an energy efficient future a strategy for the uk abstract this article examines the national and international energy context within which a uk energy efficiency strategy would need to be formulated and also highlights the broader macroeconomic rationale for a more concerted approach it focuses particular attention upon the crucial role of the public sector including both the energy demand and supply sides and the need to review investment appraisal criteria in the energy sector

information school choice and academic achievement evidence from two experiments we examine a natural experiment and a field experiment that provided direct information on school test scores to lower income families in a public school choice plan receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher performing schools parents with high scoring alternatives nearby were more likely to choose nonguaranteed schools with higher test scores using random variation from each experiment we find that attending a higher scoring school increases student test scores the results imply that school choice will most effectively increase academic achievement for disadvantaged students when parents have easy access to test score information and good options from which to choose

breakthrough china s and india s transition from production to innovation summary china and india have become major producers of products and services for global markets this article explores to what extent they are also building up innovation capabilities it draws on a combination of approaches innovation systems global value chains and professional networks to analyze four of the most dynamic industries we find that mounting innovation efforts only rarely materialized in cutting edge innovations but suggest that if capital accumulation proceeds at the current pace innovation capabilities will rapidly be built up in china and with a time lag india we conclude by setting out the implications for both the developed and the developing world

the consequences of globalisation india s software industry and cross border labour mobility the indian software industry is a prime example of globalisation the industry has been characterised by large cross border mobility of its skilled labour force using a unique survey of indian software firms our paper quantifies the extent and impact of mobility on firm behaviour and performance cross border labour mobility in the paper refers to both temporary and permanent labour flows by indian software professionals the picture that emerges is of a highly mobile world in which temporary mobility has been an important characteristic of the industry a significant number of workers have work experience abroad in a developed country moreover the share of skilled workers with such experience has been positively associated with the incidence of skilled migration from the firm this suggests network effects are at work in terms of the impact on performance as measured by the change in turnover per worker and the change in the employment size of the firm the paper finds little evidence of a robust adverse effect further the evidence suggests that there have been important external effects at work as through changes in the willingness of workers to acquire skills as well as through increased provision of educational services these have further abated the risk of a brain drain however the software industry may be rather different from other industries our results need to be interpreted as the outcome of a particular case of skilled migration and not one necessarily representative of all types of skilled migration and source sectors

technological capabilities and industrialization abstract this paper reviews the implications for industrial strategy of recent research on technological capabilities at the firm and national levels after exploring the nature and determinants of microlevel technological development a simple framework for explaining the growth of national capabilities is set out based on the interplay of incentives capabilities and institutions each may suffer market failure and so require corrective intervention the experience of some industrializing countries is described to assess the validity of this framework it is concluded that interventions carefully and selectively applied are necessary for industrial success

parent teacher meetings and student outcomes evidence from a developing country abstract we conduct a randomized field experiment involving regularly scheduled face to face meetings between teachers and parents over a period of two academic years at each of these meetings the teacher provided the parents with a report card and discussed the child s academic progress we find that the overall test scores of the students in the treatment schools compared to control schools increased by 0 26 sd in the first year and 0 38 sd by the end of the second year the program also resulted in improvements in both student attitudes and behavior and teachers pedagogical practices the intervention encouraged parents to spend more time assisting their children and monitoring their school work the treatment effects are robust across parental teacher and school level characteristics and the findings indicate that programs for stimulating parent teacher interactions are cost effective easy to implement and easy to scale up

remedying education evidence from two randomized experiments in india this paper presents the results of a two year randomized evaluation of a large scale remedial education program conducted in mumbai and vadodara india the remedial education program hires young women from the community to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children who reach standard three or four without having mastered these competencies the program implemented by a ngo in collaboration with the government is extremely cheap it cost 5 dollars per child per year and is easily replicable it has been implemented in 20 indian cities and reached tens of thousands of children we find the program to be very effective on average it increased learning by 0 15 standard deviations in the first year and 0 25 in the second year the gains are the largest for children at the bottom of the distribution children in the bottom third gain 0 2 standard deviations in the first year and 0 32 in the second year in math they gain 0 51 standard deviation in the second year the results are similar in the two grade levels and in the two cities at the margin extending this program would be up to 12 16 times more cost effective than hiring new teachers authors

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

new trends in globalization of corporate r d and implications for innovation capability in host countries a survey from india abstract since the mid 1980s transnational corporations tncs have started performing some of their strategic research and development r d in some developing countries the primary driving forces behind such a move by tncs are technology related i e to gain access to science and technology s t resources and cost related i e to exploit the cost differentials r d activities related to product development for regional global markets and generic technologies by tncs are diffusing skills and knowledge to the host countries by establishing linkages between the local innovation systems and tncs worldwide r d network such r d helps to integrate some developing countries into global technology development activities

children s schooling and parents behavior evidence from the head start impact study abstract parents may have important effects on their children but little work in economics explores whether children s schooling opportunities crowd out or encourage parents investment in children we analyze data from the head start impact study which granted randomly chosen preschool aged children the opportunity to attend head start we find that head start causes a substantial increase in parents involvement with their children such as time spent reading to children math activities or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in head start

why do multinational corporations locate their advanced r d centres in beijing abstract theories of the globalisation of innovation assume that multinational corporations mncs distribute their innovation activities hierarchically with advanced technology being confined to the advanced industrialised countries while more routine low end innovation is decentralised in a few developing countries the emergence of about 40 research and development r d centres in beijing china many of which engage in basic and advanced applied research challenges the above assumption this article argues that the cheap and abundant highly skilled labour of the latecomer countries is an essential factor in attracting global r d activities but that this factor is far from being a sufficient condition for the presence there of advanced r d activities through its analysis of the historical transformation of local institutions and of their co development with mncs this paper identifies four major knowledge assets that explains why beijing could attract advanced r d activities first beijing has de

global value chains meet innovation systems are there learning opportunities for developing countries summary the innovation systems is literature tends not to emphasize the crucial impact of international knowledge and innovation exchange and collaboration through for example inter firm and intra firm networks and global value chains gvc in developing countries this aspect is crucial with integration in gvc playing a growing and very important role in accessing knowledge and enhancing learning and innovation however there is no agreement in the literature about how innovation systems and gvc interact and how this interaction is likely to affect enterprise learning three main conclusions emerge from the theoretical analysis and evidence presented in this paper first learning mechanisms can vary widely within the various forms of governance of gvc they can be the result of the pressure to achieve international standards or be facilitated by direct involvement of the value chain leaders when the suppliers competence is low and the risk of failure to comply is high when the competences of the actors in the value chain are complementary learning is mutual and is based on intense face to face interactions second as we open is to foreign sources of knowledge the relationship between gvcs and is is nonlinear and endogenous and mutually affecting on the basis of our model we would expect a well structured and efficient innovation system would help to reduce transaction complexity and enable transactions based on relational forms of gvc governance third the internal governance of gvc is a dynamic phenomenon that is subject to continuous adjustments and changes and the nature of the is affects this co evolution 2011 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

globalisation of knowledge production and regional innovation policy supporting specialized hubs in the bangalore software industry abstract this paper is concerned with the changing role of regional innovation systems and regional policies in supporting the transition of indigenous firms in developing countries from competing on low costs towards becoming knowledge providers in global value chains special attention is paid to policies supporting the emergence and development of the regional innovation system in this transition process regional innovation systems in developing countries have very recently started to be conceptualised as specialized hubs in global innovation and production networks asheim b coenen l vang lauridsen j 2007 face to face buzz and knowledge bases socio spatial implications for learning innovation and innovation policy environment and planning c government and policy 25 5 655 670 chaminade c vang j 2006a innovation policy for small and medium size smes in asia an innovation systems perspective in yeung h ed handbook of research on asian business edward elgar cheltenham maggi c 2007 the salmon farming and processing cluster in southern chile in pietrobello c rabellotti r eds upgrading and governance in clusters and value chains in latin america harvard university press a specialized hub refers to a node in a global value chain that mainly undertakes one or a few of the activities required for the production and development of a given good or service or serves a particular segment of the global market in global value chains firms in developing countries have traditionally been responsible for the lowest added value activities however a few emerging regional innovation systems in developing countries are beginning to challenge this scenario by rapidly upgrading in the value chain there is however still only a poorly developed understanding of how the system of innovation emerges and evolves to support this transition process and what the role of regional innovation policy is in building the regional conditions that support indigenous small and medium size enterprises smes in this transition process this paper aims at reducing this omission by analyzing the co evolution of the strategies of indigenous smes and the regional innovation system of bangalore india

upgrading the technological capabilities of foreign transnational subsidiaries in developing countries the case of electronics in thailand although substantial research shows the importance of transnational corporations tncs to export led growth in some developing countries it cannot be assumed that tnc subsidiaries will automatically upgrade their capabilities through time or in a uniform fashion this paper explores the pattern and pace of a sample of exporting tnc subsidiaries operating in the electronics industry in thailand showing how the different architectures of global value chains centralised versus decentralised shaped the technological progress of subsidiaries in this country the case evidence suggests a wide variety in upgrading through time with some subsidiaries failing to develop capabilities and remaining as assembly only plants other more dynamic plants developed process engineering and product design skills investing heavily in capability building one common determinant in capability building appears to be the overall technology strategy of the global value chain leader or parent company in those subsidiaries which did not upgrade beyond assembly technology decisions and processes were tightly controlled within the parent headquarter locations in relatively centralised international value networks by contrast the more dynamic plants exercised more discretion over local capability building the latter operated in relatively decentralised networks more open to domestic policies to encourage upgrading the study suggests that governments should tailor upgrading policies not only according to the approximate level of capabilities attained by local subsidiaries but also according to how receptive subsidiaries are to upgrading arguing that capability building and policy receptiveness go hand in hand other countries hoping to upgrade the quality of foreign direct investment might also wish to focus policies on the more technologically capable ambitious and receptive categories of foreign subsidiary

anatomy of a future energy crisis restructuring and the energy sector in new zealand abstract up until the mid 1980s new zealand had been characterized by an economy that was heavily protected extensively regulated and in which production was subsidized to a considerable extent in 1984 the government embarked upon a programme of extensive public sector and economic restructuring described by some as being among the most wide reaching and radical in new zealand s history for the energy sector the restructuring has meant a move away from an administrative infrastructure of the 1970s and 1980s that was strongly centralized and government led to one that is based much more on market forces energy development production and delivery have been corporatized and privatized the energy sector has been largely deregulated and government has disavowed itself of responsibility for energy resource management and policy the primary motivation that underlies all of the reform is economic efficiency concerns are widely held however for the implications that follow from this restructuring of the energy sector for the efficient management of energy resources security of supply long term management of the sector and for the maintenance of environmental quality it is possible that greater economic efficiencies might be achieved although this is by no means certain but it would seem that specific characteristics of the restructuring will militate strongly against the achievement of other objectives in the sector recommendations for amendment refer to the need to strike a sensible balance between market forces and government involvement

reorganising global value chains and building innovation capabilities in brazil and india abstract this paper is concerned with global shifts in innovation power it shows that brazil and india are accumulating significant innovation capabilities most explanations concentrate on factors within these rising powers this paper concentrates on explanatory factors which have their origin in the old powers europe and usa in order to understand the build up of innovation capabilities in brazil and india it examines their linkages with firms in europe and usa concentrating on the value chains which connect them it shows how the organisational decomposition of the innovation process emanating from the old powers contributes directly and indirectly to the build up of innovation capabilities in the new powers the empirical evidence comes from the brazilian auto and the indian software industry and the value chains which link them to the united states and germany two very different industries show a core of common findings on processes which contribute to building advanced innovation capabilities in india and brazil

why are companies offshoring innovation the emerging global race for talent this paper empirically studies determinants of decision by companies to offshore innovation activities it uses survey data from the international offshoring research network project to estimate the impact of managerial intentionality past experience and environmental factors on the probability of offshoring innovation projects the results show that the emerging shortage of highly skilled science and engineering talent in the us and more generally the need to access qualified personnel are important explanatory factors for offshoring innovation decisions moreover contrary to drivers of many other functions labor arbitrage is less important than other forms of cost savings the paper concludes with a discussion of the changing dynamics underlying offshoring of innovation activities suggesting that companies are entering a global race for talent

report cards the impact of providing school and child test scores on educational markets this paper studies study the impact of providing school and child test scores on subsequent test scores prices and enrollment in markets with multiple public and private providers a randomly selected half of the sample villages markets received report cards this increased test scores by 0 11 standard deviations decreased private school fees by 17 percent and increased primary enrollment by 4 5 percent heterogeneity in the treatment impact by initial school quality is consistent with canonical models of asymmetric information information provision facilitates better comparisons across providers improves market efficiency and raises child welfare through higher test scores higher enrollment and lower fees

the schooling decision family preferences intergenerational conflict and moral hazard in the brazilian favelas this paper experimentally analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households in urban brazil we elicit parents choices between monthly government transfers conditional on their adolescent child attending school and guaranteed unconditional transfers of varying sizes in the baseline treatment an overwhelming majority of parents prefer conditional transfers to larger unconditional transfers however few parents prefer conditional payments if they are offered text message notifications whenever their child misses school these findings suggest important intergenerational conflicts in these schooling decisions a lack of parental control and observability of school attendance and an additional rationale for conditional cash transfer programs the monitoring they provide

avoided cost contracts can undermine least cost planning abstract utilities and regulatory agencies are increasingly turning to non utility sources of electric power in the usa many contracts with independent power producers ipps contain indexing terms under which an ipp s energy rates vary in response to energy cost changes on the purchasing utility system such indexing is often used to ensure that ipp rates track utility avoided costs unfortunately such indexing can undermine least cost planning if utility decisions can alter established ipp rates such indexing can also cause ratepayer interests to conflict with those of society the use of regional cost indices can solve the utility planning problem preventing the conflict between ratepayers and society however may require some use of cost based rather than value based ratemaking for ipps

globalization of production and innovation how outsourcing is reshaping an advanced manufacturing area cusmano l mancusi m l and morrison a globalization of production and innovation how outsourcing is reshaping an advanced manufacturing area regional studies this paper investigates the determinants and the spatial and functional dimensions of firms outsourcing based on a large survey of manufacturing firms in lombardy italy the analysis shows that outsourcing is remarkably wide across sectors and has a clear regional dimension concerning highly skilled firms at most offshoring is still a minor fraction of the deverticalization process largely related to wider strategies of internationalization by foreign group subsidiaries at intermediate stages of the value chain the evidence suggests the regional system is inserting onto global knowledge networks but also points at the risk of branch plant effects in high technology segments cusmano l mancusi m l et morrison a la mondialisation de la production et de l innovation comment l approvisionnement a l exterieur reorganise une zone ind

fighting corruption to improve schooling evidence from a newspaper campaign in uganda what are the most effective ways to increase primary school enrollment and student learning we argue that innovations in governance of social services may yield the highest return since social service delivery in developing countries is often plagued by inefficiencies and corruption we illustrate this by using data from an unusual policy experiment a newspaper campaign in uganda aimed at reducing capture of public funds by providing schools parents with information to monitor local officials handling of a large education grant program the campaign was highly successful and the reduction in capture had a positive effect on enrollment and student learning jel d73 i22 o12

the effect of conservation programmes on electric utility earnings results of two case studies abstract this paper develops methods to measure the impact of conservation programmes on electric utility earnings the methods are applied to two case studies detroit edison represents a case where impacts are unfavourable this utility has excess capacity which is only made worse by conservation pacific gas and electric represents a case where conservation helps defer the need for new capacity even in this case programmes targeted at summer peak demand are more beneficial than those which save baseload energy conditions determining the earnings impact of conservation are complex involving regulatory factors that are specific to individual utilities

analysing distributed processes of provision and innovation the vast majority of products i e goods and services are provided to the consumer through several co ordinated and contributing agents acting together this paper is concerned with improving our understanding of processes of provision and innovation that involve several contributing and co ordinated agents firms or organizations the distributedness of provision and innovation varies in scale and takes a variety of dynamic forms or modes and their analysis brings to the fore the significance of dependency and asymmetric power relations between classes of economic agent the approach thereby opens up considerations on distributed innovation beyond those addressed by the systems of innovation perspectives

child control in education decisions an evaluation of targeted incentives to learn in india i report the results of a field experiment in gurgaon india that offered cash and noncash incentives to learn either to children or to their parents while i find no evidence that the identity of the recipient or form of the reward mattered in the aggregate noncash incentives targeted to children were more effective for initially low performing children while cash incentives were more effective for high performing children to explore the mechanisms behind this result i present a model of household education production and find additional empirical results consistent with the model

the impact of operating in multiple value chains for upgrading the case of the brazilian furniture and footwear industries summary exporting has been upheld as the golden standard for industrial upgrading however research using the value chain approach shows that upgrading for developing country firms is often limited to the lowest value added activities based on comparative research carried out in two brazilian clusters furniture and footwear industries this paper shows that domestic and regional value chains can offer greater upgrading opportunities providing space for activities of higher value added better remunerated and difficult to replicate notably design marketing and branding moreover this study highlights that many firms simultaneously serve multiple value chains multichain and that multichain firms have better upgrading prospects than those primarily exporting via global value chains

peer effects teacher incentives and the impact of tracking evidence from a randomized evaluation in kenya to the extent that students benefit from high achieving peers tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones however all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction level lower achieving pupils are particularly likely to benefit from tracking when teachers have incentives to teach to the top of the distribution we propose a simple model nesting these effects and test its implications in a randomized tracking experiment conducted with 121 primary schools in kenya while the direct effect of highachieving peers is positive tracking benefited lower achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach to their level jel i21 j45 o15

privatization of the esi broadening the debate abstract the debate over the privatization of electricity in the uk has been conducted across too narrow a terrain being primarily concerned with regulation for optimality in the context of static if uncertain conditions of supply and demand insufficient account has been taken of dynamic agencies in formulating and bringing about progressive industrial change something of great importance in the light of their weakness in the uk context consequently a number of deficiencies in the uk esi have been neglected in the debate over privatization and are not liable to be rectified by it in practice

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell