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

combining carbon tax and r d subsidy for climate change mitigation abstract r d industry is introduced into a cge model kei linkages as a means to mimic the endogenous technological progress in the korean economy we found that providing across the board subsidy on r d expenditure may lead to an increase in the carbon intensity as well as the real gdp for the korean economy however when r d subsidies are combined with a carbon tax real gdp can grow without increasing co 2 emissions carbon tax on top of r d subsidy represses the growth of carbon intensive industries compared to the case of stand alone r d subsidy policy furthermore carbon intensive industries reduce carbon intensity by way of fuel mix change to cope with a higher carbon tax rate to meet the national co 2 reduction target the final outcome impinges on the industry structure of the economy therefore a careful study of the industry structure of the economy is warranted to maximize the effectiveness of climate change policy mix

are there diminishing returns to r d abstract semi endogenous models and to some extent also schumpeterian models are based on the assumption of diminishing returns to r d this paper shows that the null hypothesis of constant returns to r d cannot be rejected for the oecd countries

total factor productivity and the measurement of technological change tfp is interpreted in the literature in different mutually contradictory ways changes in tfp are shown to measure not technological change only the super normal returns to investing in such change returns that exceed the full opportunity cost of the activity thus in the limit technological change can proceed with unchanged tfp measuring the effects of technological change instead requires counterfactual estimates reasons why changes in tfp are imperfect measures of super normal returns are also studied reasons connected with the timing of output responses the treatment of r d in the national accounts the omission of resource inputs and two types of aggregation la productivite totale des facteurs et la mesure du changement technologique la productivite totale des facteurs ptf est interpretee dans la litterature de manieres differentes et mutuellement contradictoires on montre que les changements dans la ptf ne mesurent pas le changement technologique mais seulement les rendements supra normaux sur les investissements dans de tels changements des rendements qui depassent le plein cout d opportunite de cette activite donc a la limite le changement technologique peut proceder sans que la ptf change mesurer les effets du changement technique reclame des evaluations d hypotheses de rechange les raisons pour lesquelles les changements dans la ptf sont des mesures imparfaites des rendements supra normaux sont aussi etudiees raisons connectees avec la reponse des niveaux de production le traitement de la r d dans les comptes nationaux l omission des intrants de ressources et deux types d agregation

the analysis of committee power an application to senate voting on the minimum wage a widely noted empirical regularity of congressional behavior is that standing committees exert disproportionate influence on congressional choices the observed phenomenon has a number of labels committee influence committee power and from the parent chamber s perspective deference to committees and a large body of theoretical and empirical research has sought to determine when and why it exists this paper takes as given only the weakest form the observation namely that committee power exists sometimes it does not directly address the questions of when and why committee power exists although much of the relevant literature is reviewed rather it focuses on a prerequisite to the resolution of disputes about committee power how can committee power be assessed empirically section i reviews three classes of explanations and identifies obstacles to convincing empirical tests of the accounts section ii introduces an econometric approach for analyzing committee power section iii applies the technique to a sequence of votes on minimum wage legislation in the senate in 1977 section iv extends the technique to multi dimensional choice spaces section v is a discussion and summary

the impact of high tech capital on productivity evidence from australia i introduction the bulk of the empirical research on the relationship between high tech capital investment and productivity has been based on data for the united states given the relatively large size of the high tech capital sector in the u s economy it is likely that the united states is a special case most economies resemble australia s in being net importers of high tech capital not producing high tech capital was often cited as a weakness in these economies relative to the united states however since the end of the late 1990s tech boom there has been a reappraisal of whether the production or the use of high tech capital is most beneficial hence to shed light on this debate the main purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between high tech capital use and the multifactor productivity mfp of 10 industries in the australian market sector using annual data for 1966 2002 alternative specifications of production functions are considered and estimated alternative measures of high tech capital are included with combinations of computers software and electronics capital in the first production function high tech capital is allowed to be more or less productive than other capital to determine whether there is a relationship between high tech capital and mfp it is also possible to test whether there are excess returns to high tech capital for robustness testing purposes a second production function is specified with high tech capital as a separate input into production other potential sources of mfp growth such as public capital research and development stocks and microeconomic reform are also included in the production functions we find evidence of a positive relationship between high tech capital and mfp in the market sector there is less evidence however of excess returns to high tech capital which suggests that current investment levels are not inadequate the results by industry suggest that the benefits of investing in high tech capital are not distributed evenly across the economy with only some industries experiencing a positive relationship between high tech capital and mfp the structure of this article is as follows in section ii the theoretical contribution of high tech capital to mfp and the evidence to date is reviewed in section iii the methodology is outlined in section iv data sources and trends are described in section v the results are presented and interpreted and section vi concludes ii the impact of high tech capital on output and productivity the theory and evidence the impact of investment in high tech capital has been the subject of debate between new economy sceptics and optimists for several years it is widely accepted that mfp has increased substantially in u s high tech producing industries in which the rate of technological change has been phenomenal over the past 40 years several publications have found a quantifiable contribution by computer producing industries to u s output growth 1 however australia is not generally regarded as a producer of computers data from the organisation for economic co operation and development oecd 1998 indicate that the high tech share of australian manufacturing value added was 4 5 in 1995 compared to 15 8 in the united states therefore the substantial u s economy wide mfp improvements specifically associated with its computer producing industry are unlikely to be replicated in the australian economy over the past 30 years there has been rapid accumulation of high tech capital in many countries australia was the third most intensive user of high tech capital in the oecd in 1995 behind the united states and new zealand simon and wardrop 2002 find that this rapid accumulation of high tech capital may have substantially contributed to australia s economic growth during the 1990s this accumulation has been driven by technological change in high tech producing industries lowering the price of high tech capital

a contribution to event study methodology with an application to the dutch stock market abstract this paper proposes an extended market model for event studies based on daily stock returns for actual data the assumptions of the simple market model are violated the return distribution is not normal and neither the variance of the error term nor the risk parameter beta are constant our model incorporates the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch model with t distributed errors and a time dependent beta we test for anomalies by adding dummy variables in the regression equation our model is fairly general and could be used in a wide variety of event study situations we illustrate the model by an analysis of the weekend and the option expiration effect we use return data from the dutch stock market the weekend effect on stock returns is significant but no expiration effect could be detected

parametric efficiency tests economies of scale and input demand in u s electric power generation duality theory has been applied increasingly in recent years to study the structure of production a major advantage of using duality theory is that systems of input demand equations can be derived by simple differentiation facilitating the use of flexible functional forms also use of duality theory makes it possible to choose a representation of the technology which has desirable properties for estimation such as exogeneity of the regressors however the use of a dual representation of production structure is appropriate only if the corresponding maintained hypothesis concerning economic behavior e g cost minimization or profit maximization is valid the perceived advantages of the dual approach to studying production structure have led to some applications in which the maintained hypothesis concerning economic behavior is unlikely to be appropriate for example neoclassical cost functions have been used to study the characteristics of production in regulated industries despite an extensive theoretical literature indicating that a profit maximizing regulated firm would not minimize costs subject to market prices 2 in this paper we propose a generalized cost function that retains the principal advantages of the neoclassical cost function but does not require that cost minimization subject to market prices be imposed as a maintained hypothesis in our model firms are assumed to base their production decisions on unobservable shadow prices which reflect the effects of regulation on the effective prices of inputs parametric tests for cost minimization are obtained by expressing shadow prices as functions of market prices the generalized cost function is estimated with data for regulated electric utilities the parametric restrictions corresponding to cost minimizing behavior subject to market prices are rejected implying that the use of a neoclassical cost function is not appropriate in this application 3

selection and influence interest groups and congressional voting on trade policy studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote we depart from that strategy in several ways we define interest groups at the level of standard industrial classification two digit codes and observe the universe of interests for 1979 90 we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative s party and ideology we also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes we then investigate the influence of these interests on members party affiliation and ideology as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade using instrumental variables for party and ideology economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes

energy research and r d indicators an lmdi decomposition analysis for the iea big 5 in energy research abstract the literature has always shown that there are two important factors in the improvement of a country s research output gross domestic product gdp and r d expenditures taking the discussion a step further and in an effort to provide policy recommendations on what is needed to boost research capacity this paper aims at decomposing the change in energy research papers of five countries australia canada germany uk and us into four factors gdp r d intensity ratio of total r d to gdp energy r d rate of return or productivity number of energy related papers per unit of energy r d expenditure and energy r d priority share of energy r d to total r d expenditure the findings show a general trend in the sign of the four effects on research for all five countries energy r d productivity energy r d priority and gdp are mostly found to be positive contributors while the r d intensity a negative one this pattern has exceptions that are more prominent during periods where economic growth is constrained for example during 2008 09 the results have policy implications not only for these five countries but also for developing countries low gdp that aim at contributing more to the energy related research output globally

an examination of the market for favors and votes in congress this paper examines the strategies that horse traders and power brokers adopt in trading favors to pass legislation although the favors that they trade are generally impossible to observe the paper develops a model that allows tests of favor trading with data from the senate vote on the byrd amendment to the 1990 clean air act i conduct such a test the test provides evidence that on this vote i favor trading occurred ii the coalition leaders practiced price discrimination and iii the coalition leaders did not collude with each another

budget processes theory and experimental evidence this paper studies budget processes both theoretically and experimentally we give a sufficient condition for top down and bottom up budget processes to have the same voting equilibrium furthermore at a voting equilibrium it is not always true as often presumed that a top down budget process leads to a smaller overall budget than does a bottom up budget process to test the implications for budget processes of voting equilibrium theory we conduct a series of 128 voting experiments using subjects in a behavior laboratory the experimental evidence from these experiments is well organized by voting equilibrium theory both at the aggregate level and at the individual subject level in particular subjects display considerable evidence of rationality in their proposals and votes more complete information and fewer spending categories lead to greater predictive success of voting equilibrium theory and reduce the time needed to reach a budget decision

on measuring aggregate social efficiency abstract cross country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain social efficiency analogously to technical efficiency in production the article argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what is being measured standard methods of measuring technical efficiency require assumptions that are unlikely to hold for social indicators in the context of a simple parametric model of life expectancy conditions are identified under which there will be a systematic pattern of bias in estimates of efficient public health spending

technology development and the environment abstract in an attempt to achieve the positive externalities from a more knowledge intensive economy many developing countries have emphasized improvements in their science and technology st a substitution of energy for other factors of production and greater energy consumption by households our findings underscore the importance of considering the economy wide implications of a technology policy recognizing that better technology does not necessarily imply a cleaner environment

the role of product market regulations in the process of structural change abstract the sectoral allocation of labor differs considerably across developed economies even in the presence of similar patterns of structural change a general equilibrium model that captures the stylized facts of structural change is presented in this framework economy wide product market regulations hinder the development of dynamic sectors such as service industries this is consistent with the negative cross country relationship between product market regulations and the service employment share discussed in the paper additionally the model suggests that higher service prices and rents in regulated economies reduce labor supply providing a rationale for the negative association between product market regulations and the employment rate previously found in the literature

the value of risk measuring the service output of u s commercial banks rather than charging direct fees banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads as a result much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly in contrast to current statistical practice dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic risk is not part of bank output we apply these models and find that between 1997 and 2007 in the u s national accounts on average bank output is overestimated by 21 percent and gdp is overestimated by 0 3 percent moreover compared with current methods our new estimates imply more plausible estimates of the share of capital in income and the return on fixed capital

constituency opinion and congressional policy making the reagan defense buildup representatives votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the reagan administration s pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign the strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost 17 billion about 10 to the total fiscal year 1982 pentagon appropriation the impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover intense districtlevel competition and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than 1 billion in additional appropriations with the remaining 16 billion attributable to across the board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives t he appeal of representative democracy hinges on the responsiveness of elected politicians to the preferences and interests of their constituents given the theoretical and practical significance of the connection between constituents opinions and their representatives legislative activities it is remarkable that the large and in some ways quite sophisticated empirical literature addressing this connection includes so few direct estimates of the relationship between constituency opinion and specific legislative outcomes 1 my aim here is to provide one such estimate the policy issue i have chosen to examine is the level of total pentagon spending in the first fy 1982 defense appropriations bill of the reagan administration that bill the first in a series of annual appropriations resulting in a 40 real increase in defense spending during reagan s first five years in office is of obvious political significance but the issue of defense spending is also especially interesting from a broader theoretical perspective because the strong public demand for a defense spending increase at the beginning of the reagan era provides unusual analytical leverage for assessing the potential impact of public opinion on the making of public policy i shall describe some alternative mechanisms of congressional responsiveness to constituency opinion briefly characterize the politics of defense at the beginning of the reagan era present my analysis of representatives preferences regarding fy 1982 defense appropriations relating those preferences to constituency opinions on the defense spending issue and to other political characteristics of the representatives and their districts extend the analysis of fy 1982 defense appropriations from the individual to the aggregate level in an attempt to estimate the impact of congressional responsiveness on the total level of pentagon appropriations and finally touch upon some of the implications of my analysis for the study of linkages between public opinion and public policy

ict capital and services complementarities the italian evidence this article investigates whether information and communication technologies icts hardware and services play a complementary role in boosting economic growth the main argument is that investments in ict fixed capital are a necessary but not sufficient condition leading to productivity gains above all in late adopter countries their effective implementation indeed requires on the one hand a changing economic structure characterized by a growing weight of service sectors and on the other hand complementary investments in ict services directed to ease the integration of the new technologies within firms boundaries the analysis is conducted on a late industrialized country like italy and shows that in lagging countries the weak impact of ict adoption is the result of three converging forces relatively high share of manufacturing sectors low adoption levels of icts in traditional manufacturing sectors inadequate investments in ict services

the statistical analysis of roll call data modern studies of legislative behavior focus upon the relationship among the policy preferences of legislators institutional arrangements and legislative outcomes in spatial models of legislatures policies are represented geometrically as points in a low dimensional euclidean space each legislator has a most preferred policy or ideal point in this space and his or her utility for a policy declines with the distance of the policy from his or her ideal point see davis hinich and ordeshook 1970 for an early survey the primary use of roll call data the recorded votes of deliberative bodies 1 is the estimation of ideal points the appeal and importance of ideal point estimation arises in two ways first ideal point estimates let us describe legislators and legislatures the distribution of ideal points estimates reveals how cleavages between legislators reflect partisan affiliation or region or become more polarized over time e g mccarty poole and rosenthal 2001 roll call data serve similar purposes for interest groups such as americans for democratic action the national taxpayers union and the sierra club to produce ratings of legislators along different policy dimensions second estimates from roll call analysis can be used to test theories of legislative behavior for instance roll call analysis has been used in studies of the u s congress both contemporary and

improving human development a long run view abstract the pessimistic flavour of the human development reports appears to be in contradiction with their own numbers as developing countries fare comparatively better in human development than in per capita gdp terms this paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a new improved human development index ihdi informed by welfare economics the ihdi is presented here alongside the united nations development programme s undp hdi for the world and its main regions since the late 19th century social dimensions in the ihdi are derived following kakwani journal of development economics 41 1993 pp 307 336 with a convex achievement function whereas a geometric average is employed to combine its dimensions longevity knowledge and income thus the ihdi does not conceal the gap between rich and poor countries and casts a much less optimistic view than the conventional undp index while it fits with the undp concern for international differences the paper s findings highlight main weaknesses in human development dimensions of present day developing countries

energy efficiency rebound effects and the environmental kuznets curve technological change is one factor used to justify the existence of an environmental kuznets curve and technological improvements have been argued to be a key factor in mitigating the impacts of economic growth on environmental quality in this paper we use a cge model of the scottish economy to consider the factors influencing the impacts of one form of technological change improvements in energy efficiency on absolute levels of co2 emissions on the carbon intensity of the economy co2 emissions relative to real gdp and the per capita ekc relationship these factors include the elasticity of substitution between energy and non energy inputs responses in the labour market and the structure of the economy our results demonstrate the key role played by the general equilibrium price elasticity of demand for energy and the relative influence of different factors on this parameter

reflections on agricultural r d productivity and the data constraint unfinished business unsettled issues sixty years ago t w schultz introduced the idea of the productivity residual to agricultural economics 1956 schultz s main message was that growth in conventional inputs accounted for little of the observed growth in agricultural output and that there was work to be done by agricultural economists to understand and ultimately eliminate this unexplained residual called productivity thus was launched the economics of agricultural productivity as a sub field within agricultural economics along with the economics of agricultural r d and innovation and related government policy much progress has been made in the decades since still critical issues remain unresolved this matters because agricultural innovation and productivity matter and so do the related policies that rest to some extent on our established understanding of the economic relationships in this paper i review some unsettled issues related to economic models and measures applied to agricultural r d and productivity and some unfinished business in terms of economic and policy questions that are not yet well answered before doing that i present some evidence on agricultural productivity and why it matters next with a nod to factology i present available productivity measures from the u s department of agriculture usda and international science and technology practice and policy instepp center and compare them in the context of translog cost function models in subsequent sections i use these and other data to develop new evidence related to two contentious questions a do farmers benefit from public agricultural r d b has u s agricultural productivity growth slowed in recent decades the answers are revealed within

a note on optimal estimation from a risk management perspective under possibly misspecified tail behavior many financial time series show leptokurtic behavior that is fat tails such tail behavior is important for risk management in this article i focus on the calculation of value at risk var as a downside risk measure for optimal asset portfolios using a framework centered on the student t distribution i explicitly allow for a discrepancy between the fat tailedness of the true distribution of asset returns and that of the distribution used by the investment manager as a result numbers for the overestimation or underestimation of the true var of a given portfolio can be computed these numbers are used to rank several well known estimation methods for determining the unknown parameters of the distribution of asset returns minimizing the absolute percentage mismatch between the nominal and actual or true var leads to the choice of a gaussian maximum quasilikelihood estimator that is a least squares type of estimator the maximum likelihood estimator has less satisfactory behavior outlier robust es

the europe u s productivity gap in a rear view mirror will measurement differences in the services sector output please rise the deterioration in 1995 of europe s productivity performance relative to the u s coincided with the renaissance of the u s statistical system which can be regarded by now as the frontier in official statistics this paper raises the natural question whether the european statistical system was left at the station while its u s counterpart departed making it possible for measurement differences to become the primary suspect for the existing productivity gap my retrospective review of the development path in the services sector productivity statistics suggests that europe lags significantly behind the u s in the services producer price index program both in terms of scope and timing of its implementation accordingly the role of these measurement differences in the post 1995 europe u s productivity story cannot reasonably be ruled out the paper concludes with a structured guess that provides a circumstantial evidence on the benefits generated by the upgrades in the u s services sector statistics the results show that these enhancements led to two kinds of benefits during the post 1995 period a considerable reduction in the contribution of industries that traditionally dampened the aggregate productivity trend combined with a larger contribution of those that generally lifted it this contrasts markedly with europe where the contribution of these two sources remained unchanged in the meantime

impacts of regional productivity growth decoupling and pollution leakage abstractimpacts of regional productivity growth decoupling and pollution leakage regional studies this paper examines the issues of decoupling regional economic growth and pollution and the extent to which pollution effects spillover regional national borders specifically a uk regionally disaggregated computable general equilibrium cge model is used to investigate the relationship between economic growth and the level of co2 emissions posited by the environmental kuznets curve ekc conjecture using production accounting principle pap and consumption accounting principle cap environmental accounting methods the simulation results suggest that at the regional level the existence of an ekc relationship depends on the source of regional growth and the how this relationship is specified

international spillover and rebound effects from increased energy efficiency in germany the pollution energy leakage literature raises the concern that policies implemented in one country such as a carbon tax or tight energy restrictions might simply result in the reallocation of energy use to other countries this paper addresses these concerns in the context of policies to increase energy efficiency rather than direct action to reduce energy use using a global cge simulation model we extend the analyses of economy wide rebound from the national focus of previous studies to incorporate international spill over effects from trade in goods and services our focus is to investigate whether these effects have the potential to increase or reduce the overall global rebound of local energy efficiency improvements in the case we consider increased energy efficiency in german production generates changes in comparative advantage that produce negative leakage effects thereby actually rendering global rebound less than national rebound

canadian manufacturing u s r d spillovers and communication infrastructure canada is highly integrated with the u s economy this north south link coupled with its east west dimension also renders canadian production dependent on communication infrastructure we investigate the influence of research and development r d spillovers from u s manufacturing and canadian communication infrastructure on canadian manufacturing canadian production becomes relatively more r d intensive from communication spillovers however manufacturers substitute knowledge from u s spillovers for domestic r d u s spillovers cause production to become more plant and equipment intensive spillovers also enhance productivity communication infrastructure accounted for 8 5 of the growth with the major source emanating from u s spillovers they contributed 76 of the gains

bending the learning curve abstract the aim of this paper is to improve the application of the learning curve a popular tool used for forecasting future costs of renewable technologies in integrated assessment models iams first we formally discuss under what assumptions the traditional ols estimates of the learning curve can deliver meaningful predictions in iams we argue that the most problematic of them are the absence of any effect of technology cost on its demand reverse causality and the ability of iams to predict all determinants of cumulative capacity next we show that these assumptions can be relaxed by modifying the traditional econometric method used to estimate the learning curve the new estimation approach presented in this paper is robust to the two problems identified but preserves the reduced form character of the learning curve finally we provide new estimates of learning curves for wind turbines and pv technologies which are tailored for use in iams our results suggest that the learning rate should be revised upward for solar pv our estimate of learning rate for wind technology is almost the same as the traditional ols estimates

oligopolistic competition it use for product differentiation and the productivity paradox abstract empirical studies suggest that the huge investment in information technologies it of the past two decades has led to no significant increase in productivity this phenomenon is known as the productivity paradox it has been argued that the paradox might result from oligopolistic competition because of strategic interaction each individual firm might find it profitable to invest in cost reducing it but total investment might then be excessive from the industry s point of view i confirm this view and strengthen it by allowing it investment to be also devoted to product differentiation which makes the productivity paradox more likely the emergence of web based electronic commerce provides an illustration of the forces identified in the model

testing explanations of strategic voting in legislatures a reexamination of the compromise of 1790 a difficult yet prevalent problem in legislative politics is how to assess explanations when observable actions may not represent true and unobserved legislator preferences we present a method for analyzing the validity of theoretical historical accounts that unifies theory history and measurement we argue that approaches to testing accounts of legislative behavior which are theoretically and historically agnostic are not always best and present an approach which 1 forms an explicit explanation of behavior here a simple dynamic voting game that yields estimable parameter constraints and 2 tests these constraints using a customized empirical model that is as consistent as possible with the explanation we demonstrate the method using legislative voting data from the first congress 1789 1791 using the idea of sophisticated equivalents from voting theory we subject the traditional account of the compromise of 1790 to a statistical test and find that there is reason to doubt the claim that legislators of the time believed the specified log roll was taking place the results suggest that the capital location and assumption issues were resolved independently

good and bad growth the human development reports abstract the 1996 human development report undp 1996 is about economic growth and human development in keeping with past reports in the series it emphasizes the diversity of country performance in improving human development indicators at given rates of growth this article reviews what the human development reports have said on this topic looking at how well the main messages have been supported by data and analysis and how compelling they are as a basis for public action

modelling technical change in italian agriculture a latent variable approach this paper presents an alternative approach to the measurement of technical change it is based on the latent variable level of technology that enters explicitly the input demand system and on a hypothesis about the innovation generating process by adding measurement error equations the behavioral system can be viewed as a multiple indicators multiple causes mimic model the parameter estimates are obtained with a maximum likelihood estimator which involves the implicit covariance matrix the analysis refers to italian agriculture and the results provide some evidence on the nature and level of technical change during the years 1961 1991

human development in poor countries on the role of private incomes and public services development is often taken to mean rising incomes discussions of the goals of development now often emphasize the reduction of poverty rather than raising average incomes per se the role of social services particularly basic health and education has also received greater emphasis in the 1980s viewed mainly as instruments for raising the incomes of the poor but in all these approaches income growth of one sort or another is what development is all about a rather different view of the meaning of development has recently found expression in the 1990 human development report hrd produced by the united nations development programme a conceptual underpinning for this approach can be found in the work of amartya sen the essence of this view is that human development what people can actually do and be is the overriding purpose of economic development underdevelopment is viewed as the lack of certain basic capabilities rather than lack of income per se we do not aim here to advocate one of these approaches over the other but rather to explore their implications for development policy for instance what does the human development approach imply about the role of economic growth and in particular about reducing income poverty should development priorities shift toward the provision of public services in poor countries even if such a shift is at the expense of income growth

the political economy of the fair labor standards act of 1938 this paper examines the congressional passage of the american minimum wage law the fair labor standards act of 1938 voting on the act is modeled as a function of the concentration of the constituencies for minimum wage legislation north south differentials and legislator ideology it is shown that the house radically altered the final content of the bill abandoning a proposed wages and hours board with discretionary powers to determine minimum wages in favor of a flat rate following the objections of several interest groups north south divisions over the bill had little influence over congressional voting and the influence of constituent groups increased relative to legislators ideology as the bill became an important election issue

swedish business research productivity sweden experienced an increase in the ratio of granted patents to research and development spending r d between 1989 and 1998 a period when r d spending grew rapidly the ratio of patents granted to r d spending research productivity increased by 40 over the period and the ratio of quality adjusted patents to r d exhibited an even more impressive increase of 60 sectors with especially high research productivity and quality adjusted research productivity include low and medium technology manufacturing chemicals and transportation however the growth in quality adjusted research productivity was primarily generated by the high tech pharmaceuticals and electronics industries the service based sectors experienced a significant increase in r d spending over the period but the research productivity decreased less

electoral and financial effects of changes in committee power the gramm rudman hollings budget reform the tax reform act of 1986 and the money committees in the house most rational choice theories of legislatures locate the source of committee power in the restrictive procedural rules that enforce committee jurisdictions however there is no empirical support for this claim further there is little evidence for the natural implication that membership on more powerful committees confers electoral benefits i address these puzzles by exploiting the occurrence of major budget and tax reforms in the mid eighties these reforms provide a natural experiment for measuring the electoral and financial consequences of changes in committee power i show that the procedural rule changes instituted by the gramm rudman hollings budget reform caused an increase in campaign contributions to members of the budget committee and led to a reduction in the vote share of members of the appropriations committee this heretofore unrecognized effect of the gramm rudman hollings budget reform on the welfare of members of the house rivals that of a more widely recognized policy shock th

technical efficiency and u s manufacturing productivity growth this paper establishes that new inputs increase technical efficiency levels for u s manufacturing over the period 1950 1998 intermediate inputs exhibited higher rates of efficiency growth than labor and capital efficiency adjusted productivity growth annually averaged 0 4 percentage points above measured growth the gap between efficiency adjusted and measured productivity growth arises from aggregating inputs using observed and not efficiency adjusted cost share weights in the calculation of measured growth specifically the decline in efficiency adjusted material cost shares compared to the measured shares coupled with the comparatively high material input growth rate was the main source of the productivity gap

productivity technology and economic growth what is the relationship the relationship between productivity technology and economic growth has been debated extensively in the endogenous growth growth accounting new economy and policy literature this paper briefly surveys the literature on total factor productivity tfp calculations the various techniques and problems associated with it we argue that tfp is not a measure of technological change and only under ideal conditions does it measure the supernormal profits associated with technological change the critical driving force of economic growth is not the super normal profits that technological change generates but rather the continuous creation of opportunities for further technological development six illustrations of when tfp fails to correctly measure these super normal profits are provided a version carlaw and lipsey s 2003b model of endogenous general purpose technology driven growth is then utilized to make some progress toward answering prescott s 1998 call for a theory of tfp the model is used to simulate artificial data and connect theoretical assumptions of returns to scale and resource costs to the conditions under which tfp miss measures the actual growth of technological knowledge

is rising rts a figment of poor data abstract while using detailed firm level data from the private business sector this study identifies two empirical puzzles i returns to scale rts parameter estimates rise at higher levels of data aggregation and ii estimates from the firm level suggest decreasing returns to scale the analysis shows that although consistent with rising estimates neither entry exit nor the basu fernald returns to scale in u s production estimates and implications journal of political economy 105 249 283 aggregation bias effect drives this result rather rising and too low rts estimates seem to reflect a mixture of random errors in factor inputs at the firm level it turns out in fact that a 7 5 10 percent error in labor hours worked can explain both puzzles

r d productivity and the spillover effects of high tech industry on the traditional manufacturing sector the case of taiwan this study sets out to estimate the impact of r d on productivity within the private sector with further analysis of the different impacts of r d within high tech and traditional manufacturing firms we also attempt to examine the spillover effects from r d investment in the high tech sector on productivity growth within the traditional industries using a sample of 136 large manufacturing firms during the period 1994 2000 we develop an extended version of the cobb douglas production function model and our findings suggest that taiwan s r d investment had a significant impact on firm productivity growth with output elasticity standing at around 0 18 when the sample is divided into high tech and traditional firms the r d output elasticity in high tech firms is significantly greater than that found in traditional firms in addition the average rate of return in high tech firms is much greater than that estimated for other industries besides our empirical results show that although significant the impact of r d investment from the high tech sector on the productivity growth of traditional firms is rather limited

poverty human development and growth an emerging consensus this paper considers several issues relevant to the debate on the extent to which poverty or development progress in general should be measured by income or by a broader set of objectives issues covered here are practical implications of the two approaches for poverty reduction efforts the impact of growth on basic social indicators and how national achievement on social indicators is best measured sri lanka and pakistan countries often cited in this debate are used as examples

carbon dioxide emissions and international trade at the turn of the millennium we present a new dataset of geographical production final embodied production and consumption based carbon dioxide emission inventories covering 78 regions and 55 sectors from 1997 to 2011 we extend previous work both in terms of time span and in bridging from geographical to embodied production and ultimately to consumption we analyse the recent evolution of emissions the development of carbon efficiency of the global economy and the role of international trade as the distribution of responsibility for emissions across countries is key to the adoption and implementation of international environmental agreements and regulations the final production and consumption based inventories developed here provide a valuable extension to more traditional geographical production based criteria

performance in living standards abstract our ultimate objective is to enhance the standard of living of our societies but the standard of living has different meanings for different people a thorough investigation of the concept of the standard of living has been made only recently by sen who defines it in terms of functioning and capabilities functioning is an achievement whereas capability is the ability to achieve the main objective of the present paper is to compare achievements levels and improvement changes in the standard of living across countries using an axiomatic approach an achievement index is derived which accomodates the view that a further increase in the standard of living of a country when it is already at a higher level signifies an achievement greater than that of another with an equal increase but from a lower base the paper also tests for the statistical relationship between indicators of the countries standards of living so derived in their capita gdp the question posed is whether the aggregate income which provides people with the means to achieve a better life can be used as proxy measure of the standard living and extent to which the country s improvement in the standard of living can be explained by the levels and changes in the per capita income the analysis presented in the paper is based on the data from 80 developing countries

public agricultural r d design and technological spill ins a dynamic model the paper presents a dynamic model for the analysis of the national agricultural research systems narss strategy in a context of increasing globalisation both intersectoral and international technology spill ins may greatly affect the nars design and this paper proposes an analytical framework for its study when major spill ins are present these spill ins are calculated by applying the yale technology concordance ytc methodology a var vec model is then specified to detect empirically given the calculated spill ins what nars design prevails in a dynamic framework the model is estimated for the italian agriculture data and provides evidence of close dependency on external r d sources

the transatlantic productivity gap a survey of the main causes abstract during the last 2 decades europe s economy experienced a productivity slowdown whereas the united states us economy exhibited a marked acceleration the result is that since the early 1990s the relative productivity levels between the two regions have continuously diverged leading to a transatlantic productivity gap much of the explanation for this is the strong performance of the us in the so called new economy or knowledge economy and in particular the underinvestment in r d and as a result productivity and innovation has been at the forefront in the european policy agenda however various explanations for the us european union transatlantic productivity gap suggest that the picture is rather more complex than simply the effects on or the result of particular technology driven sectors

stock returns and volatility most asset pricing models postulate a positive relationship between a stock portfolio s expected returns and risk which is often modeled by the variance of the asset price this paper uses garch in mean models to examine the relationship between mean returns on a stock portfolio and its conditional variance or standard deviation after estimating a variety of models from daily and monthly portfolio return data we conclude that any relationship between mean returns and own variance or standard deviation is weak the results suggest that investors consider some other risk measure to be more important than the variance of portfolio returns

ideology economic interests and congressional roll call voting partisan instability and bank of the united states legislation 1811 1816 we introduce a wrinkle into the study of congressional roll call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in american history the era of good feelings during deviations from normal periods of two party rule the dominant model of voting behavior the ideological model loses precision in correctly classifying individual votes we contend that a pooled voting model comprised of both ideological and economic variables performs better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods when party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions we believe the electoral connection is especially important and thus economic based constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice to explore this belief we focus on a particularly contentious issue the rechartering of the bank of the united states bus which was dealt with before and after a partisan decomposition occurred in the house using measures developed by poole and rosenthal 1985 1997 we find that the vote on the first bus in 1811 during a stable partisan period is organized along ideological lines by 1816 the two party system collapsed and we do not find the vote on the second bus to exhibit much ideological structure conversely we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the second bus quite well providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological classification