trade in a general equilibrium context we evaluate the relative role of each of these factors by simulating the model backwards in time from 1995 to 1980 under different assumptions this general approach termed backcasting i e backwards forecasting takes as exogenous the basic drivers of change and attempts to explain the resulting change in food trade composition the model produced changes in the composition of agricultural and food trade are compared with historical trade data to determine the relative importance of each factor on the changing composition of food trade given limited space our focus will be on explaining the changes in the global composition of food and agriculture trade a natural follow on effort would target specific markets in more detail this type of backcasting approach was first employed by gehlhar 1997 who sought to explain the shift in exports of primary commodities to manufactures in east asia in the 1980 s he calibrated the gtap model to 1992 data then implemented shocks to factor endowments and economywide total factor productivity tfp in order to force each economy back to its 1982 levels of population land labor human capital physical capital and technology by comparing actual and predicted changes in export shares in this period he found human capital accumulation played a key role in explaining the change in the aggregate composition of east asian exports gehlhar hertel and martin 1994 built on this work in an effort to predict future changes in the pattern of agricultural trade from 1992 2002 they also emphasized the importance of supply side determinants of agricultural trade in this paper we go beyond this earlier work in a number of ways first we focus on the composition of agricultural exports rather than simply looking at the share of agriculture in total trade secondly we incorporate the cranfield et al estimates of rimmer and powell s recently developed implicitly directly additive demand system nicknamed aidads into the gtap model this permits us to better capture the impact of demand side changes on the pattern of global tr

original innovation learnt innovation and cities evidence from uk smes one of the key benefits of cities is that they allow the exchange of knowledge and information between economic actors this may have two effects it may create the conditions for entirely new innovations to emerge and it may allow firms to learn innovations from those nearby yet few studies have considered the impact of an urban location on whether innovations are original or learnt this paper tests these hypotheses using survey evidence for over 1600 uk smes it is shown that while urban firms tend to be both product and process innovators urban firms are disproportionately likely to introduce process innovations which are only new to the firm rather than entirely original instead the urban advantage in product innovation appears to come from a combination of the effects the results highlight a need for a nuanced view of the link between cities and innovation

distributional effects of wto agricultural reforms in rich and poor countries rich countries agricultural trade policies are the battleground on which the future of the wto s troubled doha round will be determined subject to widespread criticism they nonetheless appear to be almost immune to serious reform and one of their most common defenses is that they protect poor farmers the authors findings reject this claim the analysis uses detailed data on farm incomes to show that major commodity programs are highly regressive in the united states and that the only serious losses under trade reform are among large wealthy farmers in a few heavily protected subsectors in contrast analysis using household data from 15 developing countries indicates that reforming rich countries agricultural trade policies would lift large numbers of developing country farm households out of poverty in the majority of cases these gains are not outweighed by the poverty increasing effects of higher food prices among other households agricultural reforms that appear feasible even under an ambitious doha round achieve only a fraction of the benefits for developing countries that full liberalization promises but protect u s large farms from most of the rigors of adjustment finally the analysis indicates that maximal trade led poverty reductions occur when developing countries participate more fully in agricultural trade liberalization

conditional and unconditional food demand elasticities in a dynamic multistage demand system this paper estimates conditional and unconditional demand elasticities in a three stage analysis of consumer demand for food and non food items in greece a dynamic version of the aids model is specified and estimated and full system misspecification tests applied correction formulas for price and expenditure elasticities are used to calculate unconditional elasticities from conditional demand sub systems all food items rank as price inelastic deviations between the calculated conditional and unconditional price and expenditure elasticities are found to be significant demonstrating the importance of correcting conditional elasticities before they can be used for policy purposes or welfare analyses

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

dynamic almost ideal demand systems an empirical analysis of alcohol expenditure in ireland this paper presents a dynamic form of the almost ideal demand system aids three versions of the static aids model are employed to determine the preferred long run equilibrium model and represents the short run dynamics by an error correction mechanism this estimation procedure is then applied to alcohol expenditure in ireland the estimated point elasticities are consistent with previous studies and a priori expectations beer and spirits are found to be price inelastic in both the short and long run while wine is price inelastic in the short run and price elastic in the long run

innovation in europe a tale of networks knowledge and trade in five cities this paper identifies four groups of theory that seek to explain the relationships between innovation and space these are traditional agglomeration theory networking learning and new competitiveness theory evidence on the last three most recent theories is sought by analysing the results of comparable surveys of innovative firms in amsterdam london milan paris and stuttgart the empirical results show that differences occur in the external relationships between firms and the global economy with respect to specific innovation projects broadly speaking the main differences identified show that in regional cities such as stuttgart and milan innovative activities are more linked to their regional and national economies than they are in the international world cities such as paris and london this suggests that attempts to generalize the network paradigm on industrial production are premature at least as far as innovation is concerned conversely the data demonstrate the significance of trading syste

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

the economic determinants of the brazilian nominal term structure of interest rates the purpose of this study is to identify the effects of monetary policy and macroeconomic shocks on the dynamics of the brazilian term structure of interest rates we estimate a near var model under the identification scheme proposed by christiano et al 1996 1999 the results resemble those of the us economy monetary policy shocks that flatten the term structure of interest rates we find that monetary policy shocks in brazil explain a significantly larger share of the dynamics of the term structure than in the usa finally we analyse the importance of standard macroeconomic variables e g gdp inflation and measure of country risk to the dynamics of the term structure in brazil

innovation and cooperation in the small firm sector evidence from northern britain freel m s and harrison r t 2006 innovation and cooperation in the small firm sector evidence from northern britain regional studies 40 289 305 over the last 20 years network based models of innovation led economic development have grown increasingly popular to both the polity and the academy in contrast to earlier linear conceptions innovation is viewed as a systemic phenomenon in which interactive learning and cooperative entrepreneurship are fundamental the way that systems and in turn networks are usually defined is by the volume and characteristics of the linkages that bind them together accordingly drawing upon a recent survey of small firms in scotland and northern england 1347 responses the paper is concerned with mapping the extent of small firm innovation related networking and understanding the unique contribution such networks make to the successful introduction of new products and processes importantly it investigated the impact of networking on innovation in both manu

power in firm networks what it means for regional innovation systems christopherson s clark j 2007 power in firm networks what it means for regional innovation systems regional studies 41 1223 1236 the role of power within regional firm networks is noted in empirical studies but insufficiently theorized it is suggested that network functioning is conflictual and that more powerful network members particularly transnational corporations tncs leverage regional resources to advance their sustainable competitive advantage the agendas and power exercised by tncs within regionalized firm networks have significant implications for regional policy and the uneven allocation of resources and capacities within and among regions the findings indicate that transnational firm access to resources that are critical to innovation including university research and skilled labour negatively affects the potential for innovation by small and medium size firms christopherson s et clark j 2007 le pouvoir au sein des reseaux d entreprise son importance pour les systemes d

pioneers and followers competitive tactics environment and firm growth abstract market pioneering where a firm is first to offer a distinctively new product to the market is a commonly recognized form of corporate entrepreneurship as with other forms of corporate entrepreneurship the linkage between market pioneering and firm performance has received limited empirical attention much of which has yielded inconsistent results nonetheless two conclusions regarding when and how pioneering relates to firm performance are revealed in the literature first theory and past research suggest that pioneering is an environment specific phenomenon that is certain types of environments may be most likely to encourage or reward the actions of pioneers while these same actions may meet with limited success in other environments second theory and past research suggest that firm performance is affected by the fit between a firm s pioneer follower status and its competitive tactics in other words market entry order moderates the effectiveness of a firm s competitive tactics such that certain tactics will be most effective when employed by market pioneers while other tactics will be most effective when employed by market followers considered jointly the preceding observations suggest that insights might be gained regarding the effective management of market pioneering and market following by seeking to understand a how these phenomena are manifested in different industry environments and b what pioneers and followers do differently in these environments to promote their performance the research described in this paper addresses these issues in particular this paper develops theory that describes how particular competitive tactics are thought to relate to firm sales growth rate among market pioneers and market followers in two distinct environmental settings hypotheses are developed based on the following research propositions p1 in hostile environments pioneers and followers will differentially benefit in achieving high sales growth rates from their reliance on relatively high prices relatively broad product lines relatively broad served geographical markets relatively advanced process technologies and relatively advantageous purchasing arrangements p2 in benign environments pioneers and followers will differentially benefit in achieving high sales growth rates from their reliance on relatively high quality products relatively strong product warranties relatively high advertising and promotion expenditures relatively strong control over distribution channels employed and relatively large numbers of distribution channels employed to test the hypothesized relationships data were collected from the senior managers of 103 independent nondiversified manufacturing firms operating in 75 industries cluster analysis anova and correlational analysis were employed as the principal analytical techniques the results suggest that market pioneers grow neither more nor less rapidly than market followers however in hostile environments pioneering may enable firms to break out of the dominant price based mode of competition and grow in spite of charging high prices this ability of pioneers to excel in hostile environments seems to be further facilitated by limiting product line breath to a small number of product offerings that provide a tight fit with market needs pioneers in hostile environments also appear to be relatively better served than followers from gaining a wide geographical distribution for their products followers in hostile environments on the other hand should seek to reduce their cost structures in order to effectively sustain low price strategies the employment of advanced process technologies and the pursuit of purchasing advantages were actions which proved to be more advantageous for followers than for pioneers in hostile environments the managerial implications of this research applicable to benign environment firms are quite different other things being equal relatively high prices may not be as detrimental to growth among followers in benign environments as they are among followers in more hostile environments benign environment followers may in fact be better off when they charge relatively high prices and compete on non price bases the results also suggest that in benign environments offering products with warranties superior to those of competitors may have a significantly more positive effect on sales growth among pioneers than followers moreover employing a large number of distribution channels appears to benefit pioneers more than followers however among the sampled firms benign environment pioneers that realized the greatest growth did not have extensive control over distribution channel members therefore benign environment pioneers may grow more quickly if they target their distribution related resources toward expanding their channels rather than toward controlling some smaller number these channels this study contributes to the pioneering literature by having corroborated several findings of the pims based studies regarding tactical differences between pioneers and followers and by having further documented the relevance of market entry order or pioneer follower status as a moderator of the performance associated with particular competitive tactics moreover by having examined the tactics performance relationships of pioneers and followers in two distinct environmental settings this study adds specificity and empirical support to the emerging theoretical paradigm that depicts pioneering as an environment specific phenomenon finally this study contributes to the literature on coping with hostility by having theorized about and empirically identified common and effective bases for competition under varying levels of environmental hostility

on interpreting inverse demand systems a primal comparison of scale flexibilities and income elasticities scale flexibilities in inverse demand systems describe how marginal valuations change with expansions in the consumption bundle such effects clearly are related to income elasticities in direct demand systems however the connection is not so close as it first appears we argue that the link between scale flexibilities and income elasticities is tight only if preferences are homothetic a situation where neither measure is interesting or if all elasticities of substitution are unitary we make clear the relationship between the two measures in a coordinate system focusing on how marginal rates of substitution change with consumption scale and proportion

networks of innovators a synthesis of research issues abstract this paper will first summarise some key findings of empirical research in the 1960s on the role of external sources of scientific technical and market information in successful innovation by business firms this work demonstrated unambiguously the vital importance of external information networks and of collaboration with users during the development of new products and processes moreover the dilemmas of cooperative research in competitive industries were recognised and studied long ago 35 62 76 what then is new about the present wave of interest in networks of innovators are there new forms of organisation or new technologies or new policies which justify renewed research efforts since they go beyond those developments already analysed in earlier empirical and theoretical work section 2 reviews the evidence of new developments in the 1980s in industrial networks regional networks and government sponsored innovative activities it shows that there has indeed been a major upsurge of formal and semi formal flexible networks in the 1980s including some new types of network it also shows that some older forms of research cooperation have been modified and transformed the papers at montreal largely concentrated on the role of regional supplier networks which are a good example of such new wine in old bottles this paper attempts to locate the regional network discussion within a wider context of new developments in networking section 3 discusses the causes of these new developments and whether they are likely to remain a characteristic of national and international innovation systems for a long time to come or prove to be a temporary upsurge to be overtaken later by a wave of take overs and vertical integration finally section 4 sums up some of the other key issues which require further research and debate and the implications for social science theory

the efficiency of the health system in south africa evidence from stochastic frontier analysis the availability of increased resources and the lack of parallel improvement in health status have renewed interest on health system performance particularly where progress towards the millennium development goals has been slow since the political transition in 1994 south africa has consistently invested over eight of its gross domestic product gdp on health but so far returns remain uneven with some localities delivering lower outcomes than others even when they have comparable input levels this study measures the performance of the country s health system following a stochastic production frontier approach results have revealed that eight of the 52 districts in the country had an efficiency score of below 60 and in four of these the score was below 50 technical inefficiency was positively and significantly associated with hiv prevalence and illiteracy rates reported for districts overall mean technical efficiency te in the country was around 80 given this further improvements in he

the impacts of china s household consumption expenditure patterns on energy demand and carbon emissions towards 2050 abstract this paper explores how china s household consumption patterns over the period 2005 2050 influence the total energy demand and carbon dioxide co2 emissions in two baseline scenarios and how it influences carbon prices as well as the economic cost in the corresponding carbon mitigation scenarios to this end we first put forward two possible household consumption expenditure patterns up to 2050 using the working leser model taking into account total expenditure increase and urbanization for comparison both expenditure patterns are then incorporated in a hybrid recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model the results reveal that as income level increases in the coming decades the direct and indirect household energy requirements and co2 emissions would rise drastically when household expenditure shifts from material products and transport to service oriented goods around 21 000 mtce 1 of primary energy and 45 billion tons of co2 emissions would be saved over the 45 year period from 2005 to 2050 moreover carbon prices in the dematerialized mitigation scenario would fall by 13 in 2050 thus reducing the economic cost

inter firm network policies and firm performance evaluating the impact of initiatives in the united kingdom abstract this paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of inter firm networks as a public policy resource that has necessarily required experimentation and adaptation the focus of the paper is an evaluation of public policy network initiatives in the united kingdom from the point of view of the companies participating in these initiatives the study finds that inter firm network initiatives have faced a number of problems resulting in the level of inter firm interaction being generally fairly low and unintensive this has severely limited the number of firms that have benefited from participation as well as the overall impact on firm performance and growth more positively it is shown that the initiatives have resulted in substantial gains for albeit a small number of participating companies the small number of companies achieving substantial benefits were most often those involved in initiatives that were able to formalise sustainable networks the key policy problem is that this situation has occurred in only a very restricted number of circumstances with formal network initiatives being subject to extremely high drop out rates it is suggested that policies aimed at formal network initiatives should be abandoned as a mechanism for creating a critical mass of sustainable networks instead the progression of policy models based on informal initiatives appears to offer the most plausible means of catalysing inter company contact

a cointegrated vecm demand system for meat in italy this article applies cointegration techniques to estimate a monthly demand system for meat in italy in contrast to existing studies where engle and granger s two step procedure and triangular vector error correction model tvecm representations are usually exploited it applies a cointegrated vector error correction model vecm where also prices and expenditure enter endogenously the system and the cointegration rank is not assumed to be known a priori but subject to inference it highlights some of the advantages of using the vecm compared to the tvecm including the possibility of testing the cointegration rank of the system and the weak and strong exogeneity of prices and expenditure within a well specified statistical model this may lead to remarkable improvements in the efficiency of parameters system estimates

estimating consumer demands across the development spectrum maximum likelihood estimates of an implicit direct additivity model abstract this paper characterizes consumer demand patterns across the development spectrum using elasticity estimates from a demand system possessing non linear engel effects demands for six broadly defined goods are then projected under the assumption that per capita expenditure growth rates differ across the development spectrum such projections illustrate the extent to which non linear income effects generate more plausible demand responses estimated marginal budget shares for food decline in a logistical manner and range from about 0 5 for ethiopia to less than 0 05 for the usa engel elasticities for food range from 0 95 for ethiopia to less than 0 1 for the usa

bootstrapping your fish or fishing for bootstraps precision of welfare loss estimates from a globally concave inverse demand model of commercial fish landings in the u s great lakes we extend holt and bishop s 2002 normalized quadratic inverse demand function by obtaining measures of precision of elasticities and consumer welfare loss estimates due to reductions in commercial landings in the u s great lakes even with curvature constraints imposed confidence intervals are obtained by using the bootstrap subsample bootstrap and subsample jackknife

consumption patterns of food tobacco and beverages a cross country analysis this study considers the consumption patterns of food tobacco soft drinks and alcohol in 43 developed and developing countries such an analysis is important for policy issues associated with tobacco alcohol and soft drinks the results show that consumers in the developing countries spend a much higher proportion of their income on food than consumers in developed countries the proportion of expenditure allocated to the other three commodities tobacco alcohol and soft drinks are similar in the two groups of countries on average people around the world allocate about one quarter of their income on food 2 6 on tobacco 3 2 on alcohol and 1 2 on soft drinks the income elasticity estimates reveal that food is a necessity in most countries while tobacco and alcohol are necessities in most of the developed countries and luxuries in a majority of developing countries soft drinks are a luxury in a majority of the developing as well as the developed countries the own price elasticities show th

economic growth convergence and world food demand and supply in projecting global food demand to 2050 much attention has been given to rising demand due to the projected population increase from the current 7 4 billion to more than 9 billion an increasingly important source of the increase in food demand is per capita demand growth induced by rising income per person since the proportion of income spending on food decreases as incomes rise growth in global food demand will be greater if incomes grow faster in developing countries than in high income countries such a pattern of income convergence has become established in recent years making it important to assess the implications for food demand and supply using a resource based measure of food that accounts for the much higher production costs associated with dietary upgrading this paper concludes that per capita demand growth is likely to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050 using the middle ground international institute for applied systems analysis shared socioeconomic pathway projections to 2050 which assume continued income convergence the paper finds that the increase in food demand 102 percent would be roughly a third greater than without convergence 78 percent since the impact of convergence on the supply side is much more muted convergence puts upward pressure on world food prices partially offsetting a baseline trend toward falling world food prices to 2050

simulating weights restrictions in data envelopment analysis by means of unobserved dmus data envelopment analysis dea is a method for assessing the comparative efficiencies of decision making units e g banks and schools by relating their output to their input levels restrictions are often imposed in these assessments to reflect prior judgments on the values of input and or output variables this paper introduces a new approach to capturing and using value judgments in dea based on unobserved decision making units in so doing it opens up a whole new approach for reflecting value judgments in dea assessments which can offer advantages in certain situations

decomposition analysis of consumers demand changes an application to greek consumption data a decomposition analysis for consumer demand functions is developed changes in marshallian demand or expenditure shares functions over time are decomposed into a total substitution effect an income effect and a habit effect this framework is applied to post war greek consumption patterns through a habit persistence version of the quadratic almost ideal demand system quaids it is found that for all commodity categories i e food beverages and tobacco footwear and clothing settling and housing and others the income effect was the main driving force in explaining changes in both quantity demanded and expenditure shares followed by habit and total substitution effects

a dynamic stochastic frontier model to evaluate regional financial efficiency evidence from chinese county level panel data abstract studies have widely used stochastic frontier models to assess financial efficiency however traditional static approaches do not take dynamic characteristics of financial systems into account this article develops a dynamic stochastic frontier model to evaluate regional financial efficiency and provides an empirical test of the model by using panel data of 62 chinese counties during the 2001 2010 period the model measures the dynamic impact of the input output variables and environmental variables on financial efficiency and allows for the separation of technical change from the change in technical efficiency the results show that the dynamic model provides a better fit to the data than the static model in addition a gradient difference emerges in the regional financial efficiency among the six major regions of china the results offer practical implications for the development of regional financial services in china as well as other developing countries and emerging economies

innovation networks and vertical integration abstract a central debate in industrial policy today is that between proponents of large vertically integrated firms on the one hand and those of networks of small specialized producers on the other this paper argues that neither institutional structure is the panacea its supporters claim the menu of institutional alternatives is in fact quite large and both firms and networks of which there are several kinds can be successful growth promoting adaptations to the competitive environment industrial structures vary in their ability to coordinate information flows necessary for innovation and to overcome power relationships adverse to innovation the relative desirability of the various structures then depends on the nature and scope of technological change in the industry and on the effects of various product life cycle patterns the principal policy conclusion of this analysis is that the government s role ought to be facilitating rather than narrow and prescriptive allowing scope for firms to develop organizational forms that are best adapted to their particular environments

using data envelopment analysis for costing bank products an important problem that many banks face is to provide satisfactory cost estimates for the variety of products and services they offer accurate product cost estimates can be used to support better product mix and pricing decisions in this paper we present a method for providing efficient and reliable cost estimates of bank products at the branch level based on the non parametric benchmarking technique of data envelopment analysis dea results from an empirical study undertaken in a banking environment to demonstrate the applicability of the method are also presented

measuring protection mission impossible abstract there seems to be some confusion between openness and protection measures in the international trade literature the aim of this paper is to bring together the state of the art in quantifying trade policy measures and for this reason we focus on the extent of the protection granted by policies rather than on the degree of openness of the economy given the considerable amount of literature that deals with these issues we will limit our review as follows on the one hand we focus on trade policies implemented at the border and therefore do not consider all the other possible public interventions influencing trade flows on the other hand we only take into account indexes that explicitly adopt a metric expressed in a scalar aggregate tariff and quota equivalent measures or an index in a closed interval we distinguish between indexes that aggregate across products same barrier for more products and indexes that aggregate across instruments more barriers for the same product finally in order to classify the large number of indexes covered in our review we propose a typology based on three categories incidence outcome and equivalence

impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources a systematic review of the literature this study summarizes the main conclusions from a systematic review of the empirical literature regarding the impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources universities research institutes and knowledge intensive business services with the aim to organize the literature we classify the different works according to the research question addressed i which firms use knowledge external sources ii do firms using knowledge external sources achieve better results and iii which firms benefit the most from using knowledge external sources stylized facts are that larger more r d intensive and high tech firms are more likely to use knowledge external sources and that use of knowledge external sources is associated to firms higher technical results less attention has been paid to the third question and evidence is not conclusive several recommendations for future research emerge first to take in greater consideration methodological issues so that potential biases in the results caused by sample selection and endogeneity are handled properly second to pay more attention to heterogeneous outcomes third to use continuous indicators of depth and breadth of links allowing for non linear relationships and fourth to extend evidence for developing countries and service industries

the effect of changes in the federal funds rate target on market interest rates in the 1970s abstract this paper examines the influence of monetary policy on interest rates by estimating the effect of changes in the federal funds rate target the federal reserve s policy instrument on market interest rates in the 1970s we find that changes in the target caused large movements in short term rates and smaller but significant movements in intermediate and long term rates we hypothesize that the similarity of the reactions of three six and twelve month rates to changes in the target offers a possible explanation for the lack of support for the expectations theory from studies that have tested the theory using these rates

why should trade negotiators negotiate about in recent years there have been growing demands to make trade liberalization contingent on adoption of common labor and environmental standards the straightforward economic answer is that this makes little sense neither the gains from trade nor the gains from appropriate regulation are compromised if other countries impose standards that are weaker than your own it is possible to offer second bet economic rationales for harmonization but these are empirically unconvincing the only serious argument in favor or regulation is political that regulation which is in the national interest may not be politically feasible unless other countries do the same

the inverse almost ideal demand system abstract a new demand system related to the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer is developed and illustrated this inverse aids iaids retains all of the desirable theoretical properties of the aids model with the exception of consistent aggregation an empirical issue is whether a linear approximation will work as well for the iaids as it has for the aids model since quantities are not as highly correlated as prices an application to u s meat demand demonstrates that the linear approximation of the iaids is excellent which enhanced the ease and range of application

trade restrictiveness and efficiency this article proposes a trade restrictiveness quantity index trqi to measure the welfare impact of trade restrictions based on a distance functions approach the trqi embodies two farrell measures of efficiency respectively for producers and consumers that can be computed using standard efficiency measurement techniques the trqi can also be decomposed into a trade distortion and domestic distortion component in the context of the debate on the interlinkages between openness and economic performance the trqi offers a means to disentangle economic inefficiencies induced by trade restrictions alone from otherwise not directly trade related economic inefficiencies induced by domestic distortions

a system of demand equations satisfying effectively global regularity conditions a parametric specification of an indirect utility function in terms oaf expenditure and two unit cost functions is proposed specification of these unit cost functions in terms of regular functions leads to the notion of an effectively globally regular system of demand equations that is a system of demand equations that is regular over a cone in expenditure price space and for which the regular region includes all points in any given sample and all values of nominal expenditure and prices generating higher values of real expenditure than the sample minimum this general model nests a number of popular demand systems such as the linear expenditure system as special cases an empirical application illustrates some of these ideas copyright 1996 by mit press

a modified implicit directly additive demand system a recently developed demand system nicknamed aidads an implicit directly additive demand system offers an approach to capturing consumer preferences across a wide range of expenditure levels aidads generalizes the les by assuming marginal budget shares vary with utility and hence with expenditure like the les aidads includes subsistence parameters that define minimum consumption levels here we present a modified aidads maidads that replaces the constant subsistence parameters with functions that also vary with utility these transformed subsistence levels are referred to as minimum consumption quantities this model is applied to the 1996 international consumption project data as these data span a wide range of expenditure levels maidads offers a viable alternative for the estimation of a global demand system results suggest minimum consumption quantities for staple grains livestock other food products alcohol and tobacco clothing and footwear and transport and transport services vary

consumers surplus as an exact and superlative cardinal welfare indicator this article shows that the bennet bowley consumer surplus measure is an exact measure of allais disposable surplus if the consumer s utility function is of the translation homothetic generalized quadratic form the bennet bowley consumer surplus measure therefore is a superlative cardinal welfare measure for the entire class of translation homothetic preferences because the exactness results in this article apply for cardinal welfare measures they can be meaningfully aggregated across consumers to make aggregate welfare comparisons

an implicitly additive demand system the problem of endowing large applied general equilibrium models with numerical values for parameters is formidable for example a complete set of own and cross price elasticities of demands for the monash model of the australianeconomy involves in excess of 50000 items invoking the minimal assumptions that demand is generated by utility maximization reduces the load to about 26000 obviously still a number much too large for unrestrained econometric estimation to obtain demand systems estimates for a dozen or so generic commodities at a top level of aggregation categories like food clothing and footwear etc typically johansen s lead has been followed and directly additive preferences imposed upon the underlying utility function with the move beyond one step linearized solutions of applied general equilibrium models the functional form of the demand system adopted becomes an issue the most celebrated of the additive preference demand systems the linear expenditure system les has one

how well does the is lm model fit postwar u s data postwar u s time series for money interest rates prices and gnp are characterized by a multivariate process driven by four exogenous disturbances those disturbances are identified so that they can be interpreted as the four main sources of fluctuations found in the is lm phillips curve model money supply money demand is and aggregate supply shocks the dynamic properties of the estimated model are analyzed and shown to match most of the stylized predictions of the model the estimated decomposition is also used to measure the relative importance of each shock to interpret some macroeconomic episodes and to study sources of permanent shocks to nominal variables

towards a more general approach to testing the time additivity hypothesis a new procedure is proposed for re examining the assumption of additivity of preferences over time which although untenable is usually maintained in intertemporal analyses of consumption and labour supply the method is an extension of a famous work by browning however it is more general in permitting the estimation of intertemporal demand systems which are explicit in an unobservable variable price of utility but may lack a closed form representation in terms of observable variables such as prices and total outlay it also makes extensive use of duality theory to solve the endogeneity problem encountered in browning s study applying this method with an appropriate estimator to the australian aggregate data it is found that the time additivity hypothesis is decisively rejected which is consistent with browning s conclusion

price formation of fish an application of an inverse demand system inverse demand systems explain price variations as functions of quantity variations they have properties analogous to those of regular demand systems there are very few examples of their empirical application in part this is due to lack of data for which price is the decision variable and the quantity given the case of fish landed at belgian sea ports appears to suit an inverse demand system well a rotterdam variant of such a system in estimated allais interaction intensities have been derived and show a reasonable pattern

monetary policy surprises and interest rates evidence from the fed funds futures market abstract this paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill note and bond yields using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components interest rates response to anticipated target rate changes is small while their response to unanticipated changes is large and highly significant these responses are generally consistent with the expectations hypothesis of the term structure surprise target rate changes have little effect on expectations of future actions however which helps to explain the lack of empirical support for the expectations hypothesis at the short end of the yield curve

cooperative ties and the impact of external factors upon innovation in an industrial district some insights from the north staffordshire table and giftware sector tomlinson p r and jackson i cooperative ties and the impact of external factors upon innovation in an industrial district some insights from the north staffordshire table and giftware sector regional studies drawing upon a sample of 118 firms this paper explores the impact of cooperative ties and the role of institutions upon innovation in the uk ceramic table and giftware sector it is found that locational economies are important for aiding innovation with firms in the north staffordshire industrial district holding an inherent advantage vis a vis non district firms however while close vertical ties enhance innovation recent concerns have arisen that horizontal collaboration between district and asian firms is having a detrimental impact upon innovative capacity within the district finally institutions also appear to play an important role in facilitating the innovation process tomlinson p r and jackson i 118

the reliability of ml estimators of systems of demand equations evidence from oecd countries in large demand systems when the unknown error covariance matrix is approximated by its usual maximum likelihood estimator the coefficient estimates are known to suffer from two problems 1 the asymptotic standard errors severely understate the sampling variability of the estimates and 2 the efficiency of the maximum likelihood coefficient estimates is greatly impaired in this paper the author proposes an alternative estimator for the covariance matrix and evaluates its performance using time series data for oecd countries the author finds that there is a spectacular improvement copyright 1991 by mit press

flexible and semiflexible consumer demands with quadratic engel curves in this paper we introduce three flexible consumer demand systems in which expenditures on goods are quadratic functions of income we view these alternatives as to the demand systems used heretofore in the empirical modeling of rank three demands namely those in which expenditure shares are quadratic functions of the logarithm of income curvature conditions required by theory can be imposed locally during the estimation for each and a semiflexible version can be estimated for illustrative purposes we estimate various forms of two of the systems using canadian data on seven categories of goods for the period 1947 to 1995

post the washington consensus economic governance and industrial strategies for the twenty first century recent events in the global economy have led to a growing dissatisfaction with the neo liberal economic paradigm that has dominated economic policy over the last 30 years and the increasing concentration of and abuse of economic power within the corporate sector that has ensued however amidst calls for a new approach to economic management there is a danger that a new policy framework may overlook underlying economic governance structures that exist and may evolve within the economy such oversight has implications for development this paper seeks to demonstrate that the long run efficacy of industrial strategy depends upon designing appropriate economic governance structures that serve the wider public interest it does so by exploring past experiences of industrial strategy drawing lessons from the usa the uk japan the third italy and the emerging and transition economies we also offer some suggestions for ways forward

innovation and inter firm linkages new implications for policy abstract this article discusses the implications for competition innovation and learning of different forms of inter firm linkage ways to govern them different generic systems of innovation and government policy it employs a transformed theory of transactions that can deal with innovation and learning and brings in trust next to opportunism nooteboom b 1996a trust opportunism and governance a process and control model organization studies 17 6 985 1010 nooteboom b 1996b towards a learning based model of transactions in groenewegen j ed tce and beyond kluwer deventer pp 327 349 nooteboom b 1999a inter firm alliances analysis and design routledge london while trust has its limits and should not be blind it can lower transaction costs for learning and innovation it takes the resource competence perspective supported by a theory of knowledge developed in earlier publications according to this theory people perceive interpret and evaluate the world according to cognitive categories that have developed in interaction with the physical and social environment as a result people will perceive understand and evaluate differently to the extent that they have developed in different environments without interaction nooteboom b 1992 towards a dynamic theory of transactions journal of evolutionary economics 2 281 299 nooteboom 1999a this theory yields the notion of external economy of cognitive scope people and firms need outside sources of cognition and competence to complement their own that is the fundamental reason why inter firm linkages are important especially for innovation in order to produce high added value and novelty by utilizing the opportunities of complementary competencies firms need to make relation specific investments which creates risks of hold up and spill over building on earlier work the article identifies different instruments for the control of those risks nooteboom 1996a nooteboom 1996b nooteboom et al 1997 effects of trust and governance on relational risk academy of management journal 40 2 308 338 nooteboom 1999a it identifies two generic kinds of innovation systems in terms of the mix of instruments for relational governance and discusses their merits and flaws with respect to quality of products diffusion incremental and radical innovation one is close to practices in continental europe and japan another is close to anglo american practice there is a certain tendency for the first to gravitate to the second the article warns about the dangers involved and explores a possible third way

on the consumer value of complementarity a benefit function approach the article develops a conceptual model of the consumer value of complementarity and illustrates its usefulness in an application to fisheries complementarity arises when some goods have a positive effect on the marginal value of other goods we propose a measurement of the value of complementarity based on the benefit function our econometric analysis of fish consumption in italy examines these issues with special attention given to dynamics our results show that while short run fish demand is characterized by substitution relationships complementarity does develop in the intermediate run and in the long run copyright 2007 oxford university press

forecasting with the almost ideal demand system evidence from some alternative dynamic specifications the almost ideal demand system is used as a representation of long run demands in discrete time and continuous time error correction models to produce forecasts of budget shares beyond the sample period the estimated models are subjected to a battery of tests and an analysis of the forecasts indicates that continuous time adjustment mechanisms based around fully modified estimates of the long run preference parameters provide a remarkably accurate method of forecasting budget shares

a rational rank four demand system past parametric tests of demand system rank employed polynomial engel curve systems however by gorman s 1981 theorem the maximum possible rank of a utility derived polynomial demand system is three the present paper proposes a class of demand systems that are utility derived are close to polynomial and have rank four these systems nest rational polynomial demands and so can be used to test ranks up to four these systems are suitable for applications where high rank is likely such as demand systems involving a large number of goods a test of rank using this new class of systems is applied to uk consumer demand data

who co operates for innovation and why an empirical analysis abstract in recent years there has been growing interest in co operative arrangements for innovation with some commentators arguing innovation is no longer the province of individual firms but depends increasingly on collective action this paper examines the response to the uk s version of the second european community innovation survey cis 2 to investigate the patterns of co operation between innovating firms and external partners the analysis shows the relationship between innovation and co operation is not straightforward from a subjective i e firm based perspective it is clear that most firms still develop their new products processes and services without forming formal co operative arrangements for innovation with other organisations however firms that engage in r d and that are attempting to introduce higher level innovations i e new to the market rather than new to the firm innovations are much more likely to engage in co operative arrangements for innovation consequently if an objective i e innovation based perspective is taken which weighs innovations by their significance then it is likely that a significant proportion of high level innovations are developed through co operative arrangements although unfortunately the cis 2 does not indicate the direct significance of these arrangements to the development of the innovations in summary the extent of co operative arrangements for innovation appears to depend on the type of firms being considered and on what is meant by innovation

agricultural research spending must increase in light of future uncertainties abstract agricultural productivity depends critically on investments in research and development r d but there is a long lag in this response failing to invest today in improvements of agricultural productivity cannot be simply corrected a few decades later if the world finds itself short of food at that point in time this fundamental irreversibility is particularly problematic in light of uncertain future population income and climate change as portrayed in the ipcc s shared socio economic pathways ssps this paper finds the optimal path of agricultural r d spending over the 21st century for each ssp along with valuation of those regrets associated with investment decisions later revealed to be in error the maximum regret is minimized to find a robust optimal r d pathway that factors in key uncertainties and the lag in productivity response to r d results indicate that the whole of uncertainty s impact on r d is greater than the sum of its individual parts uncertainty in future population has the dominant impact on the optimal r d expenditure path the robust solution suggests that the optimal r d spending strategy is very close to the one that will increase agricultural productivity fast enough to feed the world under the most populous scenario it also suggests that society should accelerate r d spending up to mid century thereafter moderating this growth rate

inter firm collaboration and technology development partnerships within us manufacturing industries the paper examines the conditions under which firms enter into technology development partnerships with customers suppliers and other firms three conceptual approaches to inter firm collaboration are examined namely transactions costs theory resource strategy theories of the firm and network theory drawing upon data collected in a mailed questionnaire survey of us manufacturing establishments in the chemical electronics and instruments industries i assess empirically various determinants of inter firm collaboration in technology development the empirical work suggests that large firms and firms located in major urban centres are more likely to enter into technology development partnerships firms located in a specialized industrial agglomeration do not demonstrate a greater propensity toward entering into technology development partnerships with customers suppliers or other firms cet article cherche a examiner les conditions sous lesquelles les entreprises concluent des partenariats technolo

the benefit function approach to modeling price dependent demand systems an application of duality theory in this article we advocate more extensive use of the benefit function in specifying price dependent or inverse demand models we demonstrate how duality theory may be used to establish the interrelationships between the marshallian or hicksian inverse demands and luenberger s adjusted price functions allowing estimable inverse demands to be derived directly from a benefit function we estimate two systems of inverse demands for japanese quarterly fish consumption results indicate that the procedures and methods employed here appear promising and may prove beneficial for quantity and welfare analysis when modeling systems of inverse demand functions copyright 2009 oxford university press

an empirically oriented demand system with improved regularity properties while the almost ideal demand system has received increasing attention in empirical studies of consumer demand the fact that the underlying piglog cost function is not globally regular has often led to violation of negative semidefiniteness in the estimated slutsky matrix this paper suggests a modification to the piglog class of preferences termed mpiglog which preserves regularity in a wider region of expenditure price space in an empirical section the almost ideal demand system special case of piglog is compared with the analogous special case of mpiglog which the authors term maids the comparison demonstrates the improved regularity features of maids

world food demand long term projections of global food demand are heavily dependent on which functional form of the food demand equation is used given that real incomes can change substantially over the long term key elements are the dependence of the income elasticity on income which ensures that the food budget share always lies within the 0 1 range and the role of income inequality this article analyzes these issues proposes a new functional form that deals with them and presents estimates of income and price elasticities for food in 138 countries copyright 2012 oxford university press

tobacco consumption and taxation in italy an application of the quaids model estimates are presented of the demand for tobacco in italy in the context of a demand system approach the grouping of goods is based on varian s non parametric test for weak separability the parametric demand model is banks blundell and lewbel s quaids model which combines the empirical flexibility of quadratic logarithmic engel curves with integrability estimation is by iterative gmm procedure the estimates are used in an analysis of welfare improving tax reforms which incorporates distributional data the results are discussed with respect to the special features of the italian tobacco market

confronting the food energy environment trilemma global land use in the long run economic agronomic and biophysical drivers affect global land use so all three influences need to be considered in evaluating economically optimal allocations of the world s land resources a dynamic forward looking optimization framework applied over the course of the coming century shows that although some deforestation is optimal in the near term in the absence of climate change regulation the desirability of further deforestation is eliminated by mid century although adverse productivity shocks from climate change have a modest effect on global land use such shocks combined with rapid growth in energy prices lead to significant deforestation and higher greenhouse gas emissions than in the baseline imposition of a global greenhouse gas emissions constraint further heightens the competition for land as fertilizer use declines and land based mitigation strategies expand however anticipation of the constraint largely dilutes its environmental effectiveness as deforestation accelerates prior to imposition of the target

food expenditures and household demographic composition in the us a demand systems approach food expenditures and subsistence quantities of poverty status and non poverty status us households are analysed within a linear expenditure system that postulates subsistence quantities to be linear combinations of demographic variables using the us bureau of labor statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey and detailed monthly consumer price indices this article obtains expenditure elasticities own price elasticities and subsistence quantities for each income group across nine broadly aggregated food commodity groups elasticity estimates and subsistence quantity estimates differ across income groups supporting the premise that policies targeted at specific income groups should be based on the target group s elasticity estimates rather than average population elasticities parameter estimates are then used to simulate how subsistence quantities and own price elasticities can be expected to vary according to the demographic composition of the household within a specific income group

firm organization industrial structure and technological innovation abstract the formal and informal structures of firms and their external linkages have an important bearing on the rate and direction of innovation this paper explores the properties of different types of firms with respect to the generation of new technology various archetypes are recognized and an effort is made to match organization structure to the type of innovation the framework is relevant to technology and competition policy as it broadens the framework economists use to identify environments that assist innovation

the dynamics of innovation from national systems and mode 2 to a triple helix of university industry government relations abstract the triple helix of university industry government relations is compared with alternative models for explaining the current research system in its social contexts communications and negotiations between institutional partners generate an overlay that increasingly reorganizes the underlying arrangements the institutional layer can be considered as the retention mechanism of a developing system for example the national organization of the system of innovation has historically been important in determining competition reorganizations across industrial sectors and nation states however are induced by new technologies biotechnology ict the consequent transformations can be analyzed in terms of neo evolutionary mechanisms university research may function increasingly as a locus in the laboratory of such knowledge intensive network transitions

trade policy issues and empirical analysis interest in u s trade policy has been stimulated in recent years by the massive american trade deficit by the belief that intervention by foreign governments in international markets has given other countries a competitive edge over the united states and by concern about the increase in protectionism among industrial countries in turn major analytical developments in international economics have revolutionized trade theory broadening its scope both by introducing in a more formal manner such concepts as imperfect competition increasing returns product differentiation and learning effects and by including the study of political and economic factors that shape trade policy decisions this collection of papers the result of a conference held by the nber applies these new trade theories to existing world cases and also presents complementary empirical studies that are grounded in more traditional trade theories the volume is divided into four parts the papers in part 1 consider the problem of imperfect competition empirically assessing the economic effect of various trade policies introduced in industries in which the new trade theory seems to apply those in part 2 isolate the effects of protection from the influences of the many economic changes that accompany actual periods of protection and also examine how the effects from exogenous changes in economic conditions vary with the form of protection part 3 provides new empirical evidence on the effect of foreign production by a country s firms on the home country s exports finally in part 4 two key bilateral issues are analyzed recent u s japanese trade tensions and the incident involving the threat of the imposition of countervailing duties by the united states on canadian softwood lumber

explorations into factors explaining money market returns in this article we measure and interpret the common factors that describe money market returns results are presented for both three and four factor models we find that the three factor model explains on average 86 percent of the total variation in most money market returns while the four factor model explains on average 90 percent of this variation using mimicking portfolios we provide an interpretation of the systematic risks represented by these factors in this article we attempt to measure and interpret the common factors that describe money market returns the factor approach we employ assumes that the covariance matrix of a set of random variables in this case excess returns can be decomposed into common or systematic components and idiosyncratic or nonsystematic components this decomposition into systematic and nonsystematic components is based on an assumption of a linear relationship between the returns of each security and a set of common factors this is the assumption of linear return generating models which form an integral part of the structure of many asset pricing theories for example arbitrage pricing theory apt as developed by ross 1976 the interpretation is that the common factors represent sources of systematic or nondiversifiable risk and the idiosyncratic component of returns represents diversifiable risks our focus here is not on testing a particular asset pricing model per se but on developing empirical evidence for the existence of stylized facts regarding money market returns the stylized facts take the form of the existence measurement and interpretation of the common factors that are found in money markets our attempt to measure and interpret these sources of systematic risk may eventually lead to the construction of observable eco

an empirical investigation of the trade benefit function we introduce new definition and estimation procedures of trade benefit functions that allow researchers to generate estimable import share functions the method is based on the work of chau and fare while it is more general in permitting the estimation of hicksian import share systems which are explicit in an unobservable variable but may lack a closed form representation in terms of observable variables an empirical application demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method

nutrition transition and the structure of global food demand estimating future demand for food is a critical aspect of global food security analyses the process linking dietary changes to wealth is known as the nutrition transition and presents well identified features that help to predict consumption changes in poor countries this study proposes to represent the nutrition transition with a nonhomothetic flexible in income demand system known as the modified implicitly directly additive demand system maidads the resulting model is transparent and estimated statistically based on cross sectional information from faostat it captures the main features of the nutrition transition rise in demand for calories associated with income growth diversification of diets away from starchy staples and a large increase in caloric demand for animal based products fats and sweeteners the estimated model is used to project food demand between 2010 and 2050 based on a set of plausible futures trend projections and shared socioeconomic pathways scenarios the main results of these projections are as follows 1 global food demand will increase by 46 less than half the growth in the previous four decades 2 this growth will be attributable mainly to lower middle income and low income countries 3 the structure of global food demand will change over the period with a 95 increase in demand for animal based calories and a much smaller 18 increase in demand for starchy staples and 4 the analysis of a range of population and income projections reveals important uncertainties depending on the scenario the projected increases in demand for animal based and vegetal based calories range from 78 to 109 and from 20 to 42 respectively

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase

innovation learning and industrial organisation innovation learning and organisation are analysed from a perspective which seeks to integrate evolutionary economics the resource competence view of the firm an extended theory of transaction costs and insights derived from cognitive science firms are subject to selection by competitive forces but they also adapt by organisational learning uncertainty is crucial in this and to deal with it we need a logic of abduction a heuristic to move from present competence to novel competence while surviving in the process such a heuristic is specified and some features are clarified by means of the notion of a script taken from cognitive science the heuristic is applied in an analysis of changes of industrial structure the complementarity of large and small firms the roles of multinational enterprises and industrial districts

shadow pricing market access a trade benefit function approach abstract appropriate assessment of the social value of market access is at the core of a broad range of inquiries in trade research we propose a new approach based on a trade benefit function to obtain the shadow value of net imports our approach is in keeping with well established trade welfare measurement techniques for the trade benefit function is dual to the standard trade expenditure function this dual relation further allows for a direct retrieval of the shadow values of net imports from the trade benefit function the operationality of our approach is demonstrated in a series of applications and simulations