forest incomes and rural livelihoods in chiradzulu district malawi abstract this paper examines forest income among rural dwellers in one of malawi s most densely populated districts chiradzulu 160 households were interviewed in two sites only 20 km apart purposely selected on the basis of access to a forest reserve people are extremely poor with 97 having incomes of less than 1 usd day forest income constitutes around 15 of total income only non farm income 47 and agriculture 28 rank higher the poorest segment depends more on forest income than the least poor group but the medium income group exhibits the highest dependence fuelwood constitutes the major source of such income followed by fodder the incomes mainly support current consumption people with better access to the forest reserve have higher total income forest income and relative forest income as revealed through a gini coefficient analysis forest resources have an important income equalizing effect across rural households a particular group of resource poor farmers 8 1 of sample with little access to agricultural land and a high representation of female heads derives an average of 65 of their income from the forest an important policy lesson is that restricting people s access to forest resources can have substantial effects on household livelihoods and welfare and would serve to increase income inequalities in the area livelihood researchers should now recognize the substantial income from forest resources

hybrid r d we develop a model of r d collaboration in which individual firms carry out in house research on core activities and undertake bilateral joint projects on non core activities with other firms we develop conditions on the profit functions of the firm under which r d investments in different projects of a firm are complementary we show that this condition is met by standard price and quantity setting oligopoly models we then study the relation between the number of joint projects and investments and profits in this context we identify a second aspect of complementarity equilibrium investments in in house as well as in each joint project are increasing in the number of projects however we find that an increase in number of joint projects of all firms lowers collective profits suggesting the presence of excessive incentives for conducting research

open knowledge disclosure an overview of the evidence and economic motivations abstract this paper reviews current literature on open knowledge disclosure strategies used by firms it is usually acknowledged that for an innovative firm that does not benefit from a natural protection such as lead time advance the best strategy is to keep an innovation secret as long as possible or to protect it through an exclusive patent however in apparent contrast to this traditional view many studies suggest that firms often disclose important parts of their knowledge through scientific publications conferences the internet etc this paper aims to provide an overview first of the evidence supporting the existence of open knowledge disclosure and second of the economic motivations that encourage rational profit seeking firms to adopt these behaviours

an analysis of policy initiatives to promote strategic research partnerships strategic research partnerships srps have become a salient feature of the us national innovation system we provide an overview of srps and examine the antecedents and consequences of centerpiece legislation designed to stimulate the formation of srps the national cooperative research act ncra of 1984 ncra allows firms to disclose their research joint ventures rjvs to the department of justice which enabled them to significantly reduce their exposure to antitrust litigation we estimate an econometric model of trends in rjv filings and find that as intended by the legislation the propensity of firms to engage in rjvs is sensitive to changes in the global competitiveness of us high technology industries more importantly our results suggest that the establishment of the commerce department s advanced technology program which provides financial support to firms that engage in collaborative research projects induced firms to engage in additional privately financed rjvs this is a spillover mechanism that warrants further attention as national innovation systems evolve

a cross country comparison of rural income generating activities summary this paper uses a newly constructed cross country database composed of comparable income aggregates to examine the full range of income generating activities carried out by rural households the analysis paints a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space in countries on all four continents though less so in the included african countries for most countries the largest share of income stems from off farm activities and the largest share of households has diversified sources of income diversification not specialization is the norm nevertheless agricultural sources of income remain critically important for rural livelihoods in all countries

nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural africa concepts dynamics and policy implications abstract asset activity and income diversification lie at the heart of livelihood strategies in rural africa this paper introduces a special issue on the topic income diversification and livelihoods in rural africa cause and consequence of change we concentrate on core conceptual issues that bedevil the literature on rural income diversification and the policy implications of the empirical evidence presented in this special issue

strategizing by firms in the presence of markets for resources strategizing by firms from the resource based view is concerned with the process through which firms acquire a distinctive bundle of resources that is costly and time consuming for competitors to duplicate or imitate a central question facing any firm therefore is its strategy for accumulating the resources that underpin its production activities in this article the process of resource accumulation is discussed as one involving potentially both internal resource development and external resource acquisition from the perspective of the strategic issues involved in making a choice between these options emerging markets for technologies and know how through licensing and other forms of resource exchange have opened up new avenues through which firms may jostle for advantage the article is concerned with three major aspects of this process illustrating the discussion with cases from biotechnology and pharmaceuticals first the strategizing by firms around the internal development vs external sourcing issue is discussed as informed by the practices of leading firms and how these lend greater variety of strategic options for firms second the potential competitive advantages as well as disadvantages to be secured by firms through the process of external sourcing as compared with the well known potential advantages accruing to incumbents through internal development such as time compression diseconomies and causal ambiguity and third the criteria to be used by firms to strategically evaluate resources individually as contrasted with the strategic evaluation of the resource bundle or totality these criteria it is argued turn on the issues of marginal value contribution resource complementarities and synergies resource variety and transferability involving intellectual property issues successful firms it is argued expand their options through blending internal resource accumulation with external resource leverage thereby deepening their distinctive dynamic capabilities this approach extends the framework of the rbv enabling it to encompass resource driven schumpeterian competition and such aspects of industrial dynamics as specialization modularization and imitative challenge copyright 2003 oxford university press

the economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty an asset based approach abstract longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty while a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty this paper develops an asset based approach to poverty analysis that makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted persistent structural poverty from poverty that passes naturally with time due to systemic growth processes drawing on the economic theory of poverty traps and bifurcated accumulation strategies this paper briefly discusses some feasible estimation strategies for empirically identifying poverty traps and long term persistent structural poverty as well as relevant extensions of the popular foster greer thorbecke class of poverty measures the paper closes with reflections on how asset based poverty can be used to underwrite the design of persistent poverty reduction strategies

sources of productivity growth in the spanish pharmaceutical industry 1994 2000 abstract the spanish pharmaceutical industry underwent an important transformation during the 1990s to survive under the new market conditions labs had to refocus their competitive strategies towards increasing productive efficiency or reinforcing research and development r d activities this paper analyzes the evolution of the productive patterns in a sample of 80 pharmaceutical laboratories that operated in spain from 1994 to 2000 we estimate malmquist productivity indexes and decompose them into four sources of productivity change the results suggest that pure technical efficiency change and the scale change of the technology explain most of the productivity growth observed during the period the contribution of technical change to productivity growth is negligible indicating a poor result from r d activities at least in the groups of small and medium sized labs

r d co practice and reverse knowledge integration in multinational firms this paper contributes to the developing literature on the management of distributed innovation in multinational firms we focus on a specific organizational mechanism r d co practice which we believe is an important facilitator of knowledge integration in multinationals with global innovation strategies in our formulation r d co practice joint technical activities between units increases levels of absorptive capacity and social capital among participating units thus increasing the likelihood that they will share knowledge at future time periods we find strong support for this hypothesis through an empirical analysis of reverse subsidiary to headquarters knowledge integration in two sectors automotive and pharmaceuticals over a 21 year period

pharmaceuticals and the developing world pharmaceuticals have greatly improved health in developing countries but many people in developing countries do not obtain even inexpensive pharmaceuticals and little pharmaceutical r d is oriented toward products needed by developing countries such as a malaria vaccine access to existing products could be improved by facilitating differential pricing for example by subsidizing donation programs and reforming health care delivery r d incentives could be improved if rich countries or international organization committed to purchase needed products when they are developed and make them available to the poor

estimating the effects of global patent protection in pharmaceuticals a case study of quinolones in india under the trips agreement wto members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals the debate about the merits of this requirement has been extremely contentious many low income economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in substantially higher prices for medicines with adverse consequences for the health and well being of their citizens on the other hand research based global pharmaceutical companies argue that prices are unlikely to rise significantly because most patented products have therapeutic substitutes in this paper we empirically investigate the basis of these claims central to the ongoing debate is the structure of demand for pharmaceuticals in poor economies where because health insurance coverage is so rare almost all medical expense are met out of pocket using a detailed product level data set from india we estimate key price and expenditure elasticities and supply side parameters for the fluoroquinolones sub segment of the systemic anti bacterials i e antibiotics segment of the indian pharmaceuticals market we then use these estimates to carry out counterfactual simulations of what prices profits and consumer welfare would have been had the fluoroquinolone molecules we study been under patent in india as they were in the u s at the time our results suggest that concerns about the potential adverse welfare effects of trips may have some basis we estimate that in the absence of any price regulation or compulsory licensing the total annual welfare losses to the indian economy from the withdrawal of the four domestic product groups in the fluoroquinolone sub segment would be on the order of u s 450 million or about 73 of the sales of the entire systemic anti bacterials segment in 2000 of this amount foregone profits of domestic producers constitute roughly 50 million or 11 the overwhelming portion of the total welfare loss therefore derives from the loss of consumer welfare in contrast the profit gains to foreign producers in the absence of any price regulation are estimated to be only around 53 million per year

tourism in the gambia some issues in development policy abstract the paper deals with a number of issues arising from the design and implementation of tourism policies and programs in the gambia it gives a description of tourism in the gambian economy and discusses the reasons for success in this sector a number of recommendations are put forward related to the need to increase earnings from tourism and to reduce the incidence of black markets the overall conclusion of the paper is that a shift toward more cautious and flexible policies would benefit the tourism sector in the gambia and thus make the programs intended to assist this sector more effective it is on that basis that the country will attract more foreign tourists and improve the standards and quality of products the programs must also be executed in a careful sensitive and planned manner that ensures the cooperation of the local communities

using evidence of household income diversification to inform study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa abstract the labor market literature in developing countries has seldom drawn on the studies of rural household income diversification this paper draws on such studies to inform future study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa the review of evidence provides some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of rural households among the most striking is the dominant importance in the majority of case study areas of nonfarm wage labor as compared to self employment of nonfarm sector earnings as compared to farm sector wage earnings and of local nonfarm earnings as compared to migration earnings the most worrying finding was the poor distribution of nonfarm earnings in rural areas despite the importance of these earnings to food security and farm investments this poor distribution implies significant entry barriers and market segmentation it is probable that this will lead over time to an increasingly skewed distribution of land and other assets in rural africa

fishing upstream firm innovation strategy and university research alliances this paper examines how innovation strategy influences firms level of involvement with university based research our results suggest that firms with internal r d strategies more heavily weighted toward exploratory activities allocate a greater share of their r d resources to exploratory university research and develop deeper multifaceted relationships with their university research partners in addition firms with more centralized internal r d organizations spend a greater share of their r d dollars on exploratory research conducted at universities in contrast to other external partners we find evidence suggesting that universities are preferred when the firm perceives potential conflicts over intellectual property 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the political economy of international trade essays in honour of robert e baldwin part 1 theory of trade policy with imperfect information avinash dixit strategic trade policy and the new international economics a critical analysis gottfried haverlay the role of services in production and international trade a theoretical framework ronald w jones and henry kierzkowski the coefficient of trade utilization back to the baldwin envelope james e anderson and j peter neary part 2 trade policy issues reflections on uniform taxation arnold c harberger intellectual property rights and north south trade judith c chin and gene m grossman optimal tariff retaliation rules david f burgess international trade in capital and capital goods rachel mcculloch and j david richardson part 3 political economy of trade policy asymmetries in policy between exportables and import competing goods anne d krueger trade policy development and the new political economy gerald m meier does 1992 come before or after 1990 on regional versus multilateral integration andre sapir part 4 empirical studies of trade issues the structure and effects of tariff and non tariff barriers in 1983 edward leamer a computational analysis of alternative safe guards of policy scenarios in international trade alan v deardorff and robert m stern direct foreign investments and trade in east and southeast asia seiji naya

knowledge sources patent protection and commercialization of pharmaceutical innovations abstract this paper investigates different types of innovations from radical to incremental in the pharmaceutical industry by studying bibliometric data of drugs approved by the united states food and drug administration fda looking at time to market aspects knowledge sources of these innovations and protection strategies scientific knowledge stemming from the public sector is found to be important for all innovations nevertheless radical innovations build on a higher degree on basic research and they build on a significantly higher share of own prior scientific research than do incremental innovations furthermore each drug is shown to be accompanied by on average about 19 journal publications and 23 additional patents additional patent filings peak when the commercialization of the drug is in reach firms do not differ among the various types of innovations regarding the amount of additional patent filings but rather with the speed of filing these patents finally this work contributes to the improvement of future econometric analyses that aim to link bibliometric indicators such as patent or publication counts to firm success

is public r d a complement or substitute for private r d a review of the econometric evidence is public r d spending complementary and thus additional to private r d spending or does it substitute for and tend to crowd out private r d conflicting answers are given to this question we survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years a framework for analysis of the problem is developed to help organize and summarize the findings of econometric studies based on time series and cross section data from various levels of aggregation laboratory firm industry country the findings overall are ambivalent and the existing literature as a whole is subject to the criticism that the nature of the experiment s that the investigators envisage is not adequately specified we conclude by offering suggestions for improving future empirical research on this issue

uncertain intellectual property conditions and knowledge appropriation strategies evidence from the genomics industry innovating science and technology based firms often endure a sustained period of uncertain intellectual property rights ipr protection before patents could be granted to their valuable knowledge assets this problem is exacerbated as firms increasingly develop their innovations or operate in countries with weak ipr institutional environments but how does ipr uncertainty affect firms strategy toward knowledge appropriation capturing of economic value from their knowledge assets and toward providing access to these knowledge assets drawing on research from the economics of science and intellectual property strategy we examine this question using a novel panel data covering 362 firms and organizations in the knowledge intensive genomics industry based on all genomics patents and matching papers from 1988 to 2005 we find that under uncertain ipr conditions firms reveal and accumulate more knowledge through open science follow on publishing but shift to knowledge appropriation through commercial science follow on patenting when ipr uncertainty is narrowed this effect is most salient when firms develop their knowledge assets or operate under strong ipr institutional regime for highly science based knowledge assets firms continue tapping into open science for access and reciprocity in knowledge acquisition from the scientific community these findings highlight the role of patent grant as a potential lever to shape firms knowledge processes and long term innovative capacity and the emergence of a concerted science strategy employed by firms

academic freedom private sector focus and the process of innovation we develop a model that clarifies the respective advantages and disadvantages of academic and private sector research rather than relying on lack of appropriability or spillovers to generate a rationale for academic research we emphasize control rights considerations and argue that the fundamental tradeoff between academia and the private sector is one of creative control versus focus by serving as a precommitment mechanism that allows scientists to freely pursue their own interests academia can be indispensable for early stage research at the same time the private sector s ability to direct scientists toward higher payoff activities makes it more attractive for later stage research

endogenous matching in university industry collaboration theory and empirical evidence from the united kingdom we use a two sided matching framework to analyze collaboration between heterogeneous academics and firms we consider both horizontal and vertical characteristics those related to affinity e g preferences for a type of scientific research and those related to ability e g capacity to produce high quality scientific output we build a unique data set based on the teams of academics and firms that proposed research projects to the uk s engineering and physical sciences research council our results are suggestive of positive assortative matching in terms of ability and type while the matching is negative assortative in terms of their interactions the most able and the most applied academics are the ones that are more likely to propose collaborative as opposed to noncollaborative projects data are available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2680 this paper was accepted by david hsu entrepreneurship and innovation

impacts of entry by counterfeiters this paper uses a natural experiment to test the impact of counterfeiting under weak intellectual property rights i collect new panel data from chinese shoe companies from 1993 2004 by exploiting the discontinuity of government enforcement efforts for the footwear sector in 1995 and the differences in authentic companies relationships with the government i identify and measure the effects of counterfeit entry on authentic prices qualities and other market outcomes the results show that brands with less government protection differentiate their products through innovation self enforcement vertical integration of downstream retailers and subtle high price signals these strategies push up authentic prices and are effective in reducing counterfeit sales

combining household income and asset data to identify livelihood strategies and their dynamics abstractcurrent approaches to identifying and describing rural livelihood strategies and household movements between strategies over time in developing countries are imprecise here we i present a new statistical quantitative approach combining income and asset data to identify household activity choice variables characterise livelihood strategy clusters and analyse movements between strategies and ii apply the approach using an environmentally augmented three wave household n 427 level panel dataset from nepal combining income and asset data provides a better understanding of livelihood strategies and household movements between strategies over time than using only income or asset data most households changed livelihood strategy at least once over the two three year periods a common pathway out of poverty included an intermediate step during which households accumulate assets through farming petty trading and migratory work

patents and the global diffusion of new drugs analysis of the timing of launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries during 1983 2002 shows that patent and price regulation regimes strongly affect how quickly new drugs become commercially available in different countries price regulation delays launch while longer and more extensive patent rights accelerate it health policy institutions and economic and demographic factors that make markets more profitable also speed up diffusion the estimated effects are generally robust to controlling for endogeneity of policy regimes with country fixed effects and instrumental variables the results highlight the important role of policy choices in driving the diffusion of new innovations

in house versus external basic research and first to market innovations this paper explores to what extent conducting internal basic research as opposed to external basic research i e outsourcing and collaboration with universities encourages firms to bring new products into the market ahead of competitors and contributes to innovation performance the analysis is based on a sample of spanish manufacturing firms over the period 2006 2012 our findings suggest that conducting in house basic research affects firm s propensity to introduce product novelties furthermore performing this activity continuously affects the probability of being product pioneer in low and medium low tech sectors collaboration with universities also helps in introducing new products ahead of competitors but contracting scientific research from universities does not lead to a pioneer strategy results also reveal the absence of complementarities

what makes companies pursue an open science strategy whereas recent scholarly research has provided many insights about universities engaging in commercial activities there is still little empirical evidence regarding the opposite phenomenon of companies disseminating scientific knowledge our paper aims to fill this gap and explores the motivations of firms that disclose research outcomes in a scientific format besides considering a dimension internal to the firm we focus particularly on knowledge sourcing from academic institutions and the appropriability regime we conduct an econometric analysis with firm level data from the fourth edition of the french innovation survey cis and matched scientific publications for a sample of 2512 rd performing firms from all manufacturing sectors this analysis provides evidence that firms are more likely to adopt academic principles if they need to access scientific knowledge that is considered important for their innovation development whereas the mere existence of collaborative links with academic institutions is not a strong determinant furthermore the results suggest that the inclination of firms to publish is sensitive to the level of knowledge spillovers in a sector and the effectiveness of legal appropriation instruments c 2013 elsevier b v all rights reserved

positions and rewards the allocation of resources within a science based entrepreneurial firm we study the link between resource allocation and employee publication in the open science in a quantitative case study of one science based entrepreneurial firm we bridge the literature on incentives with that on authority structures to argue that a positive relationship between rewards and productivity will be strongest for individuals in positions of scientific leadership within the firm in a novel dataset we find that prolific publishers receive greater year end bonuses and are allocated additional direct reports but this relationship only holds for individuals in scientific leadership roles these results contribute to our understanding of resource allocation processes and reward structures in science based firms

opportunities and benefits as determinants of the direction of scientific research abstract scientific research and private sector technological innovation differ in objectives constraints and organizational forms scientific research may thus not be driven by the direct practical benefit to others in the way that private sector innovation is alternatively some yet largely unexplored mechanisms drive the direction of scientific research to respond to the expected public benefit we test these two competing hypotheses of scientific research this is important because any coherent specification of what constitutes the socially optimal allocation of research requires that scientists take the public practical benefit of their work into account in setting their agenda we examine whether the composition of medical research responds to changes in disease prevalence while accounting for the quality of available research opportunities we match biomedical publications data with disease prevalence data and develop new methods for estimating the quality of research opportunities from textual information and structural productivity parameters

welfare effects of global patent protection this paper uses a simple model of invention and patent protection to examine the welfare effects of extending patent protection from the country where invention takes place to another country that is only a consumer of invented products it is shown that while the welfare of the inventing country certainly rises with the extension of patent protection that of the other country probably falls and may well fall by more than the increase in welfare of the inventing country in particular as patent protection is extended to a larger and larger portion of the world the effect on the welfare of the world as a whole of extending it to the rest of the world becomes negative

tourism in the gambia problems and proposals abstract this paper analyses the development constraints which confine the gambia to being one of the poorest countries in the world the programmes designed to reduce these constraints are outlined in particular tourism is identified as an appropriate development strategy using primary data tourism in the gambia its development and administration are described in some detail althoiugh a prima facie case can be made extolling the virtues of tourism in that country the industry is beset by a range of problems the juxtaposition of the country s growing reliance on tourism against increasing stagnation in the sector is a focus of particular concern constraints in the tourism sector are identified in the spheres of policy formulation and implementation capital investment human resource endowment existing and potential tourist markets seasonality issues and product resource base for each constraint identified a management strategy is proposed in essence the article is an advocation of sustainable tourism development for the gambia based on long term holistic planning including appropriate resource development community involvement education and training

tourism and economic development a survey this article surveys the literature on tourism and economic development identifying the contribution that tourism can make to development including foreign currency income and employment and the costs that it entails single equation and system of equations models for estimating tourism demand are provided indicating developing countries potential to benefit from increasing expenditure on tourism but their susceptibility to deterioration in price competitiveness the main sectors of tourism supply transportation tour operators travel agents and accommodation are examined and the importance of cross country integration between firms is highlighted the article argues that many of the problems associated with the use of environmental resources for tourism stem from market failure and it considers methods for increasing sustainably the returns from them

incentives in university technology transfers there are two main ways in which the knowledge created in universities has been transferred to firms licensing agreements and the creation of spin offs in this paper we describe the main steps in the transfer of university innovations the main incentive issues that appear in this process and the contractual solutions proposed to address them

assessing indirect tax reform in a tourism dependent developing country summary the paper investigates the effects of reform of the current structure of indirect taxes in mauritius a relatively tourism dependent economy it uses a computable general equilibrium model to explore the relative efficiency of changing sales tax rates on tourism and nontourism related sectors and allowing for equity considerations the efficiency of tax reforms are also distinguished for cases where tourist arrivals are exogenously set and where they endogenously adjust to changes in relative prices the simulation results show that the tourism sectors are currently undertaxed additionally taxing tourism sectors is found to be the most socially efficient means of raising tax revenue

perspective absorbing the concept of absorptive capacity how to realize its potential in the organization field the purpose of this perspective paper is to advance understanding of absorptive capacity its underlying dimensions its multilevel antecedents its impact on firm performance and the contextual factors that affect absorptive capacity twenty years after the cohen and levinthal 1990 paper the field is characterized by a wide array of theoretical perspectives and a wealth of empirical evidence in this paper we first review these underlying theories and empirical studies of absorptive capacity given the size and diversity of the absorptive capacity literature we subsequently map the existing terrain of research through a bibliometric analysis the resulting bibliometric cartography shows the major discrepancies in the organization field namely that 1 most attention so far has been focused on the tangible outcomes of absorptive capacity 2 organizational design and individual level antecedents have been relatively neglected in the absorptive capacity literature and 3 the emergence of absorptive capacity from the actions and interactions of individual organizational and interorganizational antecedents remains unclear building on the bibliometric analysis we develop an integrative model that identifies the multilevel antecedents process dimensions and outcomes of absorptive capacity as well as the contextual factors that affect absorptive capacity we argue that realizing the potential of the absorptive capacity concept requires more research that shows how micro antecedents and macro antecedents influence future outcomes such as competitive advantage innovation and firm performance in particular we identify conceptual gaps that may guide future research to fully exploit the absorptive capacity concept in the organization field and to explore future fruitful extensions of the concept

a great wall of patents what is behind china s recent patent explosion abstract china s patent surge documented in this paper is seemingly paradoxical given the country s weak record of protecting intellectual property rights using a firm level data set that spans the population of china s large and medium size industrial enterprises this paper explores the factors that account for china s rising patent activity while the intensification of research and development in the chinese economy tracks with patenting activity it explains only a fraction of the patent explosion the growth of foreign direct investment in china is prompting chinese firms to file for more patent applications amendments to the patent law that favor patent holders and ownership reform that has clarified the assignment of property rights also emerge as significant sources of china s patent boom these results are robust to alternative estimation strategies that account for over dispersion in the patent counts data and firm heterogeneity

leviathan as an inventor an extended agency model of state owned versus private firm invention in emerging and developed economies we examine the relative merits of state soe and private poe ownership on firm invention output in emerging as well as developed economies firm soe affords a vehicle by which governments throughout the world encourage risky investment in new technological paths yet from a traditional agency theoretical standpoint soes are plagued by low powered incentives and dysfunctional involvement e g wasteful budgets and political meddling which reduces soe performance relative to poes to examine this paradox we build an extended agency model which rather than overlooking agency cost drivers entertains a more balanced view in which these so called agency liabilities in fact benefit soes particularly in the sphere of inventions we argue that given relatively higher levels of managerial autonomy soes may outperform poes in some types of inventive output we further propose that key boundary conditions operate to modify this base effect in that contexts lacking political constraints a condition found in most emerging economies increase the risk of political meddling reducing managerial autonomy so that any soe inventive advantages wane significantly we also hypothesize that this negative effect of weak institutions is attenuated in high invention productivity sectors empirically we track the frequency pioneerism and impact of patent inventions of 521 soes and matched poes for 16 years across 43 countries and 22 industries we find empirical support for our hypotheses based on a robust set of fixed effects regression analyses aided by a battery of checks to assess self selection and omitted variable bias

global gatekeeping representation and network structure a longitudinal analysis of regional and global knowledge diffusion networks this paper argues that structural characteristics of knowledge diffusion networks such as density levels centralization levels and the presence of global knowledge brokers contribute to the emergence of dominant designs and the competitiveness of countries firms and industries it further suggests that national institutional structures and firm specific attributes influence the development of these knowledge diffusion networks six propositions developed from examination of one industry s networks and previous scholarly literature specify these arguments

qualitative and mixed methods research in economics surprising growth promising future qualitative research in economics has traditionally been unimportant compared to quantitative work yet there has been a small explosion in use of quantitative approaches in the past 10 15 years including mixed methods projects which use qualitative and quantitative methods in combination this paper surveys the growing use of qualitative methods in economics and closely related fields aiming to provide economists with a useful roadmap through major sets of qualitative methods and how and why they are used we review the growing body of economic research using qualitative approaches emphasizing the gains from using qualitative or mixed methods over traditional closed ended approaches it is argued that although qualitative methods are often portrayed as less reliable less accurate less powerful and or less credible than quantitative methods in fact the two sets of methods have their own strengths and how much can be learned from one type of method or the other depends on specific issues that arise in studying the topic of interest the central message of the paper is that well done qualitative work can provide scientifically valuable and intellectually helpful ways of adding to the stock of economic knowledge especially when applied to research questions for which they are well suited

household income strategies and natural disasters dynamic livelihoods in rural nicaragua this paper assesses the impact of hurricane mitch on livelihood strategies of rural households in nicaragua through destruction or distress sales of productive assets a hurricane or another natural hazard could induce people with relatively remunerative livelihoods to choose more defensive strategies which allow them to survive but at a permanently lower welfare level than before using panel data from before and after hurricane mitch we find that livelihood strategies can be grouped into three welfare categories annual farming and farm employment generate low incomes whereas nonfarm wage employment and livestock farming result in relatively high incomes perennial farming nonfarm self employment and annual cropping with nonfarm employment take an intermediate position high welfare strategies were associated with high levels of capital and the number of people involved was very similar between different years suggesting that households following low welfare strategies were trapped in poverty however many households moved actively between strategies of different welfare levels this indicates that there was no absolute poverty threshold but also that being able to initiate a relatively profitable livelihood strategy was no guarantee that this strategy could be maintained there is no evidence that hurricane mitch affected livelihood strategy transitions livelihood mobility was similar for households inside and outside mitch affected areas

invention and innovation in the chemical industry demand pull or discovery push abstract this paper describes a study of the determinants of the rate direction and scale of inventive and innovative activity in the chemical industry over the period 1830 1980 statistical data are interpreted in the light of case study material in three major sectors dyestuffs plastics and pharmaceuticals theories of technical change and economic growth particularly those of schmookler and schmpeter are examined in relation to this material on the chemical industry the findings suggest that the importance of demand pull and discovery push factors and the validity of schmookler s and schumpeter s theories vary over an industry s life cycle

new pills for poor people empirical evidence after gatt abstract the protection of pharmaceutical innovations is being dramatically extended as much of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products this change in intellectual property rights may lead to more research on drugs to address developing country needs we use new survey data from india the results of interviews and measures of research and development r d constructed from a variety of statistical sources to determine trends in the allocation of research to products specific to developing country markets there is some although limited evidence of an increase in the mid to late 1980s which appears to have leveled off in the 1990s the picture presented provides a baseline against which future patterns in research activity can be compared

assessing environmental dependence using asset and income measures evidence from nepal understanding rural environmental dependence in a rural population is an important factor in the framing of environmental policy with the dual aim of tackling poverty and conserving nature firstly this study compares the assessment of environmental dependence between poverty groupings based on income and asset measures using a composite asset index we were able to distinguish the asset poor from the asset non poor we then combined income data with the asset index enabling us to disentangle the stochastic and structural nature of poverty the distribution of poor and non poor households based on income measures was significantly different from that based on asset measures the income poor are substantially more dependent on environmental resources than the income non poor about 15 difference while strikingly minimal difference was observed in environmental dependence between the asset poor and non poor less than 2 difference the level of environmental dependence between the poor and non poor households differs with the choice of welfare measure and combining two of these measures to identify wealth groups provides policy makers with better insight on the variations in environmental dependence

in search of complementarity in innovation strategy internal r d and external knowledge acquisition empirical research on complementarity between organizational design decisions has traditionally focused on the question of existence of complementarity in this paper we take a broader approach to the issue combining a productivity and an adoption approach while including a search for contextual variables in the firms strategy that affects complementarity analysis of contextual variables is not only interesting per se but also improves the productivity test for the existence of complementarity we use our empirical methodology to analyze complementarity between innovation activities internal research and development r d and external knowledge acquisition our results suggest that internal r d and external knowledge acquisition are complementary innovation activities but that the degree of complementarity is sensitive to other elements of the firms strategic environment we identify reliance on basic r dthe importance of universities and research centers as an information source for the innovation processas an important contextual variable affecting complementarity between internal and external innovation activities

making a marriage of materials the role of gatekeepers and shepherds in the absorption of external knowledge and innovation performance through interviews and a large scale survey of r d scientists and engineers this paper explores individuals attempts to absorb external knowledge focusing on their efforts to identify and assimilate external knowledge and promote its utilization extant research does not explicitly address whether individuals should better specialize in certain absorption efforts or rather work as generalists dedicated to a range of efforts we suggest that assimilation efforts increase the value of individuals efforts at external search and at promoting the utilization of external knowledge which culminates in two main absorption roles that can help individuals achieve greater innovation performance we argue that gatekeepers who combine external search with assimilation effort help to achieve innovation by contributing to building potential absorptive capacity while shepherds who combine assimilation with utilization effort aid innovation by building realized absorptive capacity we find support for these predictions and discuss the implications for research and managerial practice in open innovation

policies for sustainable development in the hillside areas of honduras a quantitative livelihoods approach in this article we use data for 376 households 1 066 parcels and 2 143 plots located in 95 villages in the hillside areas in honduras to generate information needed by decision makers to assess the needs and opportunities for public investments and design policies that stimulate natural resource conservation we develop a quantitative livelihood approach using factor and cluster analysis to group households based on the use of their main assets this resulted in seven household categories that pursue similar livelihood strategies we use a multinomial logit model to show that livelihood strategies are determined by comparative advantages as reflected by a combination of biophysical and socioeconomic variables while 92 of the rural hillsides population in honduras lives on us 1 00 capita day or less households that follow a livelihood strategy based on basic grain farming are the poorest because they often live in isolated areas with relatively poor agro ecological and socioeconomic conditions opportunities for off farm work tend to be limited in these areas and household strategies that combine on farm work with off farm work earn higher incomes per capita incomes can be increased by improving road infrastructure widening access to land policies that reduce household size and dependency ratios and adoption of sustainable land management technologies that restore soil fertility we used probit models to show that the latter can be promoted by agricultural extension programs and land redistribution investments in physical assets should be directed toward households that pursue livelihood strategies based on off farm employment or coffee production while agricultural training programs are best focused on livestock producers

quantifying rural livelihood strategies in developing countries using an activity choice approach this article uses a quantitative activity choice approach based on identification of activity variables and application of latent class cluster analysis to identify five major rural livelihood strategies pursued by households n 576 in bolivia nepal and mozambique income sources and welfare outcomes are compared across strategies and household differences in asset holdings are analyzed using multinomial logit regression findings reveal that income diversification is the norm that a higher degree of specialization does not characterize more remunerative livelihood strategies that nonfarm income significantly contributes to higher income earnings that environmental reliance does not vary across strategies and that small scale farmers are the largest and poorest livelihood group some livelihood strategies are superior to all other strategies in terms of income earned access to more remunerative livelihood strategies is determined by land ownership education and ethnic affiliation finally the article also highlights that additional work is required to determine the most suitable methods for livelihood strategy identification

livelihood strategies and dynamics in rural cambodia summary this paper addresses one of the major challenges in rural livelihood analysis to quantitatively examine the dynamics of household livelihood strategies it investigates the interactions between livelihood assets activities and outcomes and captures the dynamics of long term changes and their underlying factors the study aims to identify the classification of rural livelihood strategies their transitions and factors influencing these processes and changes we employ the dynamic livelihood strategy framework and use panel data for 2008 and 2012 covering 464 households in 15 villages in cambodia for latent class cluster analysis and regression estimation in this paper livelihood strategies are quantified based on allocation of available resources which overcomes the limitations of income based analysis our study identifies five household livelihood strategies pursued in the study areas and the results show that over 70 of households change livelihood strategies over time in response to evolving pressures incentives and opportunities the study identifies covariates that shape the choices of livelihood strategies and affects the households access to more remunerative strategies such as education ownership of physical assets and access to infrastructure these findings suggest policy implications for improving the range of livelihood choices available to lower income groups to move out of poverty trap

capitalism as an engine of progress economists from marx to schumpeter have touted capitalism as an engine of technical progress but what kind of an engine is it what are its key components how does it work

alfred marshall lecture intellectual property rights protection in developing countries the case of pharmaceuticals patent enforcement in developing countries generates considerable controversy especially when patents involve potentially life saving drugs this paper argues that common concerns regarding the effects of patents on prices and on research incentives of pharmaceutical multinationals are misplaced rather the most significant effects are likely to concern access to patented drugs in poor countries because prices in developing countries are much lower than in the developed world multinationals may choose to enter such markets with a delay or not at all implying a complete loss of access to patented drugs in developing countries even when multinationals enter countries like india their marketing and distribution networks are not currently built out leading to limited access within the country such considerations may provide a justification for policies targeting access in the short and medium run such as compulsory licensing

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

who participates in r d subsidy programs the case of spanish manufacturing firms abstract empirical evidence on the effectiveness of r d subsidies to firms has produced mixed results so far one possible explanation is that firms and project selection rules may be quite heterogeneous both across agencies and across industries leading to different outcomes in terms of the induced additional private effort here we focus on the participation stage using a sample of spanish firms we test for differences across agencies and industries our results suggest that firms in the same industry face different hurdles to participate in different agencies programs that participation patterns may reflect a combination of agency goals and that patterns differ across high tech and low tech industries

decoding the adaptability rigidity puzzle evidence from pharmaceutical incumbents pursuit of gene therapy and monoclonal antibodies the emergence of radical technologies presents a significant challenge to incumbent firms we study firms management of radical technological change by separating their actions into upstream research the r of r d and downstream development the d of r d we introduce two contingencies to explain when incumbents research investments in radical technologies translate into product development and when these upstream investments may get voided by organizational inertia downstream first radical technologies can differ in how they conform to incumbents existing business models impacting the extent to which the movement of research outputs toward development will be subject to inertial pressures second incumbents can invest in a radical technology through a variety of modes internal research external research contracts alliances acquisitions these modes represent unique combinations of who does research and who is involved in the decision for subsequent development and hence differ in the extent to which they are shielded from inertial pressures this difference helps explain why incumbents despite responding to radical technologies may still be unable to adapt as well as what types of investments will be more effective in helping firms navigate technological change evidence from pharmaceutical incumbents pursuit of monoclonal antibodies and gene therapy offers strong support for our arguments

absorptive capacity coauthoring behavior and the organization of research in drug discovery we examine the interface between for profit and publicly funded research in pharmaceuticals firms access upstream basic research through investments in absorptive capacity in the form of in house basic research and pro publication internal incentives some firms also maintain extensive connections to the wider scientific community which we measure using data on coauthorship of scientific papers between pharmaceutical company scientists and publicly funded researchers connectedness is significantly correlated with firms internal organization as well as their performance in drug discovery the estimated impact of connectedness on private research productivity implies a substantial return to public investments in basic research

different missions and commitment power in r d organizations theory and evidence on industry university alliances this paper proposes a theory for why firms conduct some research activities in house but outsource other projects to independent partners and for why firms retain different degrees of control over collaborative research projects the focus is on the determinants of a company s choice to outsource research projects to academic organizations because of the different institutional missions of academic organizations outsourcing a project to a university allows a firm to commit not to terminate or alter a scientifically valuable project before it is complete this commitment is potentially valuable for the firm in an environment where scientific value and economic value may not coincide and scientific workers are responsive to the incentives defined by their community of peers an economic model that formalizes these arguments is developed empirical hypotheses are then formulated about the kind of research activities firms will outsource to universities and activities on which they will exert stronger control evidence from a sample of industry university research agreements as well as from other large sample and case studies shows patterns consistent with the predictions of the model

who captures value from science based innovation the distribution of benefits from gmr in the hard disk drive industry abstract we analyze the discovery of giant magneto resistance gmr and its development and commercialization by the global disk drive industry to answer the question of who captures the benefits from innovation in a global innovation system we assess the returns to the scientists firms and countries associated with gmr we find that the french and german scientists that discovered gmr and their labs benefited by receiving the nobel prize and small licensing fees the firm that first commercialized the technology ibm captured profits from selling hard disk drives and magnetic heads using gmr other hard disk drive and head manufacturers based in the u s and japan were able to quickly assimilate the technology and catch up with ibm france and germany reaped limited returns due to the lack of domestic firms with the absorptive capacity to commercialize gmr the u s and japan benefited from the success of their firms in commercializing gmr as did other countries which were part of the global value chains of those companies consumers and firms that incorporated hard drives in their products ultimately benefited from cheaper hard drives with greater capacity these findings illustrate the importance of absorptive capacity at the firm and national level in capturing benefits from innovation they also show that the benefits to first mover firms can be short lived in a competitive industry with open transfer of knowledge and limited appropriability regimes finally they show that the location of jobs and wages associated with innovative products depends on the structure of the global value chains of leading firms

public support for innovation and the openness of firms innovation activities this study explores empirically the relationship between publicly funded schemes to support innovation and the openness of firms innovation practices using survey data from more than 5000 firms in 29 european countries we find that support policies for innovation both monetary and non monetary are related to an increase in the degree of openness of individual firms both in terms of the number of external partners with whom they collaborate and the number of open innovation activities they perform however the relationship between support and openness seems to be negatively moderated by the existence of previous innovative activity within the firm public support has more impact on less innovative firms and less influence when the firm is already innovative which could potentially indicate the existence of crowding out effects additionally our results suggest that non financial support is more strongly linked to openness than financial support for policy makers facing salient budgetary constraints this implies that institutions and government policies could potentially play a more important role than money in fostering open innovation this article contributes to the open innovation literature by tapping into the underexplored question of the role of public policies and has crucial implications for academics and policy makers

absorptive capacity and connectedness why competing firms also adopt identical r d approaches abstract this paper explores the endogenous determination of r d appropriability through the firms choice of r d approaches whereas identical broad r d approaches connect firms with their r d environment and maximize absorptive capacities the opposite holds for idiosyncratic r d approaches our model shows that competing firms choose identical r d approaches in order to maximize knowledge flows between each other in essence this frees firms from the prisoner s dilemma of aggressive investment in r d our analysis contrasts with kamien and zang s 2000 kamien m zang i 2000 meet me halfway research joint ventures and absorptive capacity international journal of industrial organization 18 995 1012 finding that competing firms chose idiosyncratic r d approaches we demonstrate that their model also yields a nash equilibrium for broad identical r d approaches

does regulation drive international research cooperation evidence from the pharmaceutical sector to what extent is an increased stringency of the intellectual property rights ipr system apt to stimulate research cooperation between developed and emerging economies to address this question we empirically investigate how international joint research projects in the pharmaceutical sector are affected by the regime of ipr in force in the two countries involved in the collaboration looking at the joint signature of both patent documents and scientific articles by researchers located in developed and emerging markets our investigation indicates two opposite effects joint publications are fostered by stricter ipr rules whereas joint patents are discouraged a recently proposed theory provides a plausible rationale for this apparently contradicting result

household strategies and rural livelihood diversification this article reviews the recent literature on diversification as a livelihood strategy of rural households in developing countries with particular reference to sub saharan africa livelihood diversification is defined as the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in order to survive and to improve their standards of living the determinants and effects of diversification in the areas of poverty income distribution farm output and gender are examined some policy inferences are summarised the conclusion is reached that removal of constraints to and expansion of opportunities for diversification are desirable policy objectives because they give individuals and households more capabilities to improve livelihood security and to raise living standards

empirical regularities in the poverty environment relationship of rural households evidence from zimbabwe abstract analysis of rural households and environmental resources is beset by inadequate data especially in africa using purpose collected panel data from zimbabwe we demonstrate seven empirical regularities in the rural poverty environment relationship most important environmental resources make a significant contribution to average rural incomes poorer households also depend heavily on these resources which contribute c 40 to their incomes richer households however use greater quantities of environmental resources in total finally considerable differentiation exists in the economic characteristics of environmental goods these results demonstrate the considerable economic significance of environmental resources to rural households surveys which ignore them miscalculate rural incomes and welfare

the role of firm characteristics in pharmaceutical product launches this paper examines the determinants of new pharmaceutical launches since 1980 in the g7 nations using discrete time hazard models despite the obvious incentive to amortize the large sunk costs of drug development over many markets entry occurs in only 4 of the opportunities the results indicate that firm characteristics such as domestic status and experience in the local market are important in explaining product launches in addition to market characteristics also the interaction between the innovating firm and target country is a critical component of profitability new drugs are 1 5 times more likely to be launched in markets that share a border or a language of a drug company s country of headquarters even for multinational firms the effect of competition depends on the characteristics of both the potential entrant and the incumbents domestic entrants prefer to compete with domestic incumbents although this is an industry with the potential for ubiquitous licensing and low transportation costs the specific match quality between the innovating firm and market conditions remains an important determinant of entry

getting competition down to a science the effects of technological competition on firms scientific publications prior research about the interaction between private firms and the scientific community has largely viewed firms articles in scientific publications as a means to improve research and development productivity by encouraging their researchers to publish scientific papers firms can maintain linkages with the scientific community attract talent and access external knowledge on which they can build to create innovations this paper in contrast emphasizes the role of scientific publications in firms battles for market dominance and examines how competitive conditions shape firms propensities to publish scientific articles about their innovations focusing on the context of pharmaceutical drugs we develop propositions about how the competition that one drug faces from similar drugs and potential substitutes influences the innovating firm s inclination to publish articles in the top medical journals about that drug to facilitate its assessment by the u s food and drug administration and the medical community we also propose that scientific articles about competing drugs compel a firm to highlight its own drug in scientific papers to assert the drug s uniqueness and mitigate the threat of substitution whereas prior research has elucidated how science contributes to enhancing firms competence at creating innovations which is critical to their ability to compete in technology intensive environments this paper draws attention to how competition in turn permeates into the scientific arena creating inducements for firms to use scientific publications to position their innovations in the marketplace