Regional job-turnover and industrial policy. a note on a potential time pattern of regional industrial policies and their job effects - the case of the german city-state of bremen

Many regions have experienced long-run economic fluctuations generated by the life cycles of their dominant industrial clusters. During the downswings in the 1970s and 1980s, proactive structural policies were typically launched in German regions to combat job losses in their core clusters and to create new jobs in new industries. With respect to the German State of Bremen, this paper provides empirical evidence of: (1) a long-run regional downswing; (2) the potential job effects of proactive regional industrial policy programmes in terms of increasing regional employment, by safeguarding jobs in the regional core industries and creating new jobs in new growth industries; and (3) a time pattern in the job effects, which are related to the different generations of programmes.     

Delaying integration of immigrant labor for the purpose of taxation

Delayed integration (DI) is a rule for taxing migrants. It requires that immigrants be taxed in the host country only after some period of transition. Conversely, emigrants are released from the obligation to pay taxes only after a certain period. DI is an alternative to the Employment Principle and the Home-Country Principle. The former governs the international taxation of labor. The latter is a close substitute for the Nationality Principle, on which US tax law is based. The paper studies DI in a setting which allows one to trade off the efficiency costs of distortionary taxation and of wasteful government.     

Resource allocation and public commodities

This paper characterizes Pareto efficient allocations by means of prices within a public-goods economy. The underlying notion of public commodities is a generalization covering private and pure public ones as extreme cases. The model uses as measure space of agents.     

An Interactive Economic Policy Approach to Manage Structural Change: The case of industry conversion in the German state of Bremen

The present paper deals with (1) the regional experience of a severe and sudden structural change sometimes faced by regions and cities which display considerable industrial specialisation, and (2) a proactive regional economic policy response: it offers a theoretical explanation of this policy and discusses the basic philosophy behind it, the agents involved, the instruments it employs and its effects. The German state (Land) of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is a port and industry centre that has not only had considerable experience of industrial decline, but also of proactive industrial policy involvement. In addition, being the centre of the defence industry in northern Germany, Bremen experienced dramatic structural change due to the disarmament process that occurred during the 1990s. Bremen's industrial defence conversion approach has been widely considered as a case for further developing network forms of regional economic policy and for a managed industrial diversification strategy. It has indeed developed as a way to manage industrial change during the last ten years. This paper will discuss (1) the basic industrial problem; (2) some background conditions needed for success; (3) the approach and instruments developed; (4) the results obtained; and (5) a theoretical consideration on the basis of the experience.