the emergence of new technology enterprises in china a study of endogenous capability building via restructuring this article examines the emergence of a vital non state sector consisting of new technology enterprises ntes spun off from existing r d institutions during the economic reforms in china most ntes are engaged in computer and information technology based on an outline of the development of the ntes this article focuses on an analysis of a few critical aspects of the restructuring process through which the ntes gained entry to a sphere of innovative economic activity the analysis shows that while the newly emerged ntes have to have international levels of competitiveness the restructuring process has been highly specific to the local society the article concludes by stressing the critical importance of the organisational innovation of the economic actors and the creation of institutions to support creative economic activities if developing countries are to cope with the pressing trends of rapid technological progress and economic globalisation

progress along the path evolving issues in the measurement of genuine saving more than 10 years since a practical linkage between sustainable development and a measure of national wealth expanded to include natural and environmental resources was first posited the empirical estimation of adjusted net savings dubbed genuine saving has evolved considerably in this paper we take stock of both progress achieved and the challenges that remain we begin by recalling the key points made in pearce and atkinson 1993 ecol econ 8 103 which presented the first cross country estimates of savings rates adjusted to reflect depletion and degradation of the environment we then briefly summarise the evolution of the theoretical argument linking savings and sustainability however the main focus of this paper is an aspect that concerned david pearce greatly namely the evolution of the measurement of genuine savings we identify and consider the empirical evidence with regard to two particular measurement issues the valuation of exhaustible resources and environmental degradation common to the both issues are concerns about measuring changes in national wealth in real world economies

wealth as a criterion for sustainable development in this article the authors define sustainable development as an economic programme along which social well being does not decline over time it can be shown that the requirement is equivalent to the maintenance of a comprehensive measure of wealth where an economy s wealth is defined to be the social worth of its entire array of capital assets including natural capital using data published by the world bank on the world s poorest regions countries which would be regarded as having performed well if judged on the basis of such indices as gnp per head or the human development index are found to have grown poorer a few alarmingly so

how substitutable is natural capital one of the recurring themes in the sustainability literature has been the extent to which a loss of natural capital can be made up for in welfare terms by an increase in other forms of capital this issue was raised early on in the debate on sustainability by pearce and has never really been resolved this paper is an empirical attempt to measure the degree of substitutability between different forms of capital a nested ces production function is used to allow flexibility in the estimated elasticities of substitution also within this specification natural resources and other inputs are combined in different levels of the function thus allowing for different levels of substitutability institutional and economic indicators are also incorporated in the production function estimated results show that the elasticities derived from functions involving land resources were generally around one or greater implying a fairly high degree of substitutability furthermore changes in trade openness and private sector investment have a statistically significant and direct relationship on the efficiency of production and hence on income generation no statistically significant relationship between income and any of the institutional indicators was found

the influence of market demand upon innovation a critical review of some recent empirical studies abstract a number of recent empirical studies of technical change at the level of the individual firm have concluded that market demand is the dominant influence upon the innovation process calling forth innovations in market economies the pace of innovation in the private sector heavily influences the growth of national output and productivity and these studies and their conclusions have therefore received much attention having been extensively quoted in discussions of appropriate government policy for the encouragement of innovation this paper reviews a number of these studies and concludes that their findings and the interpretations of their findings in the secondary literature are seriously flawed and in many cases invalid the proposition that market demand governs the innovation process is by no means conclusively demonstrated in these studies and they are therefore inadequate and inappropriate guides for the formulation of policy most of the studies examined employ a working definition of demand factors which is so broad as to embrace a range of possible influences upon innovation which should more properly be classified elsewhere the concept of demand utilized in these studies bears little resemblance to the more restrictive and precise definition of market demand found in economics in addition the phenomena analyzed in these studies are a very heterogeneous lot the studies do not address identical empirical questions and their findings are as a result neither uniform nor unambiguous both demand and supply side influences are crucial to understanding the innovation process and it is the exclusive preoccupation with only one set of these forces which is criticized in this paper some implications of the criticism for government policy toward innovation are discussed in the conclusion

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

intrinsic vs image related utility in social media why do people contribute content to twitter we empirically study the motivations of users to contribute content to social media in the context of the popular microblogging site twitter we focus on noncommercial users who do not benefit financially from their contributions previous literature suggests that there are two main types of utility that motivate these users to post content intrinsic utility and image related utility we leverage the fact that these two types of utility give rise to different predictions as to whether users should increase their contributions when their number of followers increases to address the issue that the number of followers is endogenous we conducted a field experiment in which we exogenously added followers or follow requests in the case of protected accounts to a set of users over a period of time and compared their posting activities to those of a control group we estimated each treated user s utility function using a dynamic discrete choice model although our results are consistent with both types of utility being at play our model suggests that image related utility is larger for most users we discuss the implications of our findings for the evolution of twitter and the type of value firms may derive from such platforms in the future

wealth and sustainable development the role of david pearce green net national product was thought to be one way of measuring sustainable income however david pearce understood that a better measure of sustainable development was to look at what a generation is leaving in form of capital assets to later generations in this article his arguments and insights are highlighted against recent theoretical advances

evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies we are interested in three related questions 1 how should accounting prices be estimated 2 how should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy 3 how can we check whether intergenerational well being will be sustained along a projected economic programme we do not presume that the economy is convex nor do we assume that the government optimizes on behalf of its citizens we show that the same set of accounting prices should be used both for policy evaluation and for assessing whether or not intergenerational welfare along a given economic path will be sustained we also show that a comprehensive measure of wealth computed in terms of the accounting prices can be used as an index for problems 2 and 3 above the remainder of the paper is concerned with rules for estimating the accounting prices of several specific environmental natural resources transacted in a few well known economic institutions

differentiation with user generated content this paper studies competition between firms whose products content are generated by their customers users video sharing sites social networks online games etc all rely heavily on user generated content and have been growing significantly in the last decade we model a hotelling style market in which consumers have heterogeneous tastes along a circular city in a first step we consider two ex ante identical firms whose offerings entirely depend on user generated content consumers contribute content to the firm they join and benefit from the content provided by the others their valuation being higher the closer the content contributor is to the content consumer i e there are local network effects in such a setting we show that ex ante identical firms can acquire differentiated market positions that spontaneously emerge from user generated content moreover such differentiation may take interesting patterns wherein a firm simultaneously attracts multiple distinct consumer segments that are isolated from each other greater segregation measured by the number of disjoint segments in each platform reduces consumer valuation for content but interestingly it intensifies firm competition we show that this insight can help us refine the set of possible equilibria in a second step we consider firms that explicitly differentiate their offerings by generating some content on their own we show that user generated content may strengthen or defeat firms intended positioning i e firms attract consumers located opposite to their chosen positions and consumer surplus may be higher in the latter case finally we allow multihoming by consumers and show that the previous equilibrium patterns remain valid but in most equilibria a subset of consumers located between rival firms core clienteles are multihomers more multihoming consumers imply reduced differentiation and higher degree of platform competition we relate these findings to anecdotal evidence and explore their strategic implications for competing firms relying on user generated content this paper was accepted by j miguel villas boas marketing

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

lessons from an economy with limited market functions r d in hungary in the 1980s abstract in the former socialist countries science developed as a leading force hungary became a special case since its science policy in the last two decades served the idea of new economic mechanism introduced in 1968 market oriented socialism still remained a shortage economy with lack of competition and of market demand for technical development the r d institutions had adjusted to the economic environment and had developed a great deal of business oriented activities to survive the falling budget support the relationship between academia and industry was unbalanced as a special kind of science push model due to the economic environment of shortage the original model was upside down instead of leading economic growth r d institutions had to adjust to the lower technical level of the industry facing political and economic transitions the scientific and business interests and values have been mixed or are overlapping and are both in danger if the market economy does not soon develop

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

nonmonotonic status effects in new product adoption we investigate how the tendency to adopt a new product independently of social influence the recipients susceptibility to such influence and the sources strength of influence vary with social status leveraging insights from social psychology and sociology about middle status anxiety and conformity we propose that for products that potential adopters expect to boost their status both the tendency to adopt independently from others and the susceptibility to contagion is higher for middle status than for low and high status customers applying a nested case control design to the adoption of commercial kits used in genetic engineering we find evidence that status affects i how early or late one adopts regardless of social influence ii how susceptible one is to such influence operating through social ties and iii how influential one s own behavior is in triggering adoption by others the inverse u patterns in i and ii are consistent with middle status anxiety and conformity the findings have implications for how to use status to better understand adoption and contagion mechanisms and for targeting customers when launching new products

limits to cba in uk and european environmental policy retrospects and future prospects this paper reviews the contemporary debate and the now long standing role of cba in uk and european environmental policy appraisal epa and looks forward to possible future applications the position taken is that despite its limitations cba still has an important part to play in epa however with the increasingly contested nature of environmental and related public policies and outcomes its role will become less prescriptive and its findings more constrained by social justice and ethical imperatives future cba is more likely to continue to flourish as a component in a wider policy analysis and decision support system whatever decision support system is eventually adopted its value will be judged on how well it aids real policymakers operating iteratively in the non linear real world political economy

making a difference how environmental economists can influence the policy process a case study of david w pearce can environmental economists influence policy if so how this paper addresses these two questions using the late david pearce s career as a case study influence can be exercised but pearce s career shows that certain conditions must be met the first is desire he wanted to influence policy and directed a high proportion of his efforts to doing so he focused particular attention on the power centres of his time the oecd world bank european commission un uk government his influence was aided by his status and location as a professor in a prestige university ucl in a major global city london his messages were consistent and clear theory is important and can be used to frame most environmental challenges as regards both explanation and solution externalities can be valued assessing benefits and costs of options is important market signals taxes etc and incentives generally are powerful shapers of behaviour stock of capital human built natural is a key measure of sustainability he communicated simply and clearly in words and phrases that ministers for finance and journalists could understand all of the broadsheet newspapers in england financial times guardian independent telegraph times were grist to pearce s mill of advocacy for environmental economics he provided the blueprint books that could be read on a commute and summaries to the media that they could fit into a 1 000 word piece he didn t seek out but neither did he shirk controversy he worked with various interest groups and politicians but never to the point were he was co opted he initiated and directed the msc in environmental and resource economics that created an ever widening and influential pool of advocates for his ideas finally he achieved a prodigious academic output that ensures a sort of immortality and provided the intellectual ballast the enabled his policy influence

a signaling explanation for charity this article examines a novel but plausible motive for charitable giving charitable donations which are observable can signal wealth or income the signaling equilibrium of charitable donations has attractive properties donations increase proportionally with population size governmental funding for public goods affects private charity only through an income effect crowding out need not be complete income redistribution is generically nonneutral increasing the spread between the poorest and richest person in a community tends to increase private donations our theory are based on the assumption that people are willing to make charitable donations even if they will not increase provision of the public good the data on charitable giving support the hypothesis that donors donate at least partly for signaling purposes rather than only to aid the recipient or to obtain satisfactions unrelated to status though charitable organizations usually report donations within categories thus not allowing perfect revelation for analytical tractability we shall consider an equilibrium with perfect revelation and a continuum of types as characterized in george j mailath 1987 and norman j ireland 1994

corruption and the political economy of resource based development a comparison of asia and sub saharan africa we model how the supply and demand for bribes affects resource use by an economy and the reinvestment of resource rents in other assets this requires adjusting the world bank s measure adjusted net savings for any rent dissipation due to corruption the impacts of corruption on long run changes and periodic growth in the adjusted net savings rate are estimated across african and asian economies from 1970 to 2003 corruption rather than resource dependency per se affects negatively the ability of african countries to reinvest resource rents in the short term but for asian countries corruption is less important than point resources corruption influences long run growth in adjusted net savings rates in all countries and is also the pathway through which this growth is affected by patterns of resource use trade and abundance

the conditions for achieving environmentally sustainable development this paper is interested in the narrower interpretation the relationship between environmental quality and sustainable economic activity the latter is interpreted as that level of economic activity which leaves the environmental quality level intact with the policy objective corresponding to this notion being the maximization of net benefits of economic development subject to maintaining the services and quality of natural resources over time 3