patent validation at the country level the role of fees and translation costs one feature of the european patent system that is heavily criticized nowadays is related to its complex fragmentation and the induced cost burden for applicants once a patent is granted by the epo the assignee must validate and often translate it and pay the renewal fees to keep it in force in each country in which the applicant seeks protection the objective of this paper is to assess to what extent validation and renewal fees as well as translation costs affect the validation behavior of applicants we rely on a gravity model that aims at explaining patent flows between inventor and target countries within the european patent system the results show that the size of countries their wealth and the distance between their capital cities are significant determinants of patent flows validation fees and renewal fees further affect the validation behavior of applicants translation costs seem to have an impact as well the important role played by fees suggests that the implementation of cost reducing policy interventions like the london protocol would induce a significant increase in the number of patents validated in each european country

empirical observations of bidding patterns in australia s national electricity market abstract for more than a decade electricity industries have been undergoing reform worldwide however there are various sometimes contradictory conclusions about the performance of these restructured electricity markets market performance depends largely on how each market participant responds to the market design including market rules market operational procedures and information revelation in this paper we identify and examine the strategies adopted by generators in australia s national electricity market based on publicly available data for the period from may 1 2002 to may 31 2003 we try to understand and answer some basic questions like how generators respond collectively or individually to changes in market conditions e g load changes and why they behave in this way the statistics calculated from the data show that wide variations in the frequency of strategic bidding and rebidding exist that generators more frequently use capacity offers as a strategic tool than price offers that large generating units are more likely to use capacity strategies to control market prices and that generators are capable of responding to changes in market conditions

is national technology policy obsolete in a globalised world the japanese response it is increasingly argued that in a world where trade business and finance and science and technology cross national borders attempts by national governments and firms to appropriate the fruits of national technology programs are doomed to fail japan although a late globalizer is becoming increasingly globalized however japanese policymakers have responded by internationalizing japan s technology policy while retaining its national objectives this paper examines if these policies are doomed to fail or if they can be justified and if the latter whether the japanese case is special or if it is at least to some extent valid for large western countries c 1995 academic press inc copyright 1995 by oxford university press

democratic processes political risk and foreign exchange markets 3i6 foreign exchange markets are among the deepest and widest financial markets in the world technological innovations and market liberal ization have made currency markets enormous by 1992 the vol ume of transactions topped over 1 trillion each day moreover economic agents can trade currencies with shocking speed during the september 1992 e m s crisis british monetary authorities expended over two billion dollars to support the pegged value of the pound in only a few hours the behavior of these currency markets can affect not only trade flows and in ternational investment key determinants of economic performance but also political outcomes consequently exchange rates have become a highly salient issue both at the domestic and international levels indeed some political economists assert that rapidly adjusting international markets may overwhelm the ability of policymakers to control policy and according to the most extreme view thwart any meaningful democracy understanding how currency markets behave therefore is fundamental step to assess accu rately how the internationalization of economic activity influences demo cratic politics we investigate how democratic political events affect currency markets by focusing on the relationship between the spot and forward exchange rate markets the efficient markets hypothesis implies that the forward ex change rate the price of the currency deliverable thirty days in the fu ture should be an unbiased predictor of the future spot exchange rate that is today s thirty day forward rate should on average accurately pre dict the spot exchange rate one month from today empirical studies how ever conclude that the forward rate is often a biased predictor of future ex change rate changes many economic models attribute this bias to a risk premium where currency traders demand a higher return for holding the currency

the effect of the food stamp program on the nutrient intake of the eligible elderly an objective of the food stamp program recognized in its originating legislation is to increase the nutrient intake of the poor economic theory suggests this might be achieved through income effects and program related effects this paper using data from the food stamp cashout project tests the effectiveness of food stamps and direct cash transfers in achieving this goal for a sample of elderly households food stamp program effects were negligible and nutrient intake did not increase with income in either program controlling for the endogeneity of participation with a selection bias technique did not affect these results

both institutions and policies matter but differently for different income groups of countries determinants of long run economic growth revisited summary this paper revisits the recent debate on the determinants of long run economic growth with the simple idea that different factors matter at different country groups classified by income levels this paper improves on the methodology by conducting not only cross section estimations but also fixed effects panel and system gmm estimations the results suggest that new policy variables such as technology and tertiary education as well as institutions matter as the determinants of long run economic growth in addition this paper finds that while secondary education and institution turn out to be important for lower income countries an emphasis on technology and higher education appears to be effective in generating growth for the upper middle and high income countries but not for the lower middle and low income countries

employment and structural impacts of material efficiency strategies results from five case studies abstract in order to come up with a sound assessment of the effects of material efficiency innovations on growth employment and competitiveness different economic mechanisms have to be considered from a methodological point of view the analysis must be able to account for technology specific aspects the employment impacts of five innovations are analyzed plastic and paper recycling increased life span of automobiles car sharing and bio based products time horizons for all strategies are scenarios until 2020 the economic impacts are context specific with regard to innovation technology and country the economic impacts highlight substantial structural adjustments the overall economic net impact on employment tends to be neutral to positive stronger positive economic impacts result if first mover advantages can be established

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

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

user producer interaction learning and comparative advantage michael porter s book the competitive advantage of nations 1990 has led to increasing attention on the favourable impact that advanced domestic users may have on competitiveness this paper presents a critical appraisal of the theoretical and empirical evidence on this relationship an econometric test of the hypothesis of a positive impact of advanced domestic users on competitiveness on data for 16 oecd countries between 1965 and 1987 is presented in general the results give strong support to the hypothesis under test the relationship appears to be stronger in cases where the home market is exposed to international competition

a modified ghg intensity indicator toward a sustainable global economy based on a carbon border tax and emissions trading abstract it will be difficult to gain the agreement of all the actors on any proposal for climate change management if universality and fairness are not considered in this work a universal measure of emissions to be applied at the international level is proposed based on a modification of the greenhouse gas intensity ghg int measure it is hoped that the generality and low administrative cost of this measure which we call the modified greenhouse gas intensity measure mghg int will eliminate any need to classify nations the core of the mghg int is what we call the ihdi adjusted gross domestic product idhigdp based on the inequality adjusted human development index ihdi the idhigdp makes it possible to propose universal measures such as mghg int we also propose a carbon border tax applicable at national borders based on mghg int and idhigdp this carbon tax is supported by a proposed global emissions trading system ets the proposed carbon tax is analyzed in a short term scenario where it is shown that it can result in a significant reduction in global emissions while keeping the economy growing at a positive rate in addition to annual ghg emissions cumulative ghg emissions over two decades are considered with almost the same results

electoral business cycles in oecd countries studies of oecd countries have generally failed to detect real economic expansions in the pre election period casting doubt on the existence of opportunistic political business cycles we develop a theory that predicts a substantial portion of the economy experiences a real decline in the pre election period specifically the political uncertainty created by elections induces private actors to postpone investments with high costs of reversal the resulting declines referred to as reverse electoral business cycles are larger the more competitive the electoral race and the greater the polarization between major parties we test these predictions using quarterly data on private fixed investment in ten oecd countries between 1975 and 2006 the results suggest that reverse electoral business cycles exist and as expected depend on electoral competitiveness and partisan polarization moreover simply by removing private fixed investment from gross domestic product gdp we uncover robust evidence of opportunistic cycles

robust inference concerning recent trends in us environmental quality understanding trends in environmental quality is important for individuals and policymakers typically trends in environmental quality are determined solely through comparisons of unconditional or conditional mean pollution levels however reaching unambiguous conclusions on the basis of only the first moment of the unconditional or conditional distribution is problematic since it ignores what is occurring in different regions of the distribution even relying on indices that incorporate both mean and variance is suspect to the extent that relative rankings are not typically robust to index choice addressing these concerns we adapt recent developments in the stochastic dominance literature to test for unambiguous relations between current and past distributions of toxic releases using epa data from 1988 1999 we find statistically significant evidence that the unconditional 1999 distributions of air land underground and total toxic releases dominate in a first degree sense their respective 1988 distributions while some of this improvement is explained by economic growth pollution net of income improved over the sample period as well finally we document robust differences in the distribution of pollution across regions in the us copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

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

elections and the timing of devaluations this paper presents a rational political budget cycle model where devaluation acts as a tax on consumption due to a cash in advance constraint competent governments can signal their competency by reducing the rate of devaluation prior to elections when voters also ignore the degree to which governments are opportunistic i e the extent to which they are willing to distort the economy for electoral gain an incompetent opportunistic incumbent can reduce the rate of devaluation in the run up to an election the main theoretical implication in either setup that the rate of devaluation is significantly higher in the months following an election is consistent with evidence drawn from 26 countries in latin america d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

inward technology transfer and competitiveness the role of national innovation systems this paper examines the role of national innovation systems in the inward transfer of technology that has underpinned the transformation of japan and other east asian economies since 1945 the economies that have benefited most from inward technology transfer have national innovation systems that have strengthened their national absorptive capacity this capacity relies primarily on investments in scientific and technical training and on economic policies that enforce competition among domestic firms the particular channels for inward technology transfer the identity of any strategic industries targeted for public intervention and the overall level of a nation s trade restrictions are ail of secondary importance a central theme of global economic change during the postwar period has been the application in less developed countries of technologies developed within economically advanced regions this phenomenon underpinned the post 1945 transformation of japan and other east asian economies and influenced the reconstruction of western european economies after world war ii the application of externally developed technologies within latecomer economies is hardly unique to the postwar period however samuel slater s introduction of british textile manufacturing is but one example of inward technology transfer in the nineteenth century us economy and david 1992 traces the origins of patent monopolies to efforts by medieval european city states and nations to attract experts in industrial arts to practice their craft within these jurisdictions both international technology flows and government efforts to influence them for national competitive advantage thus have ample historical precedent several characteristics nevertheless distinguish the post 1945 era from earlier historical periods the influence of international technology transfer on national economic development has increased as the postwar development of such economies as taiwan and south korea has relied much less on natural resource endowments than nineteenth

dependence structure in the australian electricity markets new evidence from regular vine copulae abstract in this study regular vine copula was used to investigate the dependence structure of electricity prices at the state level in the australian national electricity market nem during three periods related to the adoption and abolition of the carbon tax in the pre carbon period we found evidence of tail dependence separately in the northern and southern nem but not across them during the carbon period the joint spike in the northern nem disappeared and the tail dependence in the southern nem decreased in the post carbon period the best dependence structure turned out to be a flexible structure of the regular vine which exactly matches the geographical infrastructure connectedness of transmission wires besides both upper and lower tail dependences were found in all adjacent states after the abolition of the carbon tax suggesting a more integrated market regarding tail dependence our findings have substantial implications for risk management in the nem especially for those participants exposed to multiple states

the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition abstract we investigate the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition using household data from cashout experiments in alabama and san diego california we apply dominance methods to test for differences in nutrient distributions at or below the recommended dietary allowances

estimating the value of an in kind transfer the case of food stamps the value of one in kind transfer food stamps is estimated by evaluating the experience of an actual conversion from stamps to cash in puerto rico in 1982 the evidence indicates that the cashout of the stamps had no detectable influence on food expenditures the explanation partly lies in the distribution of expenditures for the stamps were inframarginal for most recipients however some evidence indicates that trafficking in stamps was widespread as well including indirect evidence from estimation of the piecewise linear constraint model copyright 1989 by the econometric society

us presidential elections and real gdp growth 1961 2004 in this paper i show that since 1960 an electoral cycle in us output growth can both be seen by the naked eye in the raw data and confirmed by a statistical analysis that allows for rational partisan effects as well as a wide range of control variables that is controlling for multiple lags of interest rate changes inflation money growth energy prices lagged output growth government spending or its growth and temporary partisan effects the timing of elections exerts a significant influence on quarterly real gdp growth

technology systems and technology policy in an evolutionary framework the central purpose of this paper is to outline an evolutionary theory of technology policy and to connect it with the emerging literature on national systems of innovation any understanding of technology policy must be based on a clear understanding of the nature of technology and the important differences between science and technology technology can be treated in terms of knowledge skills and artifacts and in each case there are different variety generating mechanisms different selection processes and different institutional structures for policy purposes the degree of connection between these different dimensions of technology is at the core of technology policy c 1995 academic press inc copyright 1995 by oxford university press

the globalisation of technology a new taxonomy book synopsis international management of research and development brings together the most influential contributions to managing organising and coordinating r d and innovation on a global scale in addition to papers on the fundamental principles trends and drivers of international r d it covers strategies and operations of global r d it also provides an introduction to modern concepts such as knowledge networks open innovation and virtual innovation it is a key reference collection for professors researchers and practitioners

relative undernutrition in puerto rico under alternative food assistance programmes in the early 1980s puerto rico experienced a conversion from the food stamp program fsp to the nutrition assistance program nap and a severe recession to compare relative undernutrition in puerto rico in 1977 and 1984 stochastic dominance methods and statistical inference procedures are applied to nutrient distributions to separate the effect of the recession from the effect of converting food coupons to cash benefits a multiple regression model of nutrient consumption is also estimated in the dominance comparisons every improvement in nutrition status between 1977 and 1984 is statistically significant at the lowest quintile while no case of worsening undernutrition is significant at the lowest quintile the multiple regression model provides some evidence that the conversion from food coupons to cash might have reduced nutrition status in the lowest quintile but a larger proportion of food assistance was allocated to low income households under the nap than under the fsp no evidence of signi

partial carbon permits allocation of potential emission trading scheme in australian electricity market emission trading is widely considered to be the most effective policy to minimize the overall costs for co2 abatement however the political feasibility of an emission trading scheme may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission permits to carbon intensive industries in order to offset the reduction in profits this paper aims to analyze these potential profit impacts and the possible compensation to affected generation companies through modeling the australian national electricity market under a potential emission trading scheme historical emission based and historical generation based allocation approaches are used in this paper to calculate and compare the percentages of carbon permits that should be freely allocated two carbon permit price scenarios are used to analyze the sensitivity of the optimal percentage of free allocation to carbon permit price

industrial policy changes and firm level technological capability development evidence from northern brazil summary much has been written about the impacts of the policy changes of the 1990s on industrial performance particularly in latin america most of the studies are based on aggregated analyses that argue for or against such reforms in the policy regime this study offers an alternative view to this debate based on a longitudinal empirical scrutiny of technological capability development in 46 local and foreign firms from three sectors in northern brazil there were inter sector and inter firm variations in terms of the manner and rate of capability development for specific technical functions overall the patterns of firm level capability development exhibited a positive response to the structural reforms but such responses were not a mere consequence of trade openness a combination of government policy foreign competition and intra firm capability building efforts proved essential for speeding up capability development in some of the sampled firms thus policies for accelerating industrial technological capability development in a developing area such as the one examined here would involve not only macro level incentives and competition but very importantly measures that facilitate intra firm capability building efforts

the effect of innovation activities on innovation outputs in the brazilian industry market orientation vs technology acquisition strategies abstract this research investigates innovation in brazil one of the largest emerging economies in latin america more specifically we aim to understand how innovation activities conducted in brazilian industrial sectors innovation input are related to and affect innovation results innovation output the paper presents a quantitative analysis of a comprehensive nation wide government sponsored innovation survey pintec covering more than 30 000 companies and 34 industrial sectors data from pintec reports were analyzed by means of pca and 2sls regression our results show that brazilian industry tends to adopt two main opposite innovation strategies market orientation or technology acquisition the market orientation strategy prioritizes internal and external rd these activities showed a positive effect on innovation output on the other hand a technology acquisition strategy based on industrial machinery and equipment acquisition showed a negative effect on innovation output moreover our results show that innovation efforts that concentrate investments on software acquisition also generate negative results on innovation outputs our results shed light on critical aspects of innovation in the brazilian emergent economy that provide insights and contributions for both managers and policy makers

partisanship and economic behavior do partisan differences in economic forecasts predict real economic behavior survey data regularly show that assessments of current and expected future economic performance are more positive when a respondent s partisanship matches that of the president to determine if this is a survey artifact or something deeper we investigate whether partisanship is associated with behavioral differences in economic decisions we construct a new data set of county level quarterly taxable sales to examine the effect of partisanship on consumption consumption change following a presidential election is correlated with a county s partisan complexion a result consistent with partisans acting outside the domain of politics in accordance with the opinions they express in surveys these results support an expansive view of the role of partisanship in mass politics and help validate surveys as a method for studying political behavior

transparency political polarization and political budget cycles in oecd countries we investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance while some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies in contrast we show conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies using a sample of 19 oecd countries in the 1990s we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low er transparency countries while no such cycles can be observed in high er transparency countries furthermore we find in accordance with recent theory that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries

the national system of innovation in historical perspective contrary to some recent work on so called globalisation this paper argues that national and regional systems of innovation remain an essential domain of economic analysis their importance derives from the networks of relationships which are necessary for any firm to innovate whilst external international connections are certainly of growing importance the influence of the national education system industrial relations technical and scientific institutions government policies cul tural traditions and many other national institutions is fundamental the historical examples of germany japan and the former ussr illustrate this point as well as the more recent contrast between east asian and latin american countries introduction the national system of friedrich list according to this author s recollections the first person to use the expression national system of innovation was bengt ake lundvall and he is also the editor of a highly original and thought provoking book 1992 on this subject however as he and his colleagues would be the first to agree and as lundvall himself points out the idea actually goes back at least to friedrich list s conception of the national system of political economy 1841 which might just as well have been called the national system of innovation the main concern of list was with the problem of germany overtaking england and for underdeveloped countries as germany then was in relation to england he advocated not only protection of infant industries but a broad range of policies designed to accelerate or to make possible industrialisation and economic growth most of these policies were concerned with learning about new technology and applying it the racialist and colonialist overtones of the book were in strong contrast to the inter nationalist cosmopolitan approach of the classical free trade economists and list s belief that holland and denmark should join the german bund and acquire german nationality because of their descent and whole character reads somewhat strangely in the european community of today nevertheless despite these unattractive features of his outlook he clearly anticipated many contemporary theories after reviewing the changing ideas of economists about development in the years since the second world war the world bank 1991 concludes that it is intangible investment in knowledge accumulation which is decisive rather than physical capital investment as was at one time believed pages 33 35 the report cites the new growth theory

indicators for national science and technology policy how robust are composite indicators abstract this article addresses a set of issues that were central to keith pavitt s research that is the construction and use of tools to measure national innovative performance and to design national policies relating to innovation it presents an overview of the development of science and technology s t indicators and their use in national policy making and provides evidence of the vulnerability of composite s t indicators to manipulation a brief history of the development of s t indicators begins with the role of the united states followed by their worldwide diffusion with particular emphasis on europe newer developments towards composite indicators benchmarking and scoreboarding are discussed to investigate the robustness of innovation scoreboards empirically a sensitivity analysis of one selected case is presented it is shown that composite scores and country rank positions can vary considerably depending on the selection process thus the use of scoreboards leaves room for manipulation in the policymaking system further research is needed on alternative methods of calculation to prevent their misuse and abuse

strategic bidding and rebidding in electricity markets abstract successful deregulation in electricity markets depends crucially on the ability of market regulation to promote and maintain free competition there are however important physical characteristics in electricity markets such as the constraints imposed by the physical transmission infrastructure that have the potential to undermine competition and provide opportunities for market participants to exploit temporary positions of market power in this paper the regional market of queensland australia is analysed it is found that strategic behaviour by generators exists and is closely related to the occurrence of the kind of extreme price events that characterise many deregulated electricity markets in addition rebidding behaviour by base load generators immediately after extreme price events is shown to have negative impacts on the operation of the market the key message is that promotion of competition in electricity markets can have undesirable consequences unless the regulatory policy is carefully designed to counter strategic behaviour by market participants

nutrition and nonparticipation in the us food stamp programme microdata from the national food consumption survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions we compare poor households that participate in the us food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households

the patterns of technological capabilities of countries a dual approach using composite indicators and data envelopment analysis this study explores the patterns of technological capabilities for a sample of 42 countries over the period 1995 2007 introducing a novel methodological approach we exploit duality between data envelopment analysis and composite indicators to address the inconsistency between the two methodologies the empirical findings point to the end of the hegemony of north america western europe and japan showing that a process of convergence in technological capabilities has occurred limited to the 42 countries included in this study based on our methodology a classification is provided highlighting differences in the patterns of technological capabilities of countries

structural dependence of the state on capital a central claim of both marxist and neoclassical political theory is that under capitalism all governments must respect and protect the essential claims of those who own the productive wealth of society this is the theory of structural dependence of the state on capital using a formal model the internal logic and the robustness of the theory is examined we conclude that in a static sense the theory is false virtually any distribution of consumption between wage earners and owners of capital is compatible with continual private investment once an appropriate set of taxes and transfers is in place yet the state may be structurally dependent in a dynamic sense policies that once in place redistribute income without reducing investment do reduce investment during the period in which they are anticipated but not yet implemented

technology and economic theory technology and technological change play a central role in economics whether in the theory of resource allocation or in the theory of growth and development yet the nature of technology is largely ignored in economic theory it being considered sufficient to treat technology as a constraint on productive opportunities this short essay delves a little deeper into the nature of technology and the material energy and information transformation processes that it represents a deeper understanding of technology leads to a deeper understanding of the main currents of technological advance and to the reasons why the development of technology and its application are so uneven over time and place copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

the impact of technological innovation on international trade patterns the evidence reconsidered abstract this paper presents some new evidence in relation to the role of technical change in particular industrial innovation on the international competitiveness of the various oecd countries its originality consists primarily of a using a technology output indicator to measure technological performance b presenting and comparing various measures of trade and technological performance for each individual oecd country with the exception of iceland c analysing at a relatively high level of product industry disaggregation the relationship between export performance and technological performance at the same time the very limited scope of the paper has to be emphasized a the analysis is purely static all the evidence presented relates to one year 1977 b most of the results obtained are preliminary and should be further substantiated by more detailed empirical and theoretical research c as a consequence little attention has been paid to policy implications which it was felt could only be discussed properly in a later stage the paper consists of four sections a brief review of the state of the art section 1 a discussion on definitions of technology intensity section 2 the development of the best technology output indicator section 3 and the empirical analysis itself section 4 the following most important results emerge from these various sections a there are serious shortcomings in using average technology intensity as bench mark for classifying products or industries in technology intensive or nontechnology intensive categories b there is a substantial difference between technology intensity as measured on the basis of a technology input proxy rd c yet as between countries the most traditional output and input indicators the number of patents granted and the amount spent on rd d foreign patenting in particular foreign patenting in the united states figs 1 and 2 section 3 is a more reliable technology output proxy than domestic patenting e in terms of technological comparative advantage as opposed to technology intensity it is the small oecd countries as opposed to the large ones which seem to base their trade comparative advantage on technological comparative performance table 7 section 4 1 f at the individual industry level it is found that i for most technology intensive industries defined however in a less restrictive way than us r d intensities a close relation exists between technological performance and export performance and ii that as compared to other country specific resource variables technological performance is the most important trade explanatory variable its elasticity increasing with the technology intensity of industries tables 11 and 12 section 4 2 space constraints prevented us from presenting the data in relation to the inter industry and inter country analysis these can however be obtained from the author

the impact of central bank independence on political monetary cycles in advanced and developing nations this paper examines the extent to which monetary policy is manipulated for political purposes during elections we do not detect political monetary cycles in advanced countries or developing nations with independent central banks we do find evidence however in developing countries that lack central bank independence furthermore we find some evidence that these cycles are not caused by monetization of election related fiscal expansions this suggests that pressure by politicians on the central bank to exploit the phillips curve may be an important factor in generating political monetary cycles

good volatility bad volatility what drives the asymmetric connectedness of australian electricity markets efficient delivery of network services and the electricity infrastructure to meet the long term consumer s interests are the main objectives and the strategies of a national electricity market while the main interests of generators are to maximize their profit through pricing strategies therefore the objective of this study is to explore whether electricity prices across the four australian states display symmetric price volatility connectedness the study is the first attempt in the literature to make use of intraday 5 min australian dispatch electricity prices spanning the period december 8th 1998 to may 5th 2016 to quantify asymmetries in volatility connectedness emerging from good and bad volatility the results provide supportive evidence that the australian electricity markets are connected asymmetrically implying the presence of some degree of market power that is exercised by generators across regional electricity markets

technology and growth in oecd countries 1970 1990 this paper investigates the empirical regularities and differences in the relationship between technology and growth across 20 oecd countries from 1970 to 1990 while the broad association between gdp per capita and technology indicators is confirmed the relationships change over time and a variety of national patterns is found most countries have mainly relied upon one on the two engines of growth offered by technology either disembodied innovative activity proxied by r d intensity or technology embodied in investment proxied by capital formation per employee however with decreasing scope for catching up growth appears stronger where it is sustained by a more balanced use of the two engines of growth c 1995 academic press inc copyright 1995 by oxford university press

sectoral patterns of technological activity and export market share dynamics this paper focuses on a selected number of oecd countries and manufacturing sectors and shows the importance of sectoral diversity in the innovative process and in the relation between technology and world market share dynamics the econometric exercise confirms the importance of technological variables in the relation with world market shares in two ways first they are in general statistically significant second the taxonomy of technological classes in terms of r d intensity seems to be meaningful in disentangling the role played by sectoral diversity in the relation between embodied and disembodied investment and competitiveness sectoral diversity emerges in the statistical significance of the coefficients and in the time lag structure moreover the values of estimated r d parameters are correlated with the sectoral r d intensity

labour productivity and technology gap in european regions a conditional frontier approach filippetti a and peyrache a labour productivity and technology gap in european regions a conditional frontier approach regional studies a conditional frontier approach is proposed to capture the role of the technology gap in explaining labour productivity differences in 211 european regions in eighteen countries over the years 1995 2007 labour productivity growth is driven by capital accumulation and technical change in lagging behind regions productivity growth is mainly driven by capital accumulation the technology gap does not play a role in driving labour productivity growth and remains stable across regions in the considered period cohesion policy seems more effective in terms of fixed investment rather than technological capabilities while technology gap remains a source of unused potential productivity growth

the economics of technical change this paper reviews the recent rapidly growing literature on technical change in the economy it concentrates on innovations and their diffusion at firm and industry level since this was the area designated as relatively weak in earlier literature surveys the review argues that the extensive empirical evidence and theoretical analysis now available presents a basic challenge to neoclassical theory after indicating some weaknesses in the neo schumpeterian literature the paper concludes by advocating an experiment with a new form of assessment by neighboring disciplines to economics itself which would take full account of the fundamental issues at stake in this modern methodenstreit c 1994 academic press inc copyright 1994 by oxford university press

technical change growth and trade new departures in institutional economics this article analyses the main theoretical and policy issues emerging from the literature on the evolutionary institutional economics of technical change the four distinguishing characteristics of which are that technology is often proprietary in nature only a part of knowledge is codifiable in handbooks blueprints patents and so on there are fundamental variations in the above two points across different technological fields and the evolution of knowledge is highly path dependent