The use of solar energy for cooking in developing countries

Solar cooking has received considerable attention recently as an alternative to cooking with woodfuel. This paper determines the effective solar collection area required, and examines the different design features to optimize the available heat from a small collection area. A quasi-parabola was developed and tested alongside two other prototypes. The locally-made cooker was preferred by Sudanese women for its speed of cooking. Solar cooking was seen to have potential as a complementary means of cooking, especially for light foods.     

好企业登记簿

到目前为止,公司社会责任的焦点主要是落在大企业身上。但是,为了帮助中小企业应对因为政府要求所有企业报告其业务情况,而产生的不断增加的压力,澳大利亚政府已经启动了一个项目——"负责任的企业行为项目"。在试行一年之后,该项目目前正在进行更广泛的推广。     

Appropriate household technology: charcoal stoves

Desertification and the general shortage of fuelwood for cooking in many developing countries has prompted research in improving the efficiency of traditional stoves. Laboratory developments identified significant stove modifications which resulted in three improved stoves being field-tested among a small sample of Sudanese women Responses were favourable with women claiming to save about one third of their daily fuel needs, but their perception of ‘economy’ was unclear. A stove is proposed for further quantitative testing.     

Does Auctioning of Entry Licences Induce Collusion? An Experimental Study

We use experiments to examine whether the auctioning of entry rights affects the behaviour of market entrants. Standard economic arguments suggest that the licence fee paid at the auction will not affect pricing since it constitutes a sunk cost. This argument is not uncontested though, and this paper puts it to an experimental test. Our results indicate that an auction of entry licences has a significant positive effect on average prices in oligopoly but not in monopoly. These results are consistent with the conjecture that entry fees induce players to take more risk in pursuit of higher expected profits. In oligopoly, entry fees increase the probability that the market entrants coordinate on a collusive price path. In monopoly, taking more risk does not make sense since average prices are already close to the profit-maximizing price.     

IS CORPORATE R&D INVESTMENT IN HIGH‐TECH SECTORS MORE EFFECTIVE?

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro‐longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labor productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance, and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low‐tech to the medium‐ and high‐tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high‐tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low‐tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low‐tech sectors should support overall capital formation.     

Cooperation in Experimental Games of Strategic Complements and Substitutes

We conduct a laboratory experiment aimed at examining whether strategic substitutability and strategic complementarity have an impact on the tendency to cooperate in finitely repeated two-player games with a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. We find that there is significantly more cooperation when actions exhibit strategic complementarities than in the case of strategic substitutes. The difference is to some extent driven by a difference in the speed with which some pairs reach stable full cooperation, but mainly by differences in choices of pairs that do not succeed in reaching full cooperation.