Deciding to export: An exploratory study of Singaporean entrepreneurs

This paper confirms a mapping between a taxonomy of entrepreneurs and what triggered Singaporeans to become exporters. The study involved interviews with 47 new exporters based in Singapore. Entrepreneurs were classified as either ‘opportunity seeking’ or ‘reactive’. Export triggers were either ‘pull’, negative ‘push’, or positive ‘push’. We find that those who were opportunity seeking at start-up were more likely to have responded to export ‘pull’ forces. It was rare indeed for a reactive founder to have been ‘pulled’ into exporting. Among this group of entrepreneurs, ‘push’ forces dominated the decision to export. The paper concludes with some implications for policy targeting and suggestions for further research.     

Modeling economic and agro-environmental dynamics of potato production systems

Crop rotation and other input management practices are of particular interest for their potential impacts on economic and agro-environmental components of potato production. Although crop yield and experimental impacts of rotations of grains, oilseed and legume crops have been published for several experimental studies in Canada there are few models related to the economic and environmental dynamics of potato production. We describe a dynamic model which integrates environmental and economic processes in potato production. The potato rotation model consists of interconnected modules of irrigation and precipitation, soil characteristics, soil erosion, soil water, phosphorus, nitrogen, soil organic matter, farming operations, crop yield and the related calculation of economic return. While not all aspects of crop production have been interlinked, including nitrogen carry-over, this model is the first step in the analysis of experimental data for irrigated potato rotations conducted in southern Manitoba.      

Contributions to Canadian economic history: The last 30 years

The cliometric revolution that transformed economic history in the US in the 1960s was soon embraced by Canadian economic historians. Many of the important issues surrounding Canadian development remained the same: the role of resources, the place of international trade, immigration, capital accumulation and interactions with Native Americans, among others. But beginning in the 1960s, and certainly over the last 30 years, economic historians of Canada have addressed them with the tools of modern economics, both theoretical and empirical. We highlight the recent work emphasizing not just the methods but also the fundamental ways our understanding of Canadian history has been changed.     

Accounting Price of an Exhaustible Resource: Response and Extensions

Wei (Environ Resour Econ 60:579–581, 2015) presents a novel derivation of the accounting price for an exhaustible resource in a non-optimal economy subject to an allocation mechanism. We show that Wei (2015) and Hamilton and Ruta (Environ Resour Econ 42:53–64, 2009) are in fact employing different and mutually exclusive allocation mechanisms for the economy, and this explains the differences between the respective accounting prices. Because accounting prices must be defined subject to the allocation mechanism for the economy, the prices derived in the two papers are equally valid within their respective allocation domains. Further analysis shows that if there is declining marginal product of factors, a ‘Hartwick investment rule’ for the model economy (set investment just equal to depletion, valued at the accounting price) will lead to declining consumption for the Wei (2015) accounting price, and increasing consumption for the Hamilton and Ruta (2009) accounting price. This result is extended to consider the accounting standards recommended in the UN SEEA (System of environmental-economic accounting 2012: central framework. United Nations, European Commission, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank, 2012), as well as accounting for environmental externalities from resource use.     

Genuine Savings Rates in Developing Countries

Augmented measures of savings and wealth in the national accountsare critical to conceptualizing and achieving sustainable development.After developing the theory of genuine savings—traditionalnet savings less the value of resource depletion and environmentaldegradation plus the value of investment in human capital—thisarticle presents empirical estimates for developing countries.These calculations account for resource depletion and carbondioxide emissions, using consistent time series data for 1970–93.The empirical evidence shows that levels of genuine savingsare negative in a wide range of countries, particularly in Sub-SaharanAfrica, and that these countries are being progressively impoverished.Increasing the coverage of natural resources and pollutantsin our calculations would reduce the estimated levels of genuinesavings overall. The use of genuine savings measures suggestsa series of policy questions that are key to sustaining development.These are also explored, specifically the extent to which monetaryand fiscal policies, exports of exhaustible resources, strongerresource policies, and pollution abatement measures boost genuinesavings rates. For policymakers, linking sustainable developmentto genuine savings rates means that there are many possibleinterventions to increase sustainability, from the macroeconomicto the purely environmental.     

Consumer and managerial goals in assortment choice and design

In many domains, consumers must deal with an increasing number of choices—spanning where, when, what, and how many items to buy; how many and which options to consider; and how best to weigh the pros and cons of these options. This paper considers how consumer and managerial goals and the ensuing tradeoffs affect the optimal design of assortments in order to help enhance our understanding of assortment choice, identify issues that merit particular attention, review some of the recent research in pertinent areas, and suggest directions for future research.     

Contraction of the coal industry and the local economy

The coal industry has contracted significantly during the 1980s. Further decline will take place in the 1990s as a result of the privatization of the electricity supply industry (ESI), the relaxation of planning regulations on opencast mining, and increasing productivity in the pits.

This article looks at the actual and anticipated impact on local economies of this decline and considers the policy implications for those local authorities most affected by the future restructuring of the energy sector.