Seasonality and stochastic trends in German consumption and income, 1960.1–1987.4

The quarterly time series of German consumption and income are analyzed with respect to seasonality and stochastic trends. It emerges that both variables can be appropriately described by a periodically integrated autoregression. An implication is that the stochastic trend and the seasonal fluctuations are not independent for each of the univariate series. In order to test for cointegration across the two series, we propose several methods which take account of the relationship between seasons and trends in the univariate series. Some of these methods boil down to extracting the stochastic trend from the univariate series in a first step and to relating these trends using cointegration techniques in a second step. Another method is an extension of the Johansen cointegration testing approach to periodic vector autoregressions. Monte Carlo simulations are used to evaluate the empirical performance of the various methods. The main empirical result is that only in the first quarter there seems to be cointegration between German consumption and income.     

Modeling the Impact of Agricultural Growth and Government Policy on Income Distribution in India

This article uses a limited general equilibrium model to investigatethe growth and equity effects of a variety of economic and technicalchanges and selected agricultural policies in India. It exploreshow changes in food prices, rural wages, and farm profits associatedwith the Green Revolution period affected income distributionbetween net buyers and sellers of food. The model shows thatincome gains from the Green Revolution initially accrued tothe wealthier rural groups but that after 1972–73 theywere transferred to urban consumers and that by 1980–81the per capita incomes of poor and wealthier rural groups alikewere barely above their respective 1960–61 levels. Themodel is also used in counterfactual analysis of the impactof changes in technological, demographic, investment, taxation,and income redistribution variables. Its findings indicate theimportance of trade policies for the nature of the equity outcomesfrom agricultural growth and suggest that a reduction in populationgrowth and an increase in nonagricultural employment and incomeare required to convert agricultural growth into reduced ruralpoverty.     

Consequences of Imitation by Poor Countries on International Wage Inequalities and Global Growth

The paper presents an endogenous growth model where the level of international transaction costs may be decisive for whether the relatively poor East specializes in agriculture production, imitates goods from the rich West, or makes its own innovations. The author shows that the East produces only agricultural goods if transaction costs are high, while innovation is profitable when transaction costs are low. In between there are a range of transaction costs where the East imitates, possibly resulting in a lower global growth rate and a larger international wage gap than if imitation were not possible.     

Swedish futures studies in transition

In 1984 the Swedish government appointed a parliamentary committee to examine the future of the Swedish Secretariat for Futures Studies. This article describes the intellectual and institutional background against which the Secretariat was set up and how it evolved in the 1970s and early 1980s. It finally presents the committee's recommendations and the new organization for futures studies emerging out of its proposal.     

A note on additive utility and bargaining

Necessary and sufficient conditions are given under which a decision maker's von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function on the Cartesian product of two prospect spaces can be expressed as a sum of coordinate utility functions, assuming that all preferences are given. A main motivation for this result is an application in axiomatic bargaining theory.     

EU Treaty Revision and Consumer Protection

In its original version, this paper was delivered by the authors to the Bureau Europeen des Unions des Consommateurs in April 2004 in order to provide the basis for that bodys submissions to the intergovernmental conference then charged with the task agreeing a new constitutional Treaty for the European Union. The aim: to improve the attention paid to the consumer interest in the Treaty. Ultimately the text agreed by the Heads of State and government of the Member States of the EU in June 2004 largely adopted the existing consumer-related acquis communautaire – in fact in most areas of substantive EU policy-making, not merely consumer policy, textual continuity is the hallmark of the newly agreed text. This paper has been revised to provide a commentary on the consumer-related provisions that were agreed in June 2004, in order both to show chances that have been missed (but may be revived should the ratification process founder) and to reveal areas of current debate that remain topical and controversial because of the preference simply to absorb existing provisions, lightly amended or left wholly unamended, into the constitutional Treaty agreed by the Heads of State and government of the Member States of the EU in June 2004.