The Competitiveness of UK Manufacturing: Performance and Prospects

The competitiveness of UK manufacturing and its future prospects are examined in terms of productivity, the performance of high technology industries and the relationship between science and technology. Die main findings are that concentrating on productivity performance can be misleading and attention should also be paid to the structural aspects of competitiveness, especially the relationship between the science base arid industrial technology. On this basis we conclude that if the UK is to realise fully the competitive potential of technological change, differences in these structural aspects of competitiveness need to be addressed.     

THE EMERGENCE OF COPYING TECHNOLOGIES: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

The past few decades have seen dramatic advancements in the technology of copying and the diffusion of copying technology to the general public. This paper surveys some of the recent academic literature dealing with this issue. We focus on (i) the effect of varying the extent of property rights enforcement by the government, and (ii) possible responses by producers of originals to consumers' ability to produce copies. The traditional view is that as the government increases property rights enforcement, there is a decrease in the social welfare loss due to underproduction and an increase in the social welfare loss due to under-utilization. In the first half of the paper, we show how the analyses contained in a number of recent studies throw doubt on this traditional viewpoint. In particular, varying the extent of property rights enforcement has effects that the traditional analysis ignores. As a result, the social welfare losses mentioned above can move in ways not recognized previously. The conclusion is that, contrary to what is sometimes suggested, choosing an optimal level of property rights enforcement by the government should not be viewed as a simple trade-off between these two social welfare losses. In the second half of the paper, we discuss possible market responses to consumers' ability to produce copies. Among other responses, we consider the role of price discrimination and complementary products when copying is possible.     

THE EFFECTS OF VERTICAL MARKETS ON TRADE POLICY REFORM

Typically, analysis of trade liberalization ignores the impactthat intermediate stages in the production and distributionsystem may have on the pass-through of changes in tariffs tofinal goods' prices. Using a model of a multi-stage system,this paper shows that both the number of vertical stages andthe degree of imperfect competition at any specific stage canaffect the degree of tariff pass-through. Simulation of themodel with respect to recent changes in the European Union bananaregime suggests that ignoring vertical market structure is likelyto over-estimate the benefits to consumers of trade liberalization.     

Tax Law Improvement in Australia and the UK: The Need for a Strategy for Simplification

In both Australia and the UK, programmes are under way to simplify tax legislation by rewriting it. This paper demonstrates that tax simplification is a complicated concept and concludes that sustainable improvement is unlikely to be achieved if reform is limited only to linguistic changes. Tax law is complicated because there are powerful pressures that tend to increase the complexity of modern tax systems and these should also be considered in any simplification programme. In addition, tax simplification may be promoted by the greater use of purposive legislation — that is, legislation drafted in terms of general principles rather than much more comprehensive legislation designed to deal with every likely possibility. The paper examines the progress of the Australian Tax Law Improvement Project and argues that what is needed is a strategy for tax simplification that is incorporated into the process of generating tax policy itself. JEL classification: H20.     

Bond Pricing with a Time‐Varying Price of Risk in an Estimated Medium‐Scale Bayesian DSGE Model

New Keynesian model in which households have Epstein–Zin preferences with time‐varying risk aversion and the central bank has a time‐varying inflation target can match the dynamics of nominal bond prices in the U.S. economy well. The model generates a large steady‐state term spread and its fitting errors for bond yields are comparable to those obtained from a nonstructural three‐factor model, and one‐third smaller than in models with a constant inflation target or risk aversion. Including data on interest rates has large effects on variance decompositions, making investment technology shocks much less important than found in other recent papers.     

A Conceptual Stress‐Coping Model of Factors Influencing Marketplace Engagement of Visually Impaired Consumers

Visually impaired consumers often suffer one of the worst marketplace stresses when processing product information. Despite there being around 314 million blind or visually impaired people worldwide, today's marketplace does not yet adequately address these stresses. This study develops and tests a theoretical model of how visually impaired consumers cope in marketplace engagement and discusses how companies and policymakers can help to increase marketplace engagement.