China's Exchange Rate and International Adjustment in Wages, Prices and Interest Rates: Japan Deja Vu?

China's fixed its exchange rate at 8.28 yuan to the dollar from1994 to July 2005, and has only allowed for a small appreciationsince then. China's productivity growth has been very high relativeto most other countries: its trade surplus has been rising andit continues to accumulate large dollar exchange reserves. Manyobservers, including high officials in the US government, takethis as per se evidence that the renminbi is undervalued. Tobalance China's international competitiveness and reduce itstrade surplus, they want the renminbi to appreciate much more.This common presumption of renminbi undervaluation is wrong,and its appreciation need not reduce China's trade surplus butwould cause serious deflation in China. To show this, we considerinternational adjustment between China and the US from bothan asset market and a labor market perspective, and comparethis to Japan's unsuccessful appreciation of the yen from 1971to 1995. During a time of economic catch-up and rapid financialtransformation, fixing the exchange rate is the preferred wayof anchoring the domestic price level. (JEL codes: F15, F31,F33)     

Economics of soft innovation: a review article

This article identifies and articulates the foundations of the theoretical approach of the new book ‘Soft innovation: Economics, product aesthetics and the creative industries’ by Professor Paul Stoneman. This book is likely to open a new research area within the economics of innovation. The source of economic growth and prosperity is technological change and the economics of innovation to date has mainly focused on technological approaches to innovation. However, the development of the technological base of product and process can explain only a part of economic growth as soft innovation represents a relevant additional source of economic development that has received little attention so far. The source of a unified economic approach for soft innovation relies on Lancaster's theory of consumer behaviour coupled with the variety approach, innovation in services and the economics of knowledge. It appears as though industry structures favouring the successive emergence of new variants are characterised by soft innovations.     

国家高新区对外贸易、高新技术企业占比影响创新效率的实证研究

加快推进国家高新区发展，是提高创新竞争力、实现经济高质量发展的重要途径。运用超效率DEA模型测算2013-2017年国家高新区创新效率，利用面板数据模型考察对外贸易、高新技术企业发展与创新效率的相关关系及地区差异。研究表明：我国东部地区国家高新区创新效率相对较高，中部地区、西部地区、东北地区高新区创新效率差异明显；国家高新区对外贸易、高新技术企业占比对高新区创新效率提升具有显著正向促进作用，且存在显著正向时滞效应；国家高新区对外贸易、高新技术企业占比对国家高新区创新效率的影响存在地区差异。新时代全面提升国家高新区创新效率，应以高新技术企业为主体，以进一步扩大开放为路径，注重开放贸易、高新技术企业发展相关政策的阶段性与针对性调整。     

Knowledge investments, business R&D and innovativeness of countries: A qualitative meta-analytic comparison

The relationship between knowledge investments, innovation and competitiveness is an important topic in both academic research and economic policy and has been studied extensively over the past decades. Nowadays, investments in private and public R&D are believed to make up the heart of a modern knowledge economy. The present paper adopts an evolutionary economics perspective and investigates whether, in addition to private R&D activities, also institutional support systems and policy interventions play a role in inducing innovation initiatives and creating impacts on the performance and competitiveness of industries. We aim to find support for the hypothesis that the competitiveness of industries in the international arena is sustained by the dynamic interaction between national, regional and sectoral innovation systems. This may provide stakeholders with a better understanding of the context in which they operate. Since according to the evolutionary metaphor, the growth of an innovation system follows complex dynamics that cannot simply be analysed within a static quantitative equilibrium framework, we use here an alternative approach based on qualitative pattern recognition analysis originating from artificial intelligence analysis. Besides R&D expenditures, human capital expenditures are regarded as the major input in the knowledge creation process in our analytical framework. To this end, in our paper a qualitative causal model that maps out conditional relations between key factors in national innovation systems will be described. The focus of our investigation is on systematic patterns in the competitiveness of the EU Member States, using statistical information on innovation input and output data from the European Innovation Scoreboard. In our analysis we find support for the hypothesis that there are indeed significant interactions between distinct institutional levels, which may provide guidance to the strategic orientation of nations and the European Union in terms of the emphasis on competitiveness vis-à-vis cohesion.     

新疆对外贸易竞争力研究

以竞争力理论为基础,应用定性和定量相结合的方法,通过对新疆贸易现状的分析和国际、国内的比较,认为在经济全球化下如何竞争已成为世界各国（包括地区）政府、国际组织和理论学术界关注的焦点之一。从理论和实际的结合上研究在世界经济结构调整下的国际竞争力与提升新疆贸易竞争力问题,对于新疆深化改革、扩大开放,以发展为主体、结构调整为主线、体制创新和科技创新为动力,采取渐进式的发展模式提升地区的贸易竞争力,使新疆这一边疆地区与全国一同登上世界经济舞台,积极参与国际竞争,到21世纪中叶达到中等发达国家贸易水平,具有重要的现实意义。同时提出了新疆贸易竞争力提升的对策措施和政策建议。     

我国国际贸易波动的影响因素——基于因子分析的研究

文章通过因子分析方法研究了我国国际贸易波动的因素,研究表明贸易波动的主要因子是供给冲击、需求冲击、贸易竞争力、体制与政策因素和世界经济周期波动,并通过对四个不同时期的考察发现各个因素在不同时期其重要性不同.文章最后指出:转变经济增长方式及外贸增长方式,提高企业经营业绩是提高我国贸易竞争力,减少国际贸易波动不利影响的必然选择.     

Global inequality and international trade

The paper analyses the effect of widespread trade liberalisationon global income inequality. The analysis of the trend in globalinequality during 1981–97, presented in the first partof the paper, shows that the apparent growth of income inequalityamong countries conceals a process of convergence. Some developingcountries achieved significantly faster economic growth thanthe advanced industrialised countries and, though small in number,they actually account for a majority of the population of thedeveloping world. Thus international inequality (i.e., the inequalityof distribution of per capita incomes among the world's population)in fact declined even though the inter-country income inequalityincreased. The analysis in the second part of the paper shows(i) that while improved trade performance did have a stimulatingeffect on growth performance of countries, trade liberalisationhad extremely varied effects on trade performance across countries,and (ii) that the distribution of benefits and costs of tradeliberalisation across countries has been such as to reduce internationalinequality without affecting inter-country inequality.     

Innovation and the competitiveness of industries: Comparing the mainstream and the evolutionary approaches

The study of the relationships between innovation and the competitiveness of industries is an important topic for both, academic research and economic policy. The huge economics literature flourished in the last couple of decades on the subject broadly falls into two distinct research traditions, namely the mainstream R&D spillovers approach and the evolutionary economics view. Both traditions agree on the important role played by innovation and the inter-sectoral diffusion of advanced knowledge for the competitive performance of industrial sectors. Behind this general agreement, however, the two approaches are radically different. This paper shows that, at a deeper level of analysis, the mainstream and evolutionary views do indeed differ with respect to their theoretical foundations, empirical research and policy implications. In a nutshell, while the mainstream R&D spillover approach is inspired by a traditional view of economic policy based on a market-oriented approach, the evolutionary view is on the contrary consistent with the idea that institutional arrangements and policy interventions do indeed play a fundamental role for shaping innovation patterns and their impacts on the competitiveness of industries.     

Employment Effects of Product and Process Innovation in Europe

This paper develops a model of the employment impact of innovation considering, on the one hand, the interactions with demand and labour costs and, on the other, the variety of patterns of technological change. Different technological strategies are considered. First, a search for technological competitiveness is based on product innovation and productivity rooted in quality advantages; second a strategy of active price competitiveness has productivity growth rooted in process innovation-based restructuring; third a passive price competitiveness strategy is pursued by non-innovators relying on cost-cutting. The new European innovation database drawn from the Community Innovation Survey 1994-96, merged with structural and macroeconomic data 1994-99 drawn from the OECD are analysed at a sectoral level across eight European countries: Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, the UK, and Sweden. The innovation survey data provide information on several quantitative and qualitative aspects of firms' innovative activities. A comparison of the results from the first (1990-92) and second (1994-96) Community innovation survey data is also carried out. The results show that, in the last decade, technological change has had a major impact on employment in manufacturing industry, associated with the dominance of an active price competitiveness strategy.     

基于经济交叉学科的知识溢出研究

溢出最早属于经济学范畴的问题,经济学从古典到现代的漫长发展历程中,学者们日渐关注与经济发展相关的内生变量。技术的内生性首先被肯定,知识溢出凸显的重要作用也成为不争的事实,对此方面的研究成果亦丰富起来,呈现出多角度、百花齐放的研究态势。已有研究主要对经济理论、经济地理理论、创新理论、区域经济理论、贸易理论诸多领域给予了补充,促进了交叉学科的发展,也更为科学和全面地解释了知识溢出的经济学内涵。     

Isolation and technological innovation

Despite its importance as a formative influence in evolutionary biology, the notion of isolation has received relatively little attention in evolutionary economics and its application to technological innovation. This paper makes the case that isolation, in many guises, is a pervasive and permanent feature of the economic landscape and that its implications for technological innovation deserve further analysis. Isolation and potential implications for innovation are discussed in the early part of the paper and case studies of two military innovations are then used to illustrate the value of explicitly recognising various forms of isolation in explaining observed aspects of innovation process and outcomes.     

New human resource management practices, complementarities and the impact on innovation performance

In this paper, we take our theoretical point of departure inrecent work in organisational economics on systems of humanresource management (HRM) practices. We develop the argumentthat just as complementarities between new HRM practices influencefinancial performance positively, there are theoretical reasonsfor expecting them also to influence innovation performancepositively. We examine this overall hypothesis by estimatingan empirical model of innovation performance, using data froma Danish survey of 1,900 business firms. Using principal componentanalysis, we identify two HRM systems which are conducive toinnovation. In the first one, seven of our nine HRM variablesmatter (almost) equally for the ability to innovate. The secondsystem is dominated by firm-internal and firm-external training.Of the total of nine sectors that we consider, we find thatthe four manufacturing sectors correlate with the first system.Firms belonging to wholesale trade and to the ICT intensiveservice sectors tend to be associated with the second system.     

企业竞争力研究的三个视角

随着经济的全球化企业间的竞争日趋激烈,企业竞争力问题日益受到理论界的关注,逐渐发展成为一门学科。作为一门交叉学科,企业竞争力主要有三个研究视角:企业理论、产业经济学理论和管理学理论。企业理论主要从企业内部寻找竞争优势的源泉,产业经济学则从企业外部寻找竞争优势的来源,而管理学是在操作层面上研究提高企业竞争力的途径。     

我国加工贸易对经济增长影响的实证研究

利用我国1989～2009年国内生产总值和加工贸易进出口额,采用实证方法检验了加工贸易对我国经济增长的影响,发现加工贸易净出口促进经济增长,且净出口是GDP增长的格兰杰原因。     

From groundnuts to globalization: A structural estimate of trade and growth

Starting with Romer (1987) and Rivera-Batiz-Romer (1991) economists have been able to model how trade enhances growth through the creation and import of new varieties. In this framework, international trade increases economic output through two channels. First, trade raises productivity levels because producers gain access to new imported varieties. Second, increases in the number of varieties drives down the cost of innovation and results in ever more variety creation. Using highly disaggregate trade data, e.g. Gabon’ s imports of Gambian groundnuts, we structurally estimate the impact that new imports have had in approximately 4000 markets per country. We then move from groundnuts to globalization by building an exact TFP index that aggregates these micro gains to obtain an estimate of trade on productivity growth for each country. We find that in the typical country in the world, new imported varieties account for 10–25% of its productivity growth. However, when we structurally estimate the long-run impacts of these productivity growth effects, we find that import variety growth between 1994 and 2003 raised world permanent income by 17% .     

Trade-related spillovers and industrial competitiveness: Exploring the linkages for OECD countries

This study examines how trade-related spillovers impact the OECD countries' industrial competitiveness; with an emphasis on China's innovative efforts and reintegration into the global economy. In comparison with the major R&D countries, benefits attributable to spillovers are found to be more sizable for the rest of the OECD countries.This result is consistent with the observed convergence of competitiveness between the two groups of countries during 1990–2009.Moreover, our empirical results suggest China's trade-related spillovers can produce both positive and negative effects on OECD countries' industrial competitiveness. The persistence of the spillover effects is found even after controlling for trade openness creating possible spurious association. Finally, our finding TFP growth as the competitiveness driver stresses the consequential role of STI (science, technology, and innovation) policies in supporting sustainable and balanced growth.