regional per capita income convergence in austria hofer h and worgotter a 1997 regional per capita income convergence in austria reg studies 31 1 12 the question of whether there is a tendency for regional convergence has become a central topic for economic research this paper examines growth and dispersion of output per capita across nine austrian regions and 84 districts time series analysis of the austrian regions finds no evidence for cointegration between regional output and national output we extend our empirical work by estimating convergence regressions for austrian regions and districts the rate of convergence is about 1 a year and indicates a convergence pattern with a very slow pace if we include dummy variables for type of district we estimate 2 which is a familiar value from other studies hofer h et worgotter a 1997 la convergence des revenus regionaux par tete reg studies 31 1 12 la tendance eventuelle a la convergence regionale est devenue un theme principal de la recherche economique cet article examine la cro

measuring trade strategy in the presence of non tradeables theory and some evidence for the caribbean this article models trade policies in the presence of non tradeables and investigates trade strategy interventions and outcomes where the price of non tradeables endogenously adjusts to trade interventions trade regime bias and neutrality issues are examined within a three sector open economy model the theoretical framework is operationalised using empirical evidence for trinidad and barbados the robustness of partial equilibrium measures of protection for classifying trade strategies is challenged and evidence on alternative general equilibrium or true measures of protection is reported true or revealed trade strategies are shown to differ from those apparently intended by policy makers

who bears the incidence of import protection evidence from sri lanka abstract a simple general equilibrium model is employed to measure the incidence of protection this model focuses on the internal relative price effects of protection through the equilibrium conditions of the nontraded goods market the incidence of protection is measured via the concepts of incidence parameter true protection rates and income transfers resulting from protection the model is applied to sri lankan data the results indicate that a high proportion of all trade interventions operate as an implicit export tax that true protection rates to both import competing and exporting sectors are far below the nominal rates of assistance being provided to them and that income loss to exporters is about 4 of gdp we conclude that the incidence of protection falls mostly on the sri lankan exporters

the political economy of a divided ireland for a peace process in ireland to succeed it will require an active transition away from the underlying causes of conflict not just the partition of the country but the inequalities of opportunities and employment between the communities in northern ireland this requires the restructuring of existing unequal arrangements if this restructuring is not to be at the expense of the protestant community public intervention will be needed to ensure that opportunities for the protestant community can be developed alongside the necessary catching up of the previously disadvantaged community otherwise any type of future transition process risks grinding to a halt

trade policy in burundi reform without political stability this paper evaluates burundi s progress with trade policy reform by comparing earlier analyses of burundi s trade policies undertaken in the 1980s with that of the wto s recent trade policy review since the mid 1980s burundi has been trying to reform its trade and macroeconomic policies against the background of continuous socio political tensions and periodic outbreaks of violent tribal conflict a then and now comparison allows us to assess both the extent of the trade reforms and of the economic return to those reforms it is evident that there has been a significant rationalisation and simplification of trade policy burundi has eliminated most quantitative import restrictions and reduced the average level and range of its tariffs the scope for allocative distortions undesirable redistributive effects and for impediments to investment and growth has been substantially reduced however a return to reform in terms of export growth or diversification and of overall economic growth is not discernible yet this is unsurprising given the scale of the economic disruption sustained socio political stability among other things will be required to induce the investment in human and physical capital needed for a positive return to trade policy reform

cost function for a periodic reorder point system with time dependent replenishment costs abstract a single item inventory model with probabilistic demand is considered in this paper the replenishment of items is cyclical and occurs every n periods the order for replenishment can be placed at the end of any period during the cycle replenishment costs setup and unit costs are stated as a function of time the units ordered are set equal to an order quantity q the general expression of this inventory system is formulated by developing the stationary distribution of the inventory position units ordered and the probability of placing an order during any period the expression is stated in terms of the reorder point s and the order quantity q and can be used to locate the optimal solution

testing for stationarity and co integration an application to saudi arabian monetary data 1990 testing for stationarity and co integration an application to saudi arabian monetary data applied economics vol 22 no 11 pp 1577 1590

short and long run incidence of protection the case of madagascar the effects of trade policy interventions within a general equilibrium framework are examined the short and long term incidence of protection for a particular low income developing country were measured using time series data on relative prices for the period 1974 84 the results based on cointegration techniques establish that nominal protection of importables was substantially lower than true protection that true protection was lower in the long run that in the short term and that the adjustment to equilibrium relative prices was fairly rapid in this period

intra industry trade and the shifting of protection across sectors abstract recent work on commercial policy has focussed on the incidence of protection across sectors this work has focussed on the relative price effects of intervention and has been developed in a setting of inter industry trade this paper focusses on the incidence of protection in a setting of intra industry trade a three sector general equilibrium model is developed and incidence is explored in a variety of settings the analysis suggests that the non tradeable sector may bear the major burden of protection in a setting of intra industry trade

optimal ordering strategies for announced price increases the familiar model for determining the optimal ordering strategy given an announced price increase assumes that the buyer has an opportunity to place an order at the end of the next economic order quantity cycle before the price increase takes effect this paper extends the price increase model by relaxing the requirement on the timing of the price increase specifically we develop optimal ordering strategies for situations where the price increase becomes effective at any future specified time we also calculate savings for alternate ordering strategies

the belfast agreement and cross border economic cooperation in the tourism industry teague p and henderson j 2006 the belfast agreement and cross border economic cooperation in the tourism industry regional studies 40 1 14 this paper examines the impact of the belfast agreement on north south economic cooperation in ireland using the tourism industry as a case study the first part of the paper sets out the suggested benefits that may arise from greater economic and business connections between both parts of the island it also develops a policy framework that the authors believe is established by the agreement to achieve these benefits a number of propositions are developed to assess under what conditions the potential benefits from greater cooperation will actually materialize the second part explores the case study evidence the paper concludes by arguing that although advances have been made towards greater cooperation these new initiatives for the most part have not been of a deep or strategic kind the minimalist character of strand two of the agreement suggests that

the fiscal and distributional implications of job generation this article estimates the cost of a public investment led job creation programme for the united kingdom a programme creating an additional one million jobs at the current average wage would involve a net cost to the treasury dramatically lower than the gross cost 17 billion worth of spending would result in a net cost of around 7 billion given that even a partial restoration of progressive taxation would bring in more than half this net amount improved living standards could be brought about relatively easily provided dogmatic objections to public sector initiatives can be overcome

commercial policy and intra industry trade abstract this paper constructs a model of intra industry trade within a multi product industry whose output range is limited to that obtainable from a particular type of capital intra industry trade is a natural outcome in this structure without requiring increasing returns to scale or imperfectly competitive markets and with its pattern determined along traditional relative factor abundance lines the volume of this trade will vary inversely with the level of trade restrictions as observed empirically other policies are then considered for their influence on the range rather than the level of domestic production since the former is the more likely policy objective under these circumstances

ordering policies for the cyclical replenishment problem given leadtime dependent discounts abstract this paper addresses a problem encountered by retailers who experience cyclical replenishment frequently these retailers are provided incentives for placing orders before the end of a cycle and they have to wrestle with the questions of when to order how many times to order and how many units to order the complexity of this problem arises from having to balance the reduction in unit costs with the increases in ordering costs and in some cases deal with storage and shortage costs it is argued that the decrease in unit cost can be directly related to the enhancement of manufacturing efficiency due to longer production leadtimes while the increase in storage and shortage costs is a result of the increase in uncertainty due to a representation and the cost function will be used to derive the parameters i e frequency of orders order level etc that minimize this cost function

on the accuracy of economic observations do sub saharan trade statistics mean anything matching exporters freight on board fob trade statistics with the corresponding importers cost inventory and freight cif data this paper studies the quality of official information on trade between 36 african countries the author found the disparities in data so great as to make the official trade statistics almost useless for most empirical and policy studies he concluded that a statistics on matching exports and imports vary so much that the data cannot be used to assess the level of trade between african countries b the data are probably equally useless for assessing the direction of trade since the countries that exporters report as the destination of trade often fail to report corresponding imports c the data are inadequate for determining the composition of trade because countries report on different levels of detail and d large persistent apparent differences in trends in intra african trade may simply reflect different degrees of accuracy in country trade data finally the fact that reported fob exports often exceed the corresponding reported imports suggests either that smuggling is widespread or that importers are intentionally underinvoicing because of high african tariffs or quotas

trade strategy and revealed trade bias an evaluation for a small industrializing economy abstract the traditional classification of trade strategies into import substitution is and export promotion ep is based on the traditional two sector trade model in the context of a three sector model including nontradeables there is potentially greater analytical richness and apparently greater possibility of a wider range of ex ante trade strategies included among these possibilities is a mixed is ep strategy which generates a protradeable bias this paper investigates the properties of a general equilibrium model and the necessary commercial policy interventions required to bring about particular changes in relative prices detailed evidence on revealed trade regime biases within the tradeables good sectors and between tradeables and nontradeables is provided for barbados the evidence indicates that ex post classification of trade strategy may differ significantly from the ex ante or intended strategy and that use of partial equilibrium estimates of effective protection of tradeables alone is likely to be an inappropriate means of classifying trade strategies

exchange rate economics is always and everywhere controversial abstractthis article reviews the major developments in the recent literature on exchange rate economics it is argued that the link between the exchange rate and economic fundamentals is breaking new ground evidence indicates that alternative analytical frameworks such as the new open economy macroeconomics and exchange rate arrangements such as the euro have their theoretical and analytical elegance but are proving empirically very difficult to implement the role of methodological advances and alternative fundamental instruments such as world commodity prices is also highlighted

operations research in inventory management a review and critique the objectives of inventory management including the relevant related costs are examined in this paper a brief review of standard problems that have been effectively solved is presented however we point out that a serious gap exists between theory and practice in many organizations suggestions are made for bridging this gap finally a list is provided of a number of research problems whose implementable solution would have a major beneficial impact on the practice of inventory management

evaluation of the incentive structure a survey and application to cameroon abstract this article uses a simple general equilibrium framework to evaluate the incentive structure of a country pursuing a mixed import substitution export promotion strategy it illustrates how features of general equilibrium analysis can be incorporated into the traditional balassa corden effective protection framework which is supplemented by the evaluation of the incidence of protection on firms importing and exporting households consumers and taxpayers and the government its application to a less developed country ldc cameroon shows that the burden of tariff protection is shifted 25 in the short run and 64 in the long run on to the unprotected sectors especially exports as a result average nominal protection 58 8 is much higher than protection actually provided to the protected sectors the welfare effect of protection is ambiguous households viewed only as final consumers lose when they are viewed as taxpayers protection may become beneficial in the long run taking substitution possibilities into account when measuring protection has an impact on the ranking of firms according to their nominal and effective protection

true protection concepts and their role in evaluating trade policies in ldcs in many ldcs it is not uncommon to find incentives designed to encourage import substitution activities coexisting alongside incentives aimed at encouraging export activities this article evaluates a recent approach to evaluating commercial policy which among other things highlights some of the implications of simultaneously pursuing import substitution and export promotion the study develops a model which emphasises the incidence of protection and identifies the concept of true protection empirical results for a number of ldcs are discussed and the implications of these results evaluated in addition the article contrasts this approach with the effective protection approach to evaluating commercial policy

optimal centralized ordering policies in multi echelon inventory systems with correlated demands this paper treats a depot warehouse system in which demand occurs at the warehouse or retail level this work differs from a number of other studies in that we allow item demands to be correlated both across warehouses and also correlated in time our motivation for this generalization arises from our experience with an actual system of this type used by a major national producer and distributor of consumer products we observed both high correlations between successive monthly demands around 0 7 and correlations between demands for an item at different locations also about 0 7 in a given time period we derive an explicit expression for the optimal safety stock as a function of the level of correlation through time the analysis requires two assumptions 1 the allocation assumption and 2 the equal coefficient of variation assumption similar assumptions have been used by other researchers finally numerical evaluations are included to illustrate the impact of the various magnitudes of correlation

soft budget constraints and regional industrial policy reinterpreting the rise and fall of delorean the rise and fall of delorean motor cars limited has traditionally been interpreted as either the result either of john delorean s psychological flaws or as confirming the supposed limitations of activist industrial policy however when the episode is examined in greater historical detail neither of these interpretations is compelling the reinterpretation outlined here draws on institutional analysis as well as a range of archival sources much of it previously unreleased the inefficiencies within the original contractual agreement are highlighted the lack of credibility associated with this agreement was in turn traceable to the institutional environment with its associated risk reward implications under which industrial policy operated this environment had a political element it had been distorted by the troubles and the resulting fears policymakers had of a cumulative causation relationship between violence and unemployment officials in belfast against treasury opposition advocated state led entrepreneurship as a policy response

policy appraisal and the structure of protection in a low income developing country problems of measurement and evaluation in burundi the article provides estimates of the structure of nominal and effective tariffs and the tariff equivalents of a set of quantitative import restrictions for burundi a low income data deficient developing country it carefully indicates the assumptions and limitations of the analysis the overall conclusion of the article is that not much significance can be attached to the estimates in a cardinal sense nevertheless recommendations about altering the structure of relative incentives can be justified where these are directed at increasing transparency and uniformity

true protection and the real exchange rate in a capital rich developing country some evidence for saudi arabia this paper investigates how alternative measures of the real exchange rate respond to trade policy and terms of trade changes it employs a modelling framework which endogenises the price of non tradeable goods and applies the model to price and real exchange rate data for saudi arabia for the period 1982 92 the results show that the popular propositions about the response of the real exchange rate to terms of trade or trade policy changes do not necessary hold this is a consequence of the measure of the real exchange rate utilized rather than a product of saudi arabia s capital richness

on firm and product specific true protection efforts at providing relevant indices of incentive structure comparative advantage and international competitiveness have led to the concept of true protection such a framework can be used to analyse the incidence of protection across sectors analysis has so far been carried out under the assumption of a uniform tariff and calculations limited to average rates nothing could then be said with respect to the incidence at the firm or product level this article expands on an existing model by 1 presenting firm and product specific true protection indices 2 generalising previous conclusions on true protection to encompass firm and product specific analysis it is shown that failure to take into consideration substitution possibilities may yield incorrect evaluation of the structure and level of protection