Günstige Aufkommensperspektiven — Steuererhöhungen nicht erforderlich

In May 2013, the Working Party on Tax Revenue Forecasting presented its new estimate, which is based on the federal government’s spring projection of the medium-term development of the overall economy. Tax revenues are estimated to expand from yy600 bn in 2012 to yy704.5 bn in 2017. Because the tax revenues increase at a faster pace than the nominal GDP, the tax-to-GDP ratio increases from 22.7% to 23.1%. Contrary to the diagnosis of the opposition parties in the German Bundestag, we see no structural revenue gap. In fact, public budgets will realise structural surpluses in the coming years if governments are successful in constraining expenditure growth. There are no convincing reasons to increase public revenues by increasing tax rates or launching new fees; in both cases tax burdens would increase and that would dampen economic growth. Instead, there will be budgetary leeway to reduce the fiscal drag if governments are committed to a sound consolidation policy.     

New Technologies and International Locational Choice for Research and Development Units: Evidence from Europe

This study examines the factors governing the decision to locate new research and development facilities at locations distant from company headquarters. The 20 firms surveyed are German, Swiss, Dutch, Japanese and Finnish multinationals. Development laboratories, it was found, followed the established pattern of being located away from headquarters only when distant markets attain a critical size. For research laboratories, however, the decisive factor in all cases is a desire to tap into the expertise developing in 'centres of competence' such as the American Northeast in biotechnology. This factor only operates when the new technology is otherwise unfamiliar to the investing company. This factor overrides the conventional wish to minimize the costs of internal and external communications.     

On the performance of the ordinary least squares method under an error component model

Starting from the one-dimensional results by Wang et al (1994) we consider the performance of the ordinary least squares estimator in comparison to the best linear unbiased estimator under an error component model with random effects in units and time. Upper bounds are derived for the first-order approximation to the difference between both estimators and for the spectral norm of the difference between their dispersion matrices.     

On irregular functionals of SDEs and the Euler scheme

We prove a sharp upper bound for the error $\mathbb {E}|g(X)-g(\hat{X})|^{p}We prove a sharp upper bound for the error in terms of moments of , where X and are random variables and the function g is a function of bounded variation. We apply the results to the approximation of a solution to a stochastic differential equation at time T by the Euler scheme, and show that the approximation of the payoff of the binary option has asymptotically sharp strong convergence rate 1/2. This has consequences for multilevel Monte Carlo methods. The author was supported by the Finnish Graduate School in Stochastics and Statistics, the Ellen and Artturi Nyyss?nen Foundation, and the Academy of Finland, project #110599.     

Convertibility of the rouble — Monetary integration of the Russian Federation

Russia has so far failed to achieve its goal of monetary integration into the international capital markets. Due to the deep financial and currency crisis which began in 1998, the current situation is a far more difficult one than in 1991, at the start of the transformation process. The following article examines the reasons why this situation arose and formulates alternatives to the reform approaches to date.     

Competences for green development and leapfrogging in newly industrializing countries

Competences for green development and leapfrogging in Newly Industrializing Countries are becoming increasingly urgent from a global perspective. The integration of these innovations into the development process in the rapidly growing economies requires knowledge build-up and technology cooperation. The prospect of exporting sustainability technologies can add an incentive for them to move towards sustainability technologies. These issues also affect innovations to increase material efficiency, which are receiving increasing interest among sustainability innovations. The competences for green development are analyzed with an innovation indicator approach. The general innovation capabilities are evaluated using R&D indicators and survey results about general innovation capabilities. Technological competences in the sustainability fields are a key indicator for the absorptive capacity of sustainability technologies and for the ability to export them. International patents and publications, and successes in foreign trade indicate to what extent a country is already able to participate in global technology markets. The resulting pattern shows various strengths and weaknesses of the analyzed countries. In general, the knowledge build up in material efficiency strategies is above-average in the Newly Industrializing Countries. There is a strong need for strategic positioning of the countries and for coordination of the various policy fields involved.