a cost function analysis of import demand for nigeria the article uses a translog cost function to examine the substitution relations among capital labour and imports the results show that capital has a substitute relation with domestic labour and import however labour and import have complementary relationship the implication of this finding is that liberalization policies if pursued vigorously could impart positively on the demand for labour in addition it suggests that economic growth could be enhanced through trade liberalization

how reliable are simple single equation specifications of import demand this paper examines nine models of aggregate import demand for each of five countries canada germany japan united kingdom and united states in an attempt to determine which of the frequently used single equation models of import demand are appropriate an appropriate model is defined as one which generates unbiased or at least consistent and efficient elasticity estimates while models without lagged adjustments and almon lag models perform rather poorly according to these criteria models including dynamic behavior through lagged values of the dependent variable are frequently accepted results are reported regarding functional form measures of variables and structural shift economists have devoted considerable attention to the estimation of aggregate import demand elasticities because of their importance in trade theory the simplest procedure for estimating these elasticities which is consistent with economic theory is to assume that the elasticity of supply of imports is infinitely elastic and to estimate

gender differences in rent sharing and its implications for the gender wage gap evidence from sweden abstract this study using matched employer employee data analyses gender differences in rent sharing results indicate significantly smaller remuneration from firm profits for women a difference that increases along the wage distribution gender differences in rent sharing explain less than 2 of mean gender wage differentials as differences are found in remuneration from firm profit and not in the mean profit levels of employing firms

determinants of international trade flows this paper models and estimates import demand and demand for export functions for 19 industrial countries although primary emphasis is placed on the period of generalized floating exchange rates 1972 through 1980 estimates are also provided for the fixed exchange rate years 1957 1970 thus making possible a comparison between the two eras aside from the conventional income and price variables the paper assesses the effect of variations in the exchange rate and in the expected exchange rate on real trade flows additionally it estimates an unrestricted lag structure of the effect of price and exchange rate variations on imports

impact of trade liberalization on import demands in india a panel data analysis for commodity groups the objectives of this study are to examine the impact of liberalization on price elasticities of imports at a commodity level for broad commodity groups and at an aggregate level for the indian economy over the period 1993 1997 liberalization is implemented by reducing tariff and non tariff barriers and relaxing exchange controls the impact of tariffs and market based exchange rate is introduced in the import price of the commodity relative price import domestic elasticities for each commodity group using panel data of six countries over five years are estimated for the indian economy relative price elasticities for each of the years at an aggregate level using data for twenty commodity groups as observations are obtained and these show that the price elasticity tends to rise with the increase in liberalization when tariff rates are reduced

success factors for environmentally sustainable product innovation a systematic literature review the growing awareness regarding environmental sustainability has fully reached business reality consumers and companies alike are looking for alternatives to mitigate pressing environmental demands resulting from continuous population and economic growth on the other hand companies must deal with an increasingly competitive scenario where innovation is regarded as a survival need in most markets it is thus clear that systematic academic research is paramount to guide companies to succeed in environmentally sustainable product innovation in this context this paper i consolidate extant research and aggregate findings of different studies on environmentally sustainable product innovation through an interpretative framework of published literature on the topic and ii map critical success factors that drive the success of product innovation developed in this new logic of production and consumption to achieve these objectives a systematic literature review on environmentally sustainable product innovation was conducted results show that there are four main critical success factors for environmentally sustainable product innovation market law and regulation knowledge interfunctional collaboration innovation oriented learning and r d investments the factors identified in this research and corresponding variables were subjected to a brief empirical test by professionals the test allowed a preliminary approval of the developed framework and identification of the most important variables within each factor a research agenda based on the state of the art on the topic is also proposed

energy efficiency policy analysis using socio technical approach and system dynamics case study of lighting in latvia s households abstract worldwide the lighting sector demands around 1 5 of total electricity used while the diffusion of new lighting technologies occurs quickly and prices for these technologies drop at the same time around 1 3 of households in developed european countries continue to choose incandescent light bulbs this phenomena shows a large potential for saving electricity therefore the aim of our research is to model the diffusion of innovation for energy efficiency solutions in households in latvia the methodology combines an empirical study with system dynamics modelling the model showed that electricity consumption in households decreased by 14 from the year 2015 until the year 2040 the sensitivity analysis shows that changes in the parameters used in this analysis caused expected behaviour where the uncertainly in electricity consumption in households accounted for 16 in the year 2040 although this developed system dynamics model was based on a specific process of diffusion of innovation its general application to other products and services is possible since the developed model serves as a white box the structure of the model can be used for other studies the model can be enhanced with the newest results or adapted for other case studies

canadian imports and exports by origin and destination a semi flexible approach this paper models the geographical composition of canadian foreign trade imports and exports are disaggregated into nine regions that together cover most of the oecd area the author uses both the flexible and the semiflexible versions of the symmetric normalized quadratic functional form the reduction in flexibility allows for large savings in the number of parameters and yet it is not incompatible with the data the author s results suggest that there are significant substitution possibilities in canadian foreign trade and that trade diversion towards the united states and efta is likely to be important in the event of increased e c protectionism

determinants of international trade flows the case of developing countries abstract the question of magnitude and the time path of the trade flows to changes in the exchange rates and to changes in the price level is of emitent practical importance to assess the above proposition a distributed lag structure is imposed on the relative prices and on the effective exchange rate as the determinants of trade flows then import and export demand functions are estimated for a sample of developing countries using the almon procedure the empirical findings appeared to sustain orcutt s early conjecture that trade flows adjust differently to different price stimuli more precisely it was found that imports and exports reactions were quicker and the total response time was shorter when an exchange rate rather than relative prices caused a change in international prices

import demand for india a translog cost function approach most developing countries depend heavily on imported resources in the form of raw materials or supplemental capital to increase their per capita income however most of the conventional macromodels have neglected the factor input aspect of imports these models have depicted the aggregate producing sector as employing primary factors capital and labor to produce a single final output which is used to satisfy domestic and foreign demands imports are generally treated as either final goods or intermediate goods despite this in the literature there does exist a keen awareness of the role of imports as a factor of production in an earlier study on india for 1959 60 macdougall emphasizes the gravity of the scarcity of imported resources for the indian manufacturing sector claiming that many factories are today lying partially idle through lack of imported supplies one third of the industries covered appear to be working at only 60 percent of capacity or less 2 in their seminal study chenery and strout lend further support to the notion that imports are productive inputs by stating that the inflow of external resources has become virtually a separate factor of production whose productivity and allocation provide one of the central problems for a modern theory of development 3 more recently some studies have been conducted which use u s and canadian data to examine the role of imports as a factor of production 4 these studies find that imports and capital services are complementary inputs for the united states and for canada 5 unfortunately there are no studies on the role of imports as a factor input for developing countries which examine the degree of substitutability or complementarity between imports and domestic primary factors in this paper we propose to estimate the demand for imports as a factor of

the role of imports from the newly industrializing countries in u s production this paper examines the relationship among u s imports from the nics imports from developed countries capital and labor in the production of goods for final demand import demand and substitution elasticities are estimated for the period 1960 80 u s imports from the nics are found to be complements with both labor and imports from industrialized countries this indicates that the substitution effect resulting from a reduction in the price of imports from the nics would lead to a net increase in employment multilateral tariff cuts by the united states would increase the demand for nic goods despite a reduction in their preferential tariff margins

the dynamics of technological substitution the case of eco innovation diffusion of surface cleaning products some eco innovations have already reached a mature state but they diffuse slowly there is little known about the importance of various factors on the diffusion process of eco innovations the aim of this research is to propose a conceptual model for eco innovation diffusion where particular case study of eco innovation micro fibre cloth mfc for surface cleaning purposes is given the work will study the relative importance of various motivations on diffusion processes as well as the influence of information campaigns this novel methodology has been developed under the system dynamics framework and is coupled with the logistic regression model structural validation tests were done for the proposed model the methodology is proposed then the integrated empirical study and system dynamics model are completed the results of the logistic regression models show that the overall attitudes and social influence has the most dominant impact on intention to use the studied eco innovation products the most sensitive parameters in the system dynamics model were found to be the adoption faction of information received by word of mouth households adopting micro fibre cloth at the beginning of the simulation and the contact rate per household the proposed methodology and developed mathematical model can also be used as the basis for other studies of other diffusion processes since system dynamics modelling is a white box modelling approach and the structure of the model can be enhanced with the latest results from other studies

environmental innovations and profitability how does it pay to be green an empirical analysis on the german innovation survey much of the empirical literature analysing the relation between environmental innovation and competitiveness has focused on the question whether it pays to be green we differentiate between different types of environmental innovations which will be disentangled in those aiming at reducing the negative externalities and those allowing for efficiency increases and cost savings what we analyze is at first the extent to which these two typologies have impacts on firms profitability with opposite signs and secondly whether the motivations driving the adoption of those innovations make the difference in terms of economic gains we find empirical evidence that both the typology of environmental innovation and the driver of their adoption affect the sign of the relationship between competitiveness and environmental performance the empirical strategy is based on a sample of german firms and makes use of a merge of two waves of the mannheim innovation panel in 2011 and 2009 that allow overcoming some endogeneity issues which may arise in a cross section setting

the demand for imports in korea a production analysis approach abstract balance of trade problems in the united states and other highly industrialized countries have resulted in cries for korea to liberalize its import policies this paper uses a translog cost function to investigate korea s demand for imports and the effects of trade liberalization on the demand for the country s domestic inputs this study suggest that the domestic inputs and imports are substitutes and that as the proportion of investment goods in korea s gdp increases the demand for imports will also increase thus further liberalization of korea s import policies could present short run problems in the domestic input markets

production theory technological change and the demand for imports aggregate import demand functions for switzerland 1948 1976 are estimated jointly with the supply and or demand functions for domestic outputs and inputs joint estimation not only yields more efficient estimates than single equation methods but it also ensures that the derived demand and supply functions are consistent with the underlying technology two specifications are examined one of them stressing the smallness and openess of the swiss economy as well as its flexible immigration policy the generalized leontief functional form is used in both cases special attention is devoted to the interpretation of the estimated price elasticities and various hypotheses of technological change are tested for

strategic niche management from a business perspective taking cleaner vehicle technologies from prototype to series production strategic niche management has been outlined as a policy approach to assist development and diffusion of cleaner new technologies based on a case study describing the efforts of a leading actor in the heavy vehicle industry to develop and commercially introduce hybrid electric vehicles this paper discusses strategic niche management from the perspective of the manufacturing firm in particular the paper analyses experiences from extensive field tests executed in london tests which involved a number of different manufacturers hybrid systems and vehicles the scale of this technological niche added confidence and credibility to the technology and helped opening up an important niche market which was supported by an extensive subsidy scheme the analysis shows how the field tests and the subsidies jointly functioned as bridging policies that facilitated an important step in the market formation process the analysis further points at a critical tension between niches and the volume oriented business of a major vehicle manufacturer showing how investments in new technology need to be warranted in market trends and projections of future sales and production volumes to become accepted within a vehicle manufacturer s organization

ossified materialism introduction to the special volume on absolute reductions in materials throughput and emissions drawing from papers in this special volume sv this introductory paper on absolute reductions argues that the magnitude scope and urgency of the sustainability challenge require a drastic change in global civilisation including a radical transformation of the institutional arrangements and socio technical systems that facilitate the pursuit of wellbeing the authors of this paper identify four main challenges to absolute reductions including the resource intensive conventional template for development macroeconomic structures and trade policies creating burden shifting and inequality a resourceefficiency improvements fallacy and the dominant consumerist culture and lifestyles the paper demonstrates

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

some international evidence on the stability of aggregate import demand function this paper empirically analyses the stability of the aggregate import demand function for g7 countries the standard cointegration test and a test developed by gregory and hansen are performed the results of standard cointegration tests suggest that there is no stable cointegrating relation between real import real gdp and relative import price for all g7 countries the cointegrating relation is empirically supported for france and germany if structural change for cointegrating vector is explicitly taken into consideration the cointegrating relation is empirically rejected for canada italy japan the uk and the usa thus the stimulation of domestic business conditions will not necessarily link the quantity of imports for these five countries

non stationarity and the import demand for virgin olive oil in the european union the aim of this study is to analyse the importation of virgin olive oil to european union countries paying special attention to the spanish export contribution the method used is based on the estimation of an imports demand system the novelty of the paper lies not in the modelling approach but in the explicit consideration of the univariate characteristics of series that is included in the analysis since prices are non stationary cointegration among them has been tested results indicate that they are cointegrated and that homogeneity holds as a result relative prices are included in the imports demand system structural change is also considered so as to account for the entrance of both spain and greece into the eu during the period studied results demonstrate the leadership of spain within the eu virgin olive oil market as well as the increasing competitiveness of greek oil

a symmetric normalized quadratic gnp function and the u s demand for imports and supply of exports this paper reports estimates of a gnp function for the united states using data covering most of the postwar period and it introduces a new functional form the symmetric normalized quadratic variable profit function which is a natural extension of recent work by diewert and wales this functional form allows convexity in prices and concavity in fixed inputs to be imposed globally empirical results indicate that the demand for imports is less price elastic than the supply exports that an increase in labor endowment favors trade and that a deterioration of the terms of trade mostly hurts labor

estimating long run economic equilibria with stochastic trends an asymptotic theory is provided to analyze a menu of currently existing estimators of cointegrated systems we study in detail the single equation ecm seecm approach of hendry our theoretical results lead to prescriptions for empirical work such as specifying seecm s nonlinearly and including lagged equilibrium relationships rather than lagged differences of the dependent variable as covariates simulations support these prescriptions and point to problems of overfitting not encountered in the semiparametric approach of phillips and hansen 1990