estimates of the value of patent rights in great britain and ireland 1852 1876 parameters of the distribution of the value of patent rights in britain and ireland for the 1852 76 period are estimated and compared with similar estimates by schankerman and pakes 1986 for the 1950 76 period market variables of the earlier period have a low ability but those of the later period a high ability to explain fluctuations in the value of patent rights aggregate patent rights have more lower valued patents in the earlier period in the earlier period there was no trade off between quantity and quality of patents but in the later period there was aggregate value of patent rights increased relative to gross fixed capital formation from 1870 to 1970 by approximately 100 percent a greater amount of r d effort helps to explain many of the differences found between the two periods copyright 1994 by the london school of economics and political science

lessons from strange cases democracy development and the resource curse in the u s states the work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under development suffers from several shortcomings in this article the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting using a new data set for the u s states spanning 73 years and case studies of texas and louisiana the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has they provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth poorer developmental performance and less competitive politics using this empirical setting they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development they draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross national and cross state work

the growth and distributional consequences of international trade in natural resources and capital goods a neo austrian analysis abstract the problem explored is the role of natural resources in economic growth a neo austrian model is constructed which can represent either a single autarchic country or a pair of trading countries one of which can export natural resources and the other can export manufactured capital it is shown that under autarchy the price of the natural resource has no effect on economic growth while under conditions of trade it has a significant influence falling natural resource prices slow the growth in the resource exporting country and stimulate it in the capital exporting country some policy implications of this finding are explored

for better or for worse till the human development index do us part abstract this paper describes the results of research intended to explore the volatility inherent in the united nations development programme s undp human development index hdi the hdi is intended to be a simple and transparent device for comparing progress in human development and is an aggregate of life expectancy education and gdp per capita values of the hdi for each country are presented in the human development reports hdrs the first being published in 1990 however while the methodology is consistent for all countries in each year there are notable differences between years that make temporal comparisons of progress difficult the paper presents the results of recalculating the hdi for a simplified sample of 114 countries using various methodologies employed by the undp the results are a set of deviations of recalculated hdi ranks compared to the original ranks given in the hdrs the volatility that can result from such recalculation is shown to be substantial 10 15 ranks yet reports in the popular press are frequently sensitive to movements of only a few ranks such movement can easily be accounted for by changes in the hdi methodology rather than genuine progress in human development while the hdrs often carry warnings about the inadvisability of such year on year comparisons it is argued that the existence of such a high profile index and the overt presentation within league tables do encourage such comparison assuming that the hdi will be retained as a focal point within the hdrs then it is suggested that greater focus be upon more meaningful and robust categories of human development e g low medium and high rather than league tables where shifts of a few places perhaps as a result of nothing more than a methodological or data artefact may be highlighted in the press and by policy makers

fuel consumption for road transport in the usa abstract this study provides both a historical analysis of fuel demand for road transport and an example of using econometric results for projections fuel consumption by all motor vehicles in the usa has been analysed by splitting total demand into passenger car truck and other demands distance travelled and fuel efficiency equations have been estimated for both the passenger car fleet and trucks an essentially five equation model has been constructed and used to simulate likely fuel demand patterns up to 1990

the long term consequences of resource based specialisation using geological variation in oil abundance in the southern us i examine the long term effects of resource based specialisation through economic channels in 1890 oil abundant counties were similar to other nearby counties but after oil was discovered they began to specialise in its production from 1940 90 oil abundance increased local employment per square kilometre especially in mining but also in manufacturing oil abundant counties had higher population growth higher per capita income and better infrastructure 2010 the author s the economic journal 2010 royal economic society

natural resource rents economic dynamics and structural change a capital theoretic approach abstract this paper concerns the effects of natural resource rents on the dynamics and structural change of an economy which is accumulating capital the concept of rent is developed and the determinants of natural resource rents in the real world are discussed to examine the long run effects of rents on the price system and economic structural change a neo austrian capital theoretic model is developed this is presented in input output form and the corresponding prices for the model are derived so that a consistent set of national accounts for the model can be found natural resource use is introduced into the model with natural resource rents forming a further element of value added the model is then further generalised with the dynamics of capital accumulation being determined through a savings function which itself varies with the rate of return on capital this model is used to simulate the effect on economic dynamics and structural change of two natural resource rent profiles both of which follow the hotelling rule the effects of these two cases on the model are examined through the corresponding sets of national accounts

globalization labor markets and policy backlash in the past the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have many things in common both periods recorded fast growth convergence and labor market integration between oecd members both periods witnessed intense debate about who gained and who lost from globalization furthermore the earlier period saw a retreat from global liberalism long before the interwar deglobalization disaster did globalization of that time plant seeds of its own destruction are there lessons for the present

the proper scope of government theory and an application to prisons when should a government provide a service in house and when should it contract out provision we develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost if contracts are incomplete the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage in both quality improvement and cost reduction than a government employee has however the private contractor s incentive to engage in cost reduction is typically too strong because he ignores the adverse effect on noncontractible quality the model is applied to understanding the costs and benefits of prison privatization

saving or stripping rural industry an analysis of privatization and efficiency in china abstract this paper describes the process of privatization of china s township enterprises findings from a recent field survey by the authors show how far privatization has proceeded and how it has affected firm performance the pervasiveness and impact of privatization are readily apparent the privatization in the mid 1990s was deep and fundamental more than 50 of local government owned firms have transferred their shares to the private sector partially or completely privatization is widespread regardless of what definition we use share shifting controlling interest shifting or complete although we do not find any evidence in our descriptive statistics that private and privatized firms outperform government ones the private sector does appear to be beginning to manage its firms e g labor and inventories somewhat differently our multivariate analysis however finds a positive impact of privatization on technical efficiency efficiency of china s rural industries including agro industrial firms would rise if township enterprises privatized the impact of privatization however does not occur immediately transitional costs apparently reduce private firm efficiency in the year that firms are being privatized it is possible to surmise that as privatized firms complete their ownership transition and continue to learn how to adapt to china s business environment that the gains could rise further however we cannot say if the gain in efficiency is enough to make rural industries competitive in the future

barriers to efficiency and the privatization of township village enterprises abstract qian 2000 and others suggest that post 1994 tax and banking reforms in china combined with the development of markets for allocating resources influenced the economic performance of township village enterprises tves and private enterprises pes this paper uses chinese provincial level data to search for evidence of advantages and or disadvantages offered to tves and pes before and after the 1994 reforms we define a sectoral net income based measure of overall efficiency and decompose the measure into components that highlight the existence of credit constraints output target constraints and labour hiring constraints the results offer empirical support for qian and others explanation of why private enterprises eventually emerged as the dominant institution for allocating resources in post 1994 rural china

insecure property rights and government ownership of firms we develop a theory of the ownership of firms in an environment without secure property rights against state encroachment private ownership leads to excessive revenue hiding and state ownership i e national government ownership fails to provide incentives for managers and local governments in a credible way because local government ownership integrates local government activities and business activities local government may better serve the interests of the national government and thus local government ownership may credibly limit state predation increase local public goods provision and reduce costly revenue hiding we use our theory to interpret the relative success of local government owned firms during china s transition to a market economy

input trade and the location of production stanley engerman has been a presence in the department of economics at the university of rochester for over 37 years he was an early and eminent participant in the cliometric revolution that swept throughout the economichistory profession in the 1960 s and 1970 s we doubt that anyone could have anticipated the gathering storm that greeted the publication of time on the cross co authored with robert fogel in 1974 since that time stan has become the world s leading authority on slavery in the americas and the caribbean as well as an important contributor to a set of issues ranging from the 19th century american iron industry to the economics of british imperialism his own human capital as extensive as we know it to be is complemented by capital of the physical variety an enormous library of research material spilling over into bookshelves and floors in several offices in rochester and attracting a yearly stream of itinerant scholars anxious to pick his books as well as his brains in this short note we intend to honor stan by applying the tools of international trade theory to illustrate several episodes in the development of industries both in the united states and in world markets a colleague of stan s at rochester lionel mckenzie once commented that in 19th century britain lancashire would have been unlikely to produce cotton cloth if the cotton had to be grown in england mckenzie 1954 this remark expresses in utter brevity the importance to production and trading patterns of the domain of tradability of raw materials or intermediate products for example it is difficult to envisage the patterns of production and trade in modern day japan should it be denied access to world supplies of oil coal and iron ore local production of each of these items being negligible transport costs as well as man made impediments to trade are mainly responsible for variations in the degree of access countries possess to the inputs available in the markets of other countries simple competitive generalequilibrium models of production of the type intensively utilized in the theory of international trade can usefully be harnessed to shed light on several episodes in 19th century american economic history in which the nature of trading possibilities for raw materials heavily influenced the extent to which local american production of final commodities could withstand the pressures in world markets without the aid of protective devices the simplest model setting in which to investigate the importance of trade in raw materials is a ricardian model augmented by the necessity of using a produced input in addition to labor in at least one commodity denote the pair of final commodities by x and y where in order to produce y a certain quantity of intermediate good z is required the competitive profit conditions for the two final commodities are shown in equation 1

frontiers and sustainable economic development exploiting new resource frontiers such as agricultural land and mineral reserves is a fundamental feature of economic development in poor economies yet frontier based development is symptomatic of a pattern of economy wide resource exploitation in developing economies that a generates little additional economic rents and b what rents are generated are not being reinvested in other sectors such development is inherently unsustainable the following paper explains this phenomenon and provides evidence that long run expansion of agricultural land and oil and natural gas proved reserves across poor economies is associated with lower levels of real income per capita the paper proposes a frontier expansion hypothesis to explain why the structural economic dependence of these economies on frontier land expansion and resource exploitation is not conducive to sustained long run growth the key to sustainable economic development in poor economies will be improving the economic integration between frontier and other sectors of the economy targeting policies to improved resource management in frontier areas and overcoming problems of corruption and rent seeking in resource sectors

the evolution of the industrial organisation of the production of knowledge this work elaborates the notion of localised technological knowledge based upon the distinction between information competence and knowledge and analyses the emergence of the new knowledge industry the evolution of the organisation of knowledge production is analysed through four stylised modes scientific entrepreneurship institutional variety vertical integration and technological cooperation the new trends towards the growth of knowledge intensive business service industries are detected and underlined they are considered as the outcome of the institutional formation of a market for knowledge based upon a process of increasing appropriability of localised knowledge based on the blending of generic scientific information and competence and growing scope of applicability via computercommunication systems deverticalisation of research activities from the boundaries of corporations the specification of a demand for technological competence and the specialising of independent firms in the production of technological competence and knowledge

refinancing and decentralization evidence from china abstract decentralization can complement market liberalization by strengthening incentives of agents to respond to market signals however in china banks centralized lending authority following financial reforms in the mid 1990s we present a new theory of financial decentralization in which centralization provides a credible commitment not to refinance bad projects by reducing available information using data from chinese rural financial institutions we empirically assess the determinants of decentralization and the likelihood of collateral seizure strongly confirming the predictions of the refinancing model we conclude that weak institutional environments may limit the efficiency of financial intermediation despite financial market liberalization

sources of convergence in the late nineteenth century abstract this paper investigates convergence for a group of seven countries during the period 1870 1914 a standard empirical growth model which includes physical and human capital accumulation proves unsatisfactory in this setting an alternative neoclassical open economy factor accumulation model is proposed which admits capital and labor migration and may be extended to include a moving frontier the model explains the observed convergence pattern in the sample and suggests that factor accumulation patterns were the prime sources of labor productivity convergence from 1870 to 1914

factor price convergence in the late nineteenth century the authors examine a dramatic historical episode of factor price convergence in the late nineteenth century their focus is convergence between old world and new and the analysis centers on land and labor wage rental ratios boomed in the old world and collapsed in the new moving the resource rich labor scarce new world closer to the resource scarce labor abundant old world the authors use econometrics and simulations to identify proconvergence forces which include commodity price convergence factor accumulation and factor saving biases the results confirm that open economy characteristics and international market integration are important sources of convergence copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

chinese institutional innovation and privatization from below one of the most distinctive features of china s transition to a market economy has been the role played by rural township and village enterprises tve s in the face of sustained rapid growth of tve s the share of total industrial output produced by state owned enterprises soe s has fallen below half despite steady state sector growth and the absence of significant privatization yet most tve s are collectives a form of publicly owned enterprise this feature seems to make them unique in no other transitional economy has public ownership played such a dynamic role china presents the unusual picture of an economy that has made a transition to a primarily market economy but in which publicly owned enterprises still produce the bulk of manufacturing output surprisingly also the collective ownership form does not have a precise legal definition in china leading to some uncertainty about ultimate property rights martin weitzman and chenggang xu 1993 point out that public ownership with vaguely defined ownership ought to represent a recipe for economic disaster to them tve success suggests instead advantages to the internal institutional form of tve s which are seen to facilitate cooperation through implicit contracts among community members locked into an ongoing relationship victor nee 1992 advances a similar interpretation arguing that long time community residents create forms of income sharing that may be optimal in the absence of an independent legal system an alternative perhaps complementary view is presented here the success of tve s i argue is due largely to a set of external conditions to which tve s are an effective adaptation tve s are responses to one of the most distinctive characteristics of the chinese transition as a whole the early creation of product markets which exist for a prolonged period without well developed markets for factors of production or assets tve s are a flexible and effective but basically ordinary adaptation to this environment

technological leadership and productivity leadership in manufacturing since the industrial revolution implications for the convergence debate the united states has been the labor productivity leader in manufacturing since the early nineteenth century despite changes in technological leadership from britain to the united states and then to germany and japan u s productivity leadership is based on the more widespread use of mass production rather than craft production methods determined by resource and factor endowments and demand patterns the two systems can coexist so long as the technologically lagging system imitates and adapts changes in the relative dynamism of the two systems explain changes in technological leadership but without necessarily leading to changes in productivity leadership copyright 1994 by royal economic society

on the past and future of china s township and village owned enterprises abstract this paper proposes an explanation of the historical success of industrial enterprises owned by township and village governments in china i argue that conditions peculiar to china s prereform economy fostered the growth of a skilled workforce and high savings created unusual market niches and encouraged entrepreneurial undertakings by local political elites especially in areas adjacent to certain cities i then discuss the allocative and technical efficiency of local public enterprises in china from a theoretical standpoint and review some relevant econometric findings finally i consider proposals for reform of town and village enterprise tve ownership and discuss the possible advantages of cooperative forms

financial control in the transition from classical socialism to a market economy the transition from socialism to capitalism poses severe problems of financial management that have yet to be resolved in principle let alone in practice one unfortunate consequence is continual financial turmoil as socialist economies of the soviet union and eastern europe attempt reform inflation either open or repressed first accompanies and then undermines attempts to decentralize decision making to dampen inflation and prevent economic chaos even reform governments may be provoked to reintervene by seizing the financial assets of enterprises reinstituting price controls or commandeering outputs through state orders and similar devices but why should the transition from central planning to a market economy be inflationary understanding the system of financial control in the preexisting regime of classical socialism is the key to understanding what might go wrong in the transition under classical socialism all the means of production industrial and agricultural are state owned output targets input levels wages and prices are all set by a stalinist system of central planning accordingly i shall first identify 1 how domestic fiscal and monetary processes interact with and complement central planning in the classical socialist economy and then discuss 2 why this mechanism for securing domestic financial control and avoiding inflation under classical socialism tends to break down when decentralization begins and central planning is weakened the discussion will then turn to 3 how in a more deliberate transition domestic tax and monetary arrangements might be managed to keep the average price level stable as the market prices of individual goods and services become free to fluctuate after sufficient domestic financial control is secured

climbing the development ladder economic development and the evolution of occupations in rural china we study how occupations evolve across space and time during the development of an economy using a data set on more than 200 villages from 8 provinces in china we examine the main occupations that have characterised china s labour markets since the economic reforms our findings reveal a systematic evolutionary pattern of occupational emergence the evolution of occupations proceeds from traditional and fairly simple forms of subsistence agriculture to modern more complex manufacturing and service firms our findings suggest that rural development in china is being built by a process that can be described by the climbing of a development ladder with each step up the ladder denoting the economy s transition into a more complex occupational regime

from privatization to deindustrialization implications of chinese rural industry and the ownership debate revisited summary this paper examines the evolution of chinese rural industry since the rural reform in the late 1970s and revisits the debate on the role of ownership based on a case study of w county in southern jiangsu province as well as drawing on national data the author shows that the community based market dynamic had been a key factor in the expansion of rural enterprises and that its weakening in recent years has led to the closing of village enterprises and deindustrialization of the countryside large scale land expropriation sponsored by local government is the principal factor responsible for the change

immigrants and the making of america we study the effects of european immigration to the u s during the age of mass migration 1850 1920 on economic prosperity exploiting cross county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income less poverty less unemployment higher rates of urbanization and greater educational attainment today the long run effects seem to capture the persistence of short run benefits including greater industrialization increased agricultural productivity and more innovation

the cost of doing business in africa evidence from enterprise survey data summary data from the world bank enterprise surveys show that indirect costs related to infrastructure and services account for a relatively high share of firms costs in poor african countries and pose a competitive burden on african firms we estimate firm level revenue and value added functions for six industries in 17 developing countries demonstrating that firm performance is sensitive to the cost of indirect inputs as indirect inputs are not usually included in estimations of value added we argue that existing estimates understate the relative performance of african manufacturing firms

the decline of township and village enterprises in china s economic transition summary a paradoxical phenomenon in china s transitional economy is that markets developed under predominant public ownership which nevertheless has declined with the development of markets previous studies reveal that initial political and economic conditions of reform and fiscal decentralization gave rise to local public enterprises leading role in early marketization this paper explains the subsequent fall of such a role building and expanding on recent studies of privatization we argue that market development and competition have constrained the abilities of local public enterprises to address revenue and employment imperatives whereas local governments sales oriented growth strategies have exacerbated governance problems panel data are analyzed to provide provisional test of pertinent hypotheses

growth theory and industrial revolutions in britain and america abstract long run economic growth has again become a major focus of economic theory a perception of technological change as an economic process with externalities has motivated the development of aggregate models that generate different steady state growth paths economic history has also long been interested in long run economic growth here a dialogue is presented between growth theory and the historical literature on the industrial revolution in britain and america s surge to international economic leadership in the late nineteenth century in conclusion economists recent thinking about the microeconomics of technological change has provided fruitful material for the economic historian of growth unfortunately the models of endogenous growth on the other hand present too aggregated a view of the economy to prove helpful when confronted with the details of economic history jel classification n0 n1 1 theorie de la croissance et revolutions industrielles en grande bretagne et en amerique la croissance economique a long terme est redevenue un point d interet majeur pour la theorie economique une perception du changement technologique comme processus economique porteur d externalites a engendre le developpement de modeles agreges qui generent differents sentiers de croissance en regime permanent l histoire economique s interesse depuis longtemps a la croissance economique a long terme ce texte engage le dialogue entre la theorie de la croissance et la litterature historique a propos de la revolution industrielle en grande bretagne et de l emergence de l amerique au statut de leader international a la fin du dix neuvieme siecle on en arrive a la conclusion que les recents developpements dans la pensee economique a propos de la micro economie du changement technologique ont produit des resultats utiles pour l histoire economique de la croissance malheureusement d autre part les modeles de croissance endogene presente une vue trop agregee de l economie pour s averer utile dans l examen des details de l histoire economique

variable costs and the visible hand the re regulation of electricity supply 1932 37 national transmission grid and rationalize uk electricity generation a constrained cost model estimates the gains from this re regulation of the electricity generating industry the new regime reduced costs by one third radically improving the utilization of capital and boosting the average scale of operations it did so by persuading private and municipal enterprises to accept central direction of the extent and timing of their electricity generation this voluntarism saved on enforcement costs but perhaps one half of the industry cost reduction the ceb actually achieved by 1937 was apparently forgone

scarcity resource price uncertainty and economic growth over the course of the past decade significant steps have been taken to empirically link indicators of resource scarcity to changes in economic growth this paper extends this previous literature in two ways first rather than concentrating exclusively on energy we focus on the technological change embodied in the prices of an array of complementary natural resource inputs second we investigate using g arch methods the importance of resource price uncertainty as well as resource price levels on aggregate economic growth we find that output growth is significantly influenced by both resource price levels and resource price uncertainty

fuel consumption for road transport in the usa a comment abstract a recent article in this journal econometrically estimated the relationship between us car and truck fuel economy and the price of fuel without considering the effect of legally mandated fuel economy standards for new vehicles there is considerable evidence that the standards have played an important role in recent fuel economy improvements an alternative approach to estimating the fuel price responsiveness of new vehicle fuel economy based on vehicle sales data and capital operating cost trade off analysis of fuel efficient vehicle design and technology suggests short and long run elasticities in the vicinity of 0 25 and 0 5 respectively

how do patent laws influence innovation evidence from nineteenth century world fairs studies of innovation have focused on the effects of patent laws on the number of innovations but have ignored effects on the direction of technological change this paper introduces a new dataset of close to fifteen thousand innovations at the crystal palace world s fair in 1851 and at the centennial exhibition in 1876 to examine the effects of patent laws on the direction of innovation the paper tests the following argument if innovative activity is motivated by expected profits and if the effectiveness of patent protection varies across industries then innovation in countries without patent laws should focus on industries where alternative mechanisms to protect intellectual property are effective analyses of exhibition data for 12 countries in 1851 and 10 countries in 1876 indicate that inventors in countries without patent laws focused on a small set of industries where patents were less important while innovation in countries with patent laws appears to be much more diversified these findings suggest that patents help to determine the direction of technical change and that the adoption of patent laws in countries without such laws may alter existing patterns of comparative advantage across countries jel d2 k11 l51 no 014

the demand for petrol with explicit new car fuel efficiency effects a uk study 1977 86 abstract a full quarterly model for the demand for petrol motor gasoline is presented which deals with problems of seasonality in price and volume it is shown that the annual new car fuel consumption rate can be incorporated in modelling demand for petrol and this allows a better representation of the structure and mean speed of response of demand to price effects by separately specifying a new car fuel parameter the estimated short run price elasticity is 0 18 after three months rising to 0 2 after a year without such specification the elasticity reduces to 0 14 after three months 0 12 after a year the difference is discussed and interpreted as compensation due to the new car effect the new model year car fuel elasticity is defined and found to be about 0 1 in the sense that a 10 decrease in l 100 km 10 increase in efficiency over the previous model year decreases total petrol demand by 1 by endogenizing both petrol price and volume in a simultaneous system it is possible to identify a supply model for petrol volume in terms of the now endogenous petrol price to give a long run supply elasticity of about 0 4

exploring the present through the past claudia goldin is one of the world s leading economists and economic historians and has made a series of outstanding and original contributions particularly to the cliometric or the new economic history literature in this interview professor goldin discusses with brian snowdon who first provides a background introduction several important issues relating to her research on economic history and cliometrics the economics of slavery us economic history corruption in america the role of human capital and education in us economic development wage inequality female labour force participation and the quiet revolution the influence of the contraceptive pill women s surnames the reversal of the college gender gap and women in the economics profession

production and environmental resources a prelude to an evolutionary framework the paper advances a framework to study the evolution of technology and institutions it is based on two simple tenets first the quality and quantity of environmental resources are defined and constrained by the regime of technology and institutions second the character and extent of innovations are informed and limited by the regime as well the framework is contrasted with neoclassical and ecological economics while the framework assimilates ideas from both paradigms it departs from them by stressing the importance of the technological institutional regime tir the two views ignore in different ways the significance of tir 46 the neoclassical program conceives the flow of innovations as tir independent while the ecological agenda regards the fund of resources as tir independent 1 consequently both camps fail to provide an endogenous account of the observed punctuated character of the evolution of tir neoclassical economists maintain that as a resource depletes its price rises which induces switching to a cheaper one encourages exploration or spurs invention harold barnett and chandler morse 7 11 state that nature imposes particular scarcities not an inescapable general scarcity the responses to environmental resource limitation are supposedly singular activities stripped from any underpinning regime the neoclassical disregard of tir heuristically resembles the fable of marie antoinette s folly in response to the scarcity of bread at the eve of the french revolution she advised according to legend buying cake instead ecological economists offer a different view of resource limits 48 for herman daly 21 8 nature really does impose an inescapable general scarcity while neoclassical economists emphasize relative limitation scarcity pricing ecological economists stress malthusian general limitation for ecological economists substitution can solve relative allocation but cannot solve general limitation general limitation can be avoided only if economic activity proceeded within certain boundaries or as put by martin o connor 69 within appropriate cyclical structure of resource transformations under the motto sustainable development a low pace production activity supposedly enables a population to replicate indefinitely ecological economists conceive

the theorems of international trade with factor mobility abstract this paper addresses the relation between goods trade and international factor mobility in general terms the basic theorems of international trade suitably interpreted are shown to hold in their strong versions if the number of international markets for goods and factors is at least as large as the number of factors the crucial dimensionality issue is hence not the relative number of goods and factors per se but the number of international markets relative to the number of factors only the price version of the heckscher ohlin theorem fails to be essentially preserved by this condition

finance and growth for microenterprises evidence from rural china using a survey dataset of chinese rural households we find that access to external finance is positively associated with the decision to become entrepreneur and the initial investment for microenterprises also we find that use of informal finance especially financing from friends and family is positively associated with sales growth of microenterprises with employees but not of self employed we do not find any significant relationship between the use of formal finance and firm growth our findings underline the importance of finance for entrepreneurship and microenterprise growth and the role of informal finance in the absence of efficient formal financial institutions

far from the tree do private entrepreneurs agglomerate around public sector incumbents during economic transition while it is well known that state enterprises in transition economies were displaced by private enterprises at a macro level little is known about whether private entrepreneurs emerged in a way that helped preserve or shift preexisting agglomerations of industrial activity at a microgeographic level to address this question we integrate competing perspectives on the role of large bureaucratic incumbents in spawning entrepreneurs we conceptualize a trade off between two countervailing effects of large incumbents on potential entrepreneurs bureaucratic socialization and exposure to capabilities this yields novel predictions about how different kinds of startups agglomerate around different kinds of incumbents we test these predictions using fine grained geographic data on founding rates by private entrepreneurs in china s bicycle manufacturing industry consistent with our theorized trade off we find evidence of a nonmonotonic effect of incumbent size on local founding rates by private entrepreneurs additional moderating effects are consistent with boundary conditions on the hypothesized mechanisms our results provide the first empirical investigation of the extent to which entrepreneurial activity agglomerated around public sector incumbents during economic transition we discuss how these insights add to the understanding of economic transition as well as how the context of economic transition adds to the understanding of entrepreneurial spawning

impact of historical conflict on fdi location and performance japanese investment in china historical relations between countries bring important explanatory power for foreign direct investment fdi decisions yet little is known on whether a home host country relation exhibits heterogeneous effects on fdi across the country s subnational regions in this study we examine the long term impact of historical conflict on fdi location choices and performance using a sample of 8 646 japanese fdi in china we show that civilian casualties in different provinces of china during the second sino japanese war exert deterring effects on japanese fdi location choices furthermore we demonstrate that civilian casualties negatively affect japanese fdi performance and political capital accumulation strategies in the forms of excessive tax payment and local employment can reduce this negative effect this study contributes to the discussion on how within country differences of historical factors affect fdi location decisions and performance the findings on firms political capital accumulation strategies also provide important implications for fdi operation in an environment characterized by historical animosity

forced coexistence and economic development evidence from native american reservations there are large differences in economic development across native american reservations today this paper asks whether these differences can be in part explained by the forced integration of historically autonomous sub tribal bands in the 19th century to measure forced integration i combine anthropological data on intra tribal political integration in pre reservation times with historical information on the constituent bands of each reservation exploring variation in how politically integrated tribes were before reservations and variation in how politically integrated reservations were at the time of their formation i find that forced integration lowers per capita incomes today by about 30 percent to account for potential selection into forced integration i exploit historical mining rushes as a source of exogenous variation in the government s incentive to combine bands onto reservations the iv strategy confirms the baseline results i also provide quantitative evidence on the channels through which forced integration affects incomes today

forging ahead and falling behind the rise and relative decline of the first industrial nation this paper considers britain s failure to maintain its lead in economic growth in the face of overtaking by the united states recent cliometric research is reviewed and it is argued that early nineteenth century britain had a low growth potential by twentieth century standards and that the american growth of the early twentieth century was of a quite different kind neither traditional nor new growth theories can encompass this experience and it is suggested that natural resource endowments location specific learning processes and the international migration of factors of production were central aspects of american overtaking of britain

comparative advantage in uk manufacturing trade 1910 1935 this paper uses a maintained hypothesis of comparative advantage based on relative factor endowments to investigate uk manufacturing trade prior to world war ii the results from several independent tests indicate that britain exported goods intensive in the use of unskilled labour and had a comparative disadvantage in goods intensive in the use of human capital right up to the mid 1930s this is consistent with the views of contemporaries but somewhat at odds with recent optimistic assessments of structural change in pre war britain this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

fiscal incentives and policy choices of local governments evidence from china abstract this paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of china based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue sharing scheme we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem we find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to urbanizing china i e to developing the real estate and construction sectors when their retention rate of enterprise tax revenue was reduced the increase from the new revenue source compensated for half of the losses in revenue that resulted from the reassignment of fiscal rights the reassignment had also the effect of retarding the industrial growth of domestically owned firms in particular

market reforms technological capabilities and the performance of small enterprises in china this paper shows that the domestic and foreign trade liberalization of the chinese economy since the late 1970s has led to much dynamism among small and medium firms such firms have grown at a rapid pace and have increased their share of value added in the chinese economy at the same time they have recorded gains in total factor productivity however after two decades of decontrol the potential for further growth among small and medium industries is limited unless further liberalization is undertaken and government policies pertaining to the allocation of credit levy of taxes and grants of research and other subsidies are applied in a more even handed fashion

leaders managers and the organization of township and village enterprises in china abstract the managerial contractual form in china s township and village enterprise tve sector has evolved rapidly during the past 10 years our paper uses descriptive data and a theoretical model to demonstrate that these changes may be occurring in response to the rapid development of markets in transitional rural china we econometrically test the model s main hypotheses showing that the driving force behind the movement from a leader run fixed wage contract to a fixed payment contract with better incentives for the manager is the relative value of non marketed inputs owned by local leaders and firm managers firm technical structure and local market setting also plays a role in the determination of firm contractual form

the resource curse and its potential reversal several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough we try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure using alternative measures of both resources and institutions and by studying different time periods while an institutional reversal is present in many specifications only ores and metals interacted with the icrg measure of institutional quality consistently have a negative growth effect but a positive interaction that turns the curse around when institutions are good enough

the origins of american industrial success 1879 1940 the united states became the world s preeminent manufacturing nation at the turn of the twentieth century this study considers the bases for this success by examining the factor content of trade in manufactured goods surprisingly the most distinctive characteristic of u s manufacturing exports was intensity in nonreproducible natural resources furthermnore this relative intensity was increasing between 1880 and 1920 the study then asks whether resource abundance reflected geological endowment or greater exploitation of geological potential it was mainly the latter jel 042 recent thinking about american economic performance has been marked by alarm over the country s loss of its competitive edge most of this discussion is not rooted in an understanding of the historical origins of the economic leadership now thought to be in jeopardy modern economists tend to assume that the american advantage has been technological and

a century of missing trade in contemporary data the measured factor content of trade is far smaller than its predicted magnitude in the pure heckscher ohlin vanek framework the so called missing trade mystery authors wonder if this problem has been there from the beginning that is authors ask if the heckscher ohlin theory was so much at odds with reality at its time of conception authors apply contemporary tests to historical data focusing on the major trading zone that inspired the factor abundance theory the old and new worlds of the pre 1914 greater atlantic economy this places autor s analysis in a very different context than contemporary studies an era with lower trade barriers higher transport costs a more skewed global distribution of the relevant factors especially land and comparably large productivity divergence these conditions might seem more favorable to the theory but the results are still very poor

why do entrepreneurs enter politics evidence from china this article examines the determinants of the entrepreneur s political participation by employing a unique matched firm institution data set from china we find that the likelihood of an entrepreneur s participation can be explained by the underdevelopment of markets and market supporting institutions according to our estimates the probability of entering politics decreases by 8 20 from the mean when the institutional indices improve by one standard deviation our findings support the view that the institutional environment shapes the private entrepreneur s motivation to participate in politics they also provide an example of how private entrepreneurs respond to state market failure in developing and transition countries jel g1 h00 o10 p2 p3

public versus private ownership of firms evidence from rural china why are many of china s successful rural enterprises publically owned by local communities using a set of provincial data we find that the share of community public firms township village enterprises or tves relative to private enterprises is higher where the central government s influence is greater the community government s power is stronger and the level of market development is lower we also find that tves help achieve the community government s goals of increasing government revenue rural nonfarm employment and rural income however tves do not increase rural income given the levels of nonfarm employment and local public goods provision indicating possible inefficiency as compared with private enterprises