new human resource management practices complementarities and the impact on innovation performance in this paper we take our theoretical point of departure in recent work in organisational economics on systems of human resource management hrm practices we develop the argument that just as complementarities between new hrm practices influence financial performance positively there are theoretical reasons for expecting them also to influence innovation performance positively we examine this overall hypothesis by estimating an empirical model of innovation performance using data from a danish survey of 1 900 business firms using principal component analysis we identify two hrm systems which are conducive to innovation in the first one seven of our nine hrm variables matter almost equally for the ability to innovate the second system is dominated by firm internal and firm external training of the total of nine sectors that we consider we find that the four manufacturing sectors correlate with the first system firms belonging to wholesale trade and to the ict intensive service sectors tend to be associated with the second system

beyond gdp the quest for a measure of social welfare this paper critically examines the various approaches to the measurement of individual well being and social welfare that have been considered for the construction of alternatives to gdp special attention is devoted to recent developments in the analysis of sustainability in the study of happiness in the theory of social choice and fair allocation and in the capability approach it is suggested in the conclusion that although convergence toward a consensual approach is not impossible for the moment not one but three alternatives to gdp are worth developing jel i31 e23 e01

capital taxation and government debt policy with public discounting abstract this paper characterizes capital taxation and public debt policy in a quantitative macroeconomic model with an impatient government and uncertainty the government has access to linear taxes on capital and labor and to non state contingent bonds government impatience generates positive and empirically realistic long run levels of both capital taxes and public debt prior predictive analysis shows that the simulated model matches the distribution of both variables in a sample of 42 countries alongside other statistics the paper then presents econometric evidence that countries with higher political instability used as an approximation of unobservable public discount rates have both higher capital taxes and debt

production and welfare progress in economic measurement while the gdp was intended by its originators as a measure of production the absence of a measure of welfare in the national accounts has led to widespread misuse of the gdp to proxy welfare measures of welfare are needed to appraise the outcomes of changes in economic policies and evaluate the results concepts that describe the income distribution such as poverty and inequality fall within the scope of welfare rather than production this paper reviews recent advances in the measurement of production and welfare within the national accounts primarily in the united states and the international organizations expanding the framework beyond the national accounts has led to important innovations in the measurement of both production and welfare

political instability capital taxation and growth abstract in cross country studies of economic growth average growth rates of gdp per capita tend to be negatively associated both with the size of government and with measures of political instability we show that a linear endogenous growth model with a very simple model of government spending and taxation in the presence of political instability can account for both empirical correlations in addition the model predicts that both correlations are intimately linked thus greater political instability leads to both lower growth rates and a higher share of government spending in gdp

the wage effects of high performance work organization in manufacturing an unresolved question about now widespread innovative work systems such as teams and quality programs is whether they influence wage determination this study examines that possible association in manufacturing the author uses data from the 1997 national establishment survey that allow examination of how new work systems affected not only employees who were directly involved in them but other workers as well the key finding is that for core blue collar manufacturing employees higher wages were associated with high performance work organization hpwo systems while higher skill levels and computer based technologies were associated with higher wages the key mechanism appears to have been productivity gains independent of skill and technology that were shared via various across the board wage payment systems hpwo systems appear to have increased managers wages as well although through different channels the author finds no evidence that hpwo related wage gains led to greater wage inequality amon

labour market deregulation flexibility and innovation labour flexibility is often portrayed as important to competitive success using evidence from an original survey of uk firms this paper investigates the relationships between firms use of on the one hand various flexible work practices human resource management techniques and industrial relations systems and on the other hand the innovative activities of those firms our results suggest that the sort of low road labour flexibility practices encouraged by labour market deregulation short term and temporary contracts a lack of employer commitment to job security low levels of training and so on are negatively correlated with innovation

innovation complementarity and environmental productivity effects reality or delusion evidence from the eu abstract innovation is a key element behind the achievement of desired environmental and economic performances regarding co2 mitigation strategies would require cuts in emissions of around 80 90 with respect to 1990 by 2050 in the eu we investigate whether complementarity namely integration between the adoption of environmental innovation measures and other technological and organizational innovations is a factor that has supported reduction in co2 emissions per value added that is environmental productivity we merge new eu innovation and wiod data to assess the innovation effects on sector co2 performances at a wide eu level we find that jointly adopting different innovations is not a widespread factor behind increases in environmental productivity nevertheless even though complementarity is not a low hanging fruit a case where innovation complementarity arises is for manufacturing sectors that integrate eco innovations with product innovations one example of this integrated action is a strategy that pursues energy efficiency with product value enhancement we believe that the lack of integrated innovation adoption behind environmental productivity performance is a signal of the current weaknesses economies face in tackling climate change and green economy challenges incremental rather than more radical strategies have predominated so far the latter have been confined to industrial niches in terms of the number of involved firms this is probably insufficient when we look at long term economic and environmental goals

electoral uncertainty fiscal policy and macroeconomic fluctuations abstract in this paper we study the link between elections fiscal policy and aggregate fluctuations the setup is a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating both technology and political re election shocks the latter are incorporated via a two party model with elections the main theoretical prediction is that forward looking incumbents with uncertain prospects of re election find it optimal to follow relatively shortsighted fiscal policies and that this hurts capital accumulation our econometric estimation using u s data finds a statistically significant link between electoral uncertainty and policy instruments and in turn macroeconomic outcomes

complementarities of innovation activities an empirical analysis of the german manufacturing sector abstract innovation strategies in manufacturing often involve internal rd it is based on data from the german part of the community innovation survey cis 3 the results provide evidence for significant complementarities between internal r d and r d cooperation but cast doubt on the complementarity of internal and contracted r d since a productivity effect on firms patenting probability or sales with new products cannot be found

the quantity and quality of life and the evolution of world inequality gdp per capita is usually used to proxy for the quality of life of individuals living in different countries welfare is also affected by quantity of life however as represented by longevity this paper incorporates longevity into an overall assessment of the evolution of cross country inequality and shows that it is quantitatively important the absence of reduction in cross country inequality up to the 1990s documented in previous work is in stark contrast to the reduction in inequality after incorporating gains in longevity throughout the post world war ii period health contributed to reduce significantly welfare inequality across countries this paper derives valuation formulas for infra marginal changes in longevity and computes a full growth rate that incorporates the gains in health experienced by 96 countries for the period between 1960 and 2000 incorporating longevity gains changes traditional results countries starting with lower income tended to grow faster than countries starting with higher income we estimate an average yearly growth in full income of 4 1 percent for the poorest 50 percent of countries in 1960 of which 1 7 percentage points are due to health as opposed to a growth of 2 6 percent for the richest 50 percent of countries of which only 0 4 percentage points are due to health additionally we decompose changes in life expectancy into changes attributable to 13 broad groups of causes of death and three age groups we show that mortality from infectious respiratory and digestive diseases congenital perinatal and ill defined conditions mostly concentrated before age 20 and between ages 20 and 50 is responsible for most of the reduction in life expectancy inequality at the same time the recent effect of aids together with reductions in mortality after age 50 due to nervous system senses organs heart and circulatory diseases contributed to increase health inequality across countries

welfare analysis of tax reforms using household data abstract this paper discusses a methodology for calculating the distribution of gains and losses from a policy change using data for a large sample of households estimates are based on the equivalent income function which is money metric utility defined over observable variables this enables calculations to be standardised and a computer program to compute the statistics presented in the paper is available for a general demand system equivalent income is related to measures of deadweight loss and standard errors are computed for each of the welfare measures an application to u k data for 5 895 households is given which simulates a reform that involves eliminating housing subsidies

sustainability and technical progress a rigorous model connects together the following three basic concepts 1 sustainability meaning the generalized future power of an economy to consume over time 2 green nnp meaning a current measure of national income that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also more generally depletion of environmental assets evaluated at current efficiency prices 3 technological progress meaning a projection onto the future of the so called solow residual a simple general formula is derived some crude calculations suggest a possibly strong effect of the residual which hints that our best present estimates of long term sustainability may be largely driven by predictions of future technological progress

public debt stabilization the relevance of policymakers time horizons policymakers are stuck in time political short termism policy myopia policy short sightedness and similar words have been coined to emphasize the present centric policy thinking politics tends to produce short time horizons and as a result policymakers often fail to use present opportunities to mitigate future harms focusing on fiscal and monetary strategic interactions given different separate decision makers our paper aims to explore the effects of policymakers time horizons on debt stabilization to formalize our ideas we use the novel concept of nonlinear model predictive control feedback nash equilibrium nfne and find that present centric policy thinking and decision horizons matters under several dimensions

government spending and budget deficits in the industrial economies fiscal policy nouriel roubini and jeffrey sachs this paper examines the evolution of the size of government and of budget deficits in oecd economies we highlight the rapid increase in government spending in the 1970s the sharp rise in budget deficits and public debt after 1973 and the reversal in these trends in the 1980s the increase in the size of government was associated in part with the slowdown in growth after 1973 but also reflected gradual adjustment of the ratio of spending to output towards a long run target which depends on political and institutional characteristics of the economy the political orientation of the government the degree of wage indexation and the degree of stability of the political system such factors also explain the size of budget deficits when faced with an adverse shock subsequent deficit reduction requires a measure of political consensus we note that such consensus is hard to achieve in multi party coalitions in consequence countries with such a political structure tended in consequence countries with such a political structure tended toin consequence countries with such a political structure tended to experience much more rapid increases in their debt gnp ratios

fiscal policy in real time in this paper i estimate the ex ante or intentional cyclical stance of fiscal policy in oecd countries i use the fiscal plans reported at the time of budgeting together with other information available to fiscal policy makers in real time indeed fiscal plans might be significantly different from ex post outcomes because governments do not have complete control over their implementation which is influenced by several exogenous factors when fiscal policy rules are estimated using real time data i show in this paper that oecd countries have often planned a counter cyclical fiscal stance especially during economic expansions this contrasts with conventional findings based on actual data which tend to point towards a cyclicality or pro cyclicality forecast errors for the government structural balance and the output gap play a central role in explaining the differences between estimates based on ex ante and ex post data

complementarities in organizational design and the diffusion of information technologies an empirical analysis we use a specially designed survey on french firms located in haute savoie to provide empirical evidence suggesting that information and communication technologies adoption is not only influenced by the traditional factors of technology diffusion but also by complementarity effects between strategies organization and information technologies the data collected permitted several advances firstly we could study authentic ict while the recent literature has mainly focused on computer capital stocks or automation tools secondly we constructed measures of the determinants put forward by the models of technology diffusion thirdly we studied three kinds of practices organizational and strategic practices technological choices

three sides of harberger triangles prevailing economic wisdom is highly critical of injudicious tax policies or government regulations uncorrected externalities unchecked monopolistic practices and various other market failures when economists are challenged to quantify the economic costs of associated price distortions it is standard practice and has been since the 1960s to use a small number of assumptions and selected elasticities to estimate areas of the relevant harberger triangles this simple and straightforward exercise has numerous applications and the virtue of producing answers rather than conjectures harberger triangles come in many shapes and sizes figure 1 offers an illustration of such a triangle for the simple case of an excise tax point a of figure 1 at which the demand and supply schedules intersect denotes market equilibrium in the absence of the tax with quantity q1 transacted at price p1 introduction of an excise tax at rate t payable by firms selling the commodity shifts the supply schedule upward by t at the new market equilibrium firms sell q2 units of the commodity at a market price of p2 receiving after tax p3 a p2 0 t market equilibrium at point a in figure 1 has the feature that marginal consumption benefits equal marginal production costs the excise tax drives a wedge between marginal benefits and marginal costs at consumption level q2 consumers are willing to pay any amount up to p2 for additional units of the good and suppliers would readily provide additional units of the good for any price of p3 or greater but these additional transactions do not take place due to the effect of the tax wedge the loss associated

aggregate deadweight loss and money metric social welfare an econometric approach to the measurement of aggregate deadweight loss is proposed that does not require restrictive assumptions about preferences for validity the measure can be interpreted as the loss in allocative efficiency and is independent of the distribution of individual welfare an approach that is pervasive in the literature is to sum the individual measures of deadweight loss and interpret the resulting index as a measure of social welfare the author shows that this approach is invalid unless individual preferences or the social ordering are severely restricted an alternative method of evaluating money metric social welfare that does not require these restrictions is presented copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

on the ineffectiveness of tax policy in altering long run growth harberger s superneutrality conjecture abstract in 1964 harberger conjectured that although theory predicts that changes in tax rates affect investment and growth in the long run in practice tax policy is an ineffective instrument to influence growth this paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence in favor of this view the growth effects of tax policy in the class of endogenous growth models driven by human capital accumulation are examined and numerical simulations of these models confirm the results harberger predicted cross country panel regressions estimated using a new method for measuring effective tax rates produce significant investment effects from taxes that are consistent with negligible growth effects these results are robust to the introduction of other growth determinants

towards a green economy through innovations the role of trade union involvement abstract in this paper we address the overlooked issue of whether and how industrial relations might play a role in the process of greening the economy primarily through the levers of innovation adoption and organisational change we address our objective econometrically assessing the quality of industrial relations as a driver of environmental innovation adoption through the use of micro data on manufacturing firms the results yield two interesting main findings being a unionised firm is not associated with the adoption of environmental innovation however when we consider the industrial relations climate we observe a positive relationship between a cooperative industrial relations climate union involvement and the propensity to introduce environmental innovation two models are relevant a managerially oriented model unions are informed and a participatory model unions bargain on innovation adoption the contents of environmental innovations are also important union involvement is more relevant for adopting more complex and radical innovations to abate co2 and ems and iso practices

fair production and allocation of an excludable nonrival good we study fairness in economies with one private good and one partially excludable nonrival good a social ordering function determines for each profile of preferences an ordering of all conceivable allocations we propose the following free lunch aversion condition if the private good contributions of two agents consuming the same quantity of the nonrival good have opposite signs reducing that gap improves social welfare this condition combined with the more standard requirements of unanimous indifference and responsiveness delivers a form of welfare egalitarianism in which an agent s welfare at an allocation is measured by the quantity of the nonrival good that consumed at no cost would leave her indifferent to the bundle she is assigned

estimating consumption economies of scale adult equivalence scales and household bargaining power how much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married what percentage of a married couple s expenditures are controlled by the husband how much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart we propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these we model households in terms of the utility functions of its members a bargaining or social welfare function and a consumption technology function we demonstrate generic non parametric identification of the model and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call indifference scales as well as consumption economies of scale the household s resource sharing rule or members bargaining power and other related concepts copyright 2013 oxford university press

global welfare comparisons to provide a normative foundation for transfers between dierent economies one needs information on their per capita welfare this paper considers various methods for doing this and reaches the following main conclusions i such global welfare comparisons are more demanding than usually thought ii the ranking of methods diers from that of local e g over time comparisons with real comprehensive per capita nnp being the least impractical method the lesson is that global welfare comparisons should be performed with great care the comparisons must be made in local real prices calculated according to purchasingpower parity where non traded environmental amenities play an important role

comparative statics of the firm abstract complementarities arise naturally in diverse models of optimal decision making in a firm theoretical properties of supermodular functions provide a powerful tool for analyzing qualitative properties in such circumstances this paper considers a general model of the firm and gives sufficient conditions for complementarities to hold and for optimal decisions to be monotone with a parameter a variety of specific models of the firm are shown to satisfy these conditions necessary conditions delimit those models of the firm that may exhibit monotone optimal decisions journal of economic literature classification numbers b41 c61 d20 l00

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

backward and forward looking shadow prices in inclusive wealth accounting an example of renewable energy capital abstract attaching weights to the list of capital assets is crucial in inclusive wealth accounting and sustainability assessments these weights or shadow prices can be constructed in theory by looking prospectively at future social profits that the capital in question is expected to yield in practice however both backward and forward looking shadow prices are used this study confirms that these two approaches are theoretically equivalent under strong assumptions and reviews how and why the two approaches are taken the two approaches are then applied to renewable energy capital rec which has rarely been done in either produced or natural capital accounting and sustainability assessments renewable energy capital provides an ideal example with which to compare the two approaches as it is a class of produced capital that substitutes both produced and natural capital the numerical results of both approaches demonstrate that renewable energy capital starts to account for as large a share as natural capital does if not produced capital or inclusive wealth in those countries where natural capital is poorly endowed and investment in renewable energy capital has been witnessed

on the dynamics of growth and fiscal policy with redistributive transfers abstract this paper continues the study of optimal fiscal policy in a growing economy by studying the case in which the government simultaneously provides three main categories of expenditures public production services public consumption services and state contingent redistributive transfers we make two contributions to the literature firstly we set up a dynamic general equilibrium model of endogenous growth in which rational voters choose the capital tax rate and the allocation of total tax revenues between productive government expenditures public production services and non productive ones public consumption services and redistributive transfers we study the properties of these policies and their impact on growth secondly we deliver analytic results for the long run and transitional dynamics of optimal fiscal policies and endogenous growth in particular we establish existence and investigate the possibility of uniqueness and dynamic determinacy and how this possibility is affected by the chosen allocative and redistributive policies

effective tax rates in macroeconomics cross country estimates of tax rates on factor incomes and consumption abstract this paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics using this method we construct time series of tax rates for large industrial countries the method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines aggregate measures of the corresponding tax bases this method yields estimates of effective tax rates on factor incomes and consumption consistent with the tax distortions faced by a representative agent in a general equilibrium framework these tax rates compare favorably with existing estimates of marginal tax rates and highlight important international differences in tax policy

testing for complementarities in reduced form regressions a note abstract in many cases it is important to know whether choice variables for a decision maker are mutual complements but a structural model cannot be estimated a unified framework for testing for complementarity through reduced form regressions is provided

a positive theory of fiscal deficits and government debt this paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences alternate in office as a result of elections government debt is used strategically by each policymaker to influence the choices of his successors if different policymakers disagree about the desired composition of government spending between two public goods the economy exhibits a deficits bias that is debt accumulation is higher than it would be with a social planner the equilibrium level of debt is larger the larger is the degree of polarization between alternating governments and the less likely it is that the current government will be re elected

pricing the limits to growth from minerals depletion this paper evaluates the loss of global welfare from exhaustion of nonrenewable resources such as oil the underlying methodology represents an empirical application of some recent developments in the theory of green accounting and sustainability the paper estimates that the world loses the equivalent of about 1 percent of final consumption per year from finiteness of the earth s resources compared with a counterfactual trajectory where global extraction of minerals is allowed to remain forever constant at today s flow rates and extraction costs

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

can firms location decisions counteract the balassa samuelson effect this paper examines the determinants of relative prices in a model combining a harrod balassa samuelson hbs mechanism and an endogenous location of traded good producers besides the standard hbs effect asymmetric productivity improvements in the traded good sector push new firms to enter the market this benefits local consumers who save on trade costs and exerts an upward pressure on relative wages as a consequence relative prices in the traded good sector either increase or fall in general equilibrium in a panel cointegration framework the wage effect is shown to dominate this means the hbs effect is strengthened by the relocation of traded good producers

aggregate consumer behavior and the measurement of social welfare this paper describes a new approach to normative economics combining the theory of social choice with econometric modeling of aggregate consumer behavior we first derive a system of aggregate demand functions by exact aggregation over individual demand functions we then construct measures of individual welfare from systems of individual demand functions finally we incorporate these measures into a social welfare function introducing ethical assumptions based on horizontal and vertical equity to illustrate the application of this approach we consider the u s standard of living and its cost over the period 1947 1985 the purpose of this paper is to describe a remarkable convergence that has occurred between economic theory and econometrics over the past decade this conjunction has taken place between the theory of social choice and econometric modeling of aggregate consumer behavior the confluence of these two streams of research has produced a new approach to normative economics this approach has been successfully applied to the evaluation of economic policy the measurement of poverty and inequality and the assessment of the standard of living and its cost a common problem in the modeling of consumer behavior and social choice is the representation of individual preferences in the econometric modeling of aggregate consumer behavior the primary emphasis has been on simplifying aggregate demand functions the most familiar approach to this problem is the model of a representative consumer this model is required to justify applications of the theory of individual consumer behavior to aggregate data on prices and quantities consumed the simplest version of the model is based on identical homothetic preferences for all individuals under identical homothetic preferences aggregate quantities consumed are functions of aggregate expenditure and prices these functions have precisely the same properties as demand functions in the theory of individual consumer behavior the condition of identical homothetic preferences was weakened by gorman 1953 to permit displacements from the origin for individual demand functions gorman showed that a necessary and sufficient condition for aggregate demand functions to depend on aggregate expenditure is that all individu

consumer prices the consumer price index and the cost of living after presenting major findings and recommendations the cpi commission reiterates the estimate of a 1 1 percentage point per annum upward bias it rejects the contention that the bls already makes substantial corrections for quality change that quality improvements and new products accrue only to the rich and that procedures to make more extensive quality adjustments valuations of new products and adjustments for commodity and outlet substitution are impractical the bias in the cpi can be sharply reduced as the authors detail in this paper coauthors are ellen r dulberger robert j gordon zvi griliches and dale w jorgenson

a review article the case against the use of the sum of compensating variations in cost benefit analysis this paper presents a case against the use of the sum of compensating varia tions as a cost benefit test we argue that 1 the ethical judginents implied by the test are not defensible 2 positive sums of compensating variations occur without potential pareto improvements resulting in social preference reversals without simultaneous scitovsky re versals 3 when lump sum transfers are feasible a positive sum of compensating variations is necessary but not sufficient for a potential pareto improvement 4 in order to eliminate preference reversals and intransitivities all households must have almost identical quasi homothetic preferences a condition that is not satisfied in real economies

why a stubborn conservative would run a deficit policy with time inconsistent preferences a conservative government in favor of a low level of public consumption knows that it will be replaced by a government in favor of a larger level of public consumption we show that the resulting level of public consumption is in between the levels the two governments would choose if each were in power both in the present and in the future in particular we show that if the conservative government is more stubborn in a particular sense than the succeeding government the conservative government will borrow more than it would had it remained in power in the future

a contribution to the theory of welfare accounting a kind of unified theory is proposed as a dynamic generalization of the standard consumer surplus methodology for evaluating welfare changes the unified theory allows rigorous dynamic welfare comparisons to be inferred between any two economic situations from just knowing current incomes and observing a short run market demand schedule essentially the change in present discounted future utility is exactly captured by the formula difference in current income plus consumer surplus this well known formula is thereby shown to cover a far wider class of welfare comparisons than is customarily treated in the textbook static case

unemployment labour markets and structural change in eastern europe labour markets in eastern europe michael burda unemployment is a major concern in the transforming economies of central and eastern europe the modern flow approach to labour markets suggests both that unemployment is an important component of the transformation process and that the labour market institutions adopted will influence the rate of unemployment in the long run to date eastern european countries exhibit considerable divergences in several of these institutions especially in unemployment benefit systems collective bargaining structures and active labour market policies an aggregate matching function is successfully estimated for data from czech and slovak employment offices emerging labour markets in the east function not so differently from those in the west the implied dynamics make both big bang and benign neglect unattractive strategies for transformation a mixed bang is more appropriate quantitative evidence about the effects on unemployment of different labour market institutions in oecd countries is used to make long term projections of equilibrium rates of unemployment in central and eastern europe given the labour market institutions now in place there with the possible exception of the czech republic high unemployment is likely to be pervasive and persistent

environmental efficiency and labour productivity trade off or joint dynamics a theoretical investigation and empirical evidence from italy using namea in this paper we test an adapted ekc hypothesis to verify the relationship between environmental efficiency namely emissions per unit of value added and labour productivity value added per employee we exploit namea data on italy for 29 sector branches and 6 categories of air emissions for the period 1991 2001 we employ data on capital stock and trade openness to test the robustness of our results on the basis of the theoretical and empirical analyses focusing on innovation firm performances and environmental externalities we would expect a positive correlation between environmental efficiency and labour productivity a negative correlation between the emissions intensity of value added and labour productivity which departs from the conventional mainstream view the hypothesis tested is a critical one within the longstanding debate on the potential trade off or complementarity between environmental preservation and economic performance which is strictly associated with the role of technological innovation we find that for most air emission categories there is a positive relationship between labour productivity and environmental efficiency labour productivity dynamics then seem to be complementary to a decreasing emissions intensity in the production process taking a disaggregate sector perspective we show that the macro aggregate evidence is driven by sector dynamics in a non homogenous way across pollutants services tend always to show a complementary relationship while industry seems to be associated with inverted u shape dynamics for greenhouse gases and nitrogen oxides this is in line with our expectations in any case ekc shapes appear to drive such productivity links towards complementarity the extent to which this evidence derives from endogenous market forces industrial and structural change and policy effects is discussed by taking an evolutionary perspective to innovation and by referring to impure public goods arguments

the innovation effects of environmental policy instruments a typical case of the blind men and the elephant abstract in this paper we examine the innovation effects of environmental policy instruments in four literatures theoretical models on incentives for eco innovation econometric studies based on observed data survey analysis based on stated information and technology case studies the aim of this paper is to critically examine the methods and the results we argue that the case studies literature even when its results are specific and difficult to generalise is a necessary source of empirical evidence about policy impacts and the factors responsible for these impacts pointing to issues that are neglected in the theoretical and econometric literature such as the specifics of the innovation context and policy interaction effects the paper states five synthesised findings and makes a plea for multi method analysis one other important synthesised finding is that the influence of market based instruments on innovation such as emission trading and taxes is far weaker than assumed

investigating policy and r d effects on environmental innovation a meta analysis in the last decades a wide research effort has been devoted at the analysis of the determinants of environmental innovation ei whereas agreement seemed to emerge around a cluster of determinants mainly technology push market pull policy push pull and firm specific factors empirical analyses have failed to provide strong confirmation on the relevance of some core variables after a qualitative discussion of this literature we empirically assess it by exploiting meta regression analysis techniques to test the effectiveness of two determinants policy and r d our findings are clear as for the first we show that only certain types of policy have proven to affect ei in particular regulatory stringency as for r d we show that the use of estimation methods is not neutral to the outcome of the primary studies

environmental innovations in services manufacturing services integration and policy transmissions abstract this paper investigates the relevant factors behind the almost unexplored realm of environmental innovation in services using a dataset of 8161 italian service firms specifically we test whether manufacturing services integration matters for environmental innovations in addition taking account for the heterogeneity of the service industries we analyse whether environmental policies for manufacturing transmit induced innovation effects to services our findings show that i the drivers of environmental innovations related to carbon abatement and energy efficiency differ across industries and ii cooperation training environmental management systems and public funding play key roles in these processes the integration of services and manufacturing through push and pull effects and the environmental policy transmission effect from manufacturing to services generally do not seem to have a positive impact on the diffusion of environmental innovations

complementarities between obstacles to innovation evidence from france abstract this paper investigates obstacles to innovation faced by french manufacturing firms using cis2 data we distinguish between obstacles in postponed projects and obstacles in abandoned projects first we highlight the most important barriers to innovation faced by firms and find that lack of skilled personnel is one of these second based on descriptive analysis correspondence analysis and multivariate probit models we explore factors explaining the perception of obstacles and study complementarities between those obstacles we show that while adopting a package of policies increases the pace of innovation a more targeted choice among policies is needed to encourage firms to persevere in their innovative efforts

barriers to investment in polarized societies i present a tractable dynamic model of political economy where disagreements about the composition of public spending result in implementation of short sighted policies the relative price of investment to consumption is excessively large in equilibrium due to over taxation investment rates are too low which slows down growth along the transition in the long run this results in output consumption and welfare being inefficiently low the larger is the degree of polarization the greater is the inefficiency political stability mitigates the effects of polarization by making the incumbent internalize the dynamic inefficiencies introduced by the choice of growth retarding policies

redefining innovation eco innovation research and the contribution from ecological economics while innovation processes toward sustainable development eco innovations have received increasing attention during the past years theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze these processes are poorly developed against this background the term eco innovation is introduced in this paper addressing explicitly three kinds of changes towards sustainable development technological social and institutional innovation secondly the potential contribution of neoclassical and co evolutionary approaches from environmental and innovation economics to eco innovation research is discussed three peculiarities of eco innovation are identified the double externality problem the regulatory push pull effect and the increasing importance of social and institutional innovation while the first two are widely ignored in innovation economics the third is at the least not elaborated appropriately the consideration of these peculiarities may help to overcome market failure by establishing a specific eco innovation policy and to avoid a technology bias through a broader understanding of innovation finally perspectives for a specific contribution of ecological economics to eco innovation research are drawn it is argued that methodological pluralism as established in ecological economics would be very beneficial for eco innovation research a theoretical framework integrating elements from both neoclassical and evolutionary approaches should be pursued in order to consider the complexity of factors influencing innovation decisions as well as the specific role of regulatory instruments and the experience gathered in ecological economics integrating ecological social and economic aspects of sustainable development is highly useful for opening up innovation research to social and institutional changes 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

determinants of environmental innovation new evidence from german panel data sources abstract in most cases empirical analyses of environmental innovations based on firm level data relied on surveys for one point in time these surveys allow for the inclusion of many explanatory variables such as different policy instruments or the influence of pressure groups but it is not possible to address the dynamic character of environmental innovations this paper uses two german panel databases the establishment panel of the institute for employment research iab and the mannheim innovation panel mip of the centre for european economic research zew to explore the determinants of environmental innovations the econometric estimations show that the improvement of the technological capabilities knowledge capital by r d triggers environmental innovations environmental regulation environmental management tools and general organizational changes also encourage environmental innovation a result that has also been postulated by the famous porter hypothesis

municipal waste kuznets curves evidence on socio economic drivers and policy effectiveness from the eu waste generation and waste disposal are becoming increasingly prominent in the environmental arena from a policy perspective and in the context of delinking analysis in general waste generation is still increasing proportionally with income and economic and environmental costs associated to landfilling are also increasing this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of waste generation incineration and landfill dynamics based on panel data for the eu25 to assess the effects of different drivers economic structural policy and the eventual differences between western and eastern eu countries we show that for waste generation there is still no waste kuznets curve wkc trend although elasticity to income drivers appears lower than in the past landfill and other policy effects do not seem to provide backward incentives for waste prevention and in terms of landfill and incineration as expected they are respectively decreasing and increasing with policy acting as a strong driver eastern countries appear to be performing generally quite well thus benefiting from eu membership and related policies in terms of environmental performance we can conclude that although absolute delinking is far from being achieved for waste generation there are some first positive signs of an increasing relative delinking for waste generation and robust landfill diversion and varying evidence of a significant role of the eu waste policies implemented in the late 1990s and early 2000s our evidence suggests that if while landfill diversion is currently associated to a delinking partly explained by eu policies waste prevention must be the next objective of waste regulation efforts

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

on the welfare significance of green accounting as taught by parable abstract green nnp is a national accounting concept that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also depletion of environmental assets for a time autonomous technology green nnp has a rigorous welfare interpretation as an exact measure of the economy s future power to consume the present paper extends the standard framework to cover the case of labor augmenting technological progress for this special case of time dependence a powerful conceptual parable applies it is as if the conclusion from a simple minded welfare story told by the standard neoclassical one sector growth model covers a far more general situation involving any number of different types of capital any convex production possibilities set and fully optimizing behavior implications and applications are discussed

optimal taxation of capital income in general equilibrium with infinite lives this paper analyzes the optimal tax on capital income in general equilibrium models of the second best agents have infinite lives and utility functions which are extensions from the koopmans form the population is heterogeneous the important property of the models is the equality between the social and the private discount rates in the long run i find that the optimal tax rate is zero in the long run for a special case of additively separable utility functions i then determine the tax rates along the dynamic path and conditions that are sufficient for the local stability of the steady state

voting on the budget deficit this paper analyzes a model in which a group of rational individuals votes over the composition and time profile of public spending all voters agree that a balanced budget is ex ante optimal however if there is disagreement between current and future majorities a balanced budget is not a political equilibrium under majority rule under certain conditions a majority of the voters favors a budget deficit and the equilibrium deficit is larger the greater is the polarization among voters copyright 1990 by american economic association

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

information appropriability and the generation of innovative knowledge four decades after arrow and nelson an introduction this introduction sets in context the works that follow which are meant to take stock of the theoretical advances and also historical changes since the seminal arrow 1962 and nelson 1959 first we summarize some of the original arrow nelson insights second we map the subsequent developments shorthanded as the stanford yale sussex synthesis a particularly controversial issue concerns the relationships between notional opportunities of innovation private appropriability of return from innovating and realized rates of innovation hence third we briefly offer a framework for its discussion in general and with reference to the private appropriation of scientific knowledge copyright 2006 oxford university press

inequalities in life expectancy and the global welfare convergence abstract becker et al 2005 maintain that including life expectancy gains in a welfare indicator result in a reduction of inequality between 1960 and 2000 twice as great as when measured by per capita income we discuss their methodology and show it determines the convergence result we use an alternative methodology based on fleurbaey and gaulier 2009 which monetizes differences in life expectancy between countries at each date rather than life expectancy gains we show that including life expectancy has no effect on the evolution of world inequality

is environmental innovation embedded within high performance organisational changes the role of human resource management and complementarity in green business strategies abstract this paper investigates whether firms joint implementation of organisational innovation and training may foster their adoption of environmental innovation ei and if this correlation falls within porter hypothesis ph framework we study the relationship of complementarity between strategies of high performance work practices hpwp and human resource management hrm when ei adoption is the firms objective using an original dataset on 555 italian industrial firms regarding ei hpwp and hrm coherent with the last cis2006 2008 survey results show that sector specificity matter the only case in which strict complementarity is observed in organisational change concerns co 2 abatement a relatively complex type of ei but this is true only when the sample is restricted to more polluting and regulated sectors this evidence is coherent with the porter hypothesis complementarity related adoption of ei is an element of organisational change in firms that are subject to more stringent environmental regulations nevertheless the fact that strict complementarity is not a diffuse factor behind the adoption of all environmental innovation indeed does not come as a surprise at this stage in the development of green strategies the share of eco firms is still limited even in advanced countries that are seeking tools for a new competitiveness the full integration of eis within the internal capabilities and firm s own assets is far from being reached even in advanced and competitive industrial settings

complementarities in innovation policy this paper develops a framework for testing discrete complementarities in innovation policy using european data on obstacles to innovation we propose a discrete test of supermodularity in innovation policy leading to a number of inequality constraints we apply our test to two types of innovation decisions to innovate or not and if so by how much we find that the evidence regarding the existence of complementarity in innovation policies depends on the phase of innovation that is targeted getting firms innovative or increasing their innovation intensity as well as on the particular pair of policies that is being considered the two phases of the innovation process i e the probability of becoming an innovator and the intensity of innovation are subject to different constraints interestingly there seems to be a need to adopt a package of policies to make firms innovate while a more targeted choice among policies is necessary to make them more innovative

shifting chinese organizational responses to evolving greening pressures organizations are facing various evolving pressures to green their practices these pressures range from obligatory forces to voluntary measures environmental pressures traditionally influenced organizations to seek reactive and internal practices the adopted environmental management em practices have evolved to be more proactive and external as the focus has shifted to supply chains this paper aims to further understand the driving mechanisms for em practices under various external pressures to meet this research goal this study extends the theory of dynamic incentives of environmental policies and institutional theory to develop environmental pressures using an empirical study of 422 chinese manufacturers covering all 31 provinces and provincial cities an exploratory factor analysis reveals four em practices factors and four pressures drivers factors results of a hierarchical regression analysis show that coercive pressures positively relate to more reactive internal em practices less coercive pressures positively relate to more proactive external and green supply chain management practices the empirical findings provide further support that voluntary regulatory measures can help motivate companies in extending their em efforts to supply chains the work also provides insights into how organizations may respond to evolving regulatory regimes dynamic incentives of environmental regulatory policy and various institutional pressures

international comparisons of living standards by equivalent incomes we propose a measure of living standards for international comparisons based on gdp per capita the measure incorporates corrections for international flows of income labor risk of unemployment healthy life expectancy household demography and inequalities the method for comparing populations that differ in some non income dimension consists of computing the equivalent variation of income that would make each population indifferent between its current situation and a reference situation with respect to the non income dimension this is applied to 24 oecd countries the obtained ranking of countries differs substantially from the gdp ranking

what drives eco innovators a critical review of the empirical literature based on econometric methods abstract the aim of this paper is to provide a critical review of the literature on the econometric analyses of firm level determinants to eco innovation the review reveals some gaps in knowledge first an integrated theoretical framework which merges the insights from different approaches is missing second the influence of some variables is still unsettled demand pull and cost savings whereas others have hardly been included in previous analyses internal and international factors third studies on the drivers to eco innovation versus general innovation are relatively scarce with respect to those on the drivers to eco innovation in general fourth analyses of the relevance of different determinants to eco innovation for distinct eco innovator and eco innovation types have largely been missing fifth studies on middle income and developing countries are still scarce sixth the econometric analyses have relied on microeconometric methods based on cross section data mostly logit and probit models whereas the use of panel data is virtually absent seventh detailed econometric analyses on the distinct drivers and barriers to eco innovation in different sectors and regions have not been performed so far finally whether the position of the firm in the value chain and the market structure influence the propensity to eco innovate are largely unexplored topics