Sources and directions of technological accumulation in France: a statistical comparison with FR Germany and the UK

Technological activities are an important determinant of national economic performance. Data on R&D and on the national origins of patenting in the USA show that, compared to those of FR Germany and the UK, French technological activities have the following characteristics: (1) a relatively high rate of growth over the past 20 years in aggregate activity; (2) concentration of technological strength in sectors dominated by state procurement and related R&D funding, rather than in “core” technologies; (3) stronger performance in fast-growing technologies in defence, electrical products and fine chemicals, than in electronics and motor vehicles; (4) a relatively stable and speialized sectoral pattern of technological strengths and weaknesses; and (5) sectoral patterns of trading strengths and weaknesses that broadly reflect those in technology. These characteristics of France's technological activities cannot be explained by their greater or lesser concentration, which is very similar to that found in both FR Germany and the UK, both in aggregate and in specific sectors. As in the other two countries, a few large firms have a major influence on national technological activities, especially in R&D-intensive sectors and automobiles. These results are on the whole consistent with the recent assessment by INSEE and CEPII of France's competitive position in international markets. However, they do show a strong Franch “niche” in technologies linked to state markets, and they do suggest certain advantages in long-term stability, rather than rapaid change, in technological priorities.     

Resource use in general anaesthesia: a comparison of practice in Germany,France and the UK

Summary

This study reports the results of a study of anaesthetic resources used before, during and after various surgical procedures performed in the United Kingdom, Germany and France. A total of 1787 patients undergoing general anaesthesia for daycase knee arthroscopy, daycase laparoscopic gynaecological procedures, inpatient major non-gynaecological abdominal surgery or inpatient knee arthroscopy in a range of hospital settings were included in the study. The objective was to compare the use of anaesthetic agents, adjunct drugs and times spent in the various stages of surgery and recovery. An audit of the incidence of emesis in the postoperative recovery room and on the hospital ward was also undertaken. Results showed that the UK had the shortest median procedure times for induction, surgery and recovery. The pattern of drug use was generally similar for the main classes of anaesthetic agents and adjunct drugs, although the use of specific drugs in each class differed from country to country. Between 7% and 10% of patients suffered from one or more episodes of emesis. Practice differences between countries were apparent and differences in resource use indicate considerable scope for institutional cost savings on anaesthesia-related activities, beyond drug acquisition costs, in both France and Germany compared with the UK.     

Video game demand in Japan: a household data analysis

Various economic studies of the video game industry have focused on intra-industry details. This article complements the approach by highlighting broader budget allocation by households. Using the ‘total households’ data of the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, this article estimates the demand model for video games. Estimation results show the effects of household income and demographic factors and prices of goods on the expenditure share of video games. These results indicate the importance of explicitly considering a households' budget allocation, or at least, including information on households.     

Private bureaucracies,organizational efficiency,and Australia's manufacturing trade structure: a comparison with Japan

This study tests the hypothesis that use of in-house information services, which are approximated by the relative size of private bureaucracies or the ‘management sector’, is a statistically significant determinant of Australia's manufacturing trade structure. Large private bureaucracies are a feature of industrialized economies. Their growth, and concomitantly huge resource use, suggest that informational and organizational efficiency have become of paramount importance for economic development. However, variables trying to capture these phenomena are neglected in mainstream trade analysis. The study is conducted for a cross-section of Australian industries and the results are compared with those obtained from a similar study for Japan. The empirical results confirm the importance of private bureaucracies as a trade determinant. Moreover, they seem to dominate some major conventional factors. In the Australian case, the new variables capture an increasingly important aspect of ‘human capital’, i.e., its potentially inefficient use due to lack of organizational innovation. Comparison with Japan indicates major structural weaknesses of Australian manufacturing which hinder the development of a revealed comparative advantage and exports. The paper also comments on the controversial debate concerning Australia's current account deficit, and on the broad implications of the study's findings for economic policy. It concludes with suggestions for further research.     

Determinants of inward investment in the UK,a panel analysis

This paper develops an inter-industry model of inward investment, using a fixed effects approach. This demonstrates that when inward investment is investigated in such a framework, previous findings, relating to the specification of measures of location advantage and ownership advantages no longer hold. This also shows that there are some industries that have attracted significant inward investment over time, and continue to do so, while others are noticeably less successful. Reasons for this, and potential policy measures are briefly discussed.     

Sectoral shocks and business cycles: a disaggregated analysis of output fluctuations in the UK

In this paper we first show that it is possible to modify linear real business cycle models to allow for disaggregate (industry-specific) factors in the generation of macroeconomic fluctuations. We then try to determine the relative importance of aggregate and sectoral shocks by doing principal components analysis on the residuals from a VAR of output growth rates in 19 UK industrial sectors. We find that a significant percentage of the innovations in sectoral output growths can be accounted for by a single unobserved component. However, since the model only sets an upper bound to the explanatory power of aggregate impulses, the importance of using sectoral data to extract additional information to bear on the analysis of economic fluctuations is confirmed by our findings.     

Industrial Exploitation of Carbon Fibre in the UK,USA and Japan

This paper describes the invention of high strength carbon fibre and its subsequent exploitation by three companies: Courtaulds in the UK, Hercules in the USA and Toray in Japan. Of these, Toray has become the most successful. Courtaulds ceased carbon fibre production in 1991, whilst Hercules sold its carbon fibre plant in 1996. Without a special relationship with a large local market (such as the US Department of Defence), success in the manufacture of an internationally traded material such as carbon fibre depends on achieving competitive quality and price. Toray's consistent investment in process technology improvements has enabled them to become the world leader in carbon fibre production. This has been achieved, despite periods of negligible profitability, because of the characteristics of the Japanese innovation system.     

Industrial Exploitation of Carbon Fibre in the UK, USA and Japan

This paper describes the invention of high strength carbon fibre and its subsequent exploitation by three companies: Courtaulds in the UK, Hercules in the USA and Toray in Japan. Of these, Toray has become the most successful. Courtaulds ceased carbon fibre production in 1991, whilst Hercules sold its carbon fibre plant in 1996. Without a special relationship with a large local market (such as the US Department of Defence), success in the manufacture of an internationally traded material such as carbon fibre depends on achieving competitive quality and price. Toray's consistent investment in process technology improvements has enabled them to become the world leader in carbon fibre production. This has been achieved, despite periods of negligible profitability, because of the characteristics of the Japanese innovation system.     

Corporation tax revenue growth in the UK: A microsimulation analysis

This paper examines the built-in flexibility properties — as measured by the elasticity of revenue with respect to profits — of the UK corporation tax system. Emphasis is placed on determining some of the major influences on the extent to which total corporation tax revenue changes when profits change over the economic cycle. A microsimulation model, CorpSim, is constructed and used to obtain numerical results. In the model, corporations use group relief, capital allowances and losses in a tax-minimising manner. The growth of aggregate corporation tax revenue in practice in the UK appears to be highly volatile in relation to the growth of profits. High volatility in revenue elasticities is found to be especially associated with economic downturns. In mild economic downturns, corporation tax revenue elasticities may rise (because tax growth falls less than profit growth), but in more severe downturns, large but temporary decreases in revenue elasticities (and even negative elasticities) can be expected.     

When economics harmonized mathematics in Japan: a history of stability analysis

This article discusses how economics was mathematized by Japanese theoretical economists with the cooperation of Japanese mathematicians before 1950. Mathematicians played the leading part in assimilating European scientific ideas and providing an internationally oriented attitude in Japan from the mid nineteenth century. They began to publish many updated textbooks in Japanese from around 1930 on. In the 1940s, Japanese mathematical economists were intensively studying the so-called stability problem, thereby mathematizing economics more rapidly than ever before. Their research activity will give us an interesting example of a process of organizing economic knowledge by introducing more mathematics into the economics literature.     

Aggregate imports and expenditure components in the UK: an empirical analysis

This paper examines the long-run relationship between UK aggregate imports and the macroeconomic components of final expenditure, using the Johansen multivariate cointegration analysis. It is found that there are significant differences between the long-run elasticities of import demand with respect to the different components of final expenditure, over the period 1972 to 1990. An error correction model is proposed for short-run forecasting of UK aggregate imports. The short-run model appears to track the data well.     

Modelling structural change in the UK housing market: A comparison of alternative house price models

This paper develops a new approach to the modelling of house prices in the UK, with housing demand being conditioned directly on consumers' expenditure rather than the determinants of expenditure. Conditioning on consumption ensures that the permanent income measure used in determining the level of consumption is consistently reflected in housing demand. The effects of financial liberalisation on the relative consumption of housing and non-housing goods and services are captured using the average loan-value ratio for first-time buyers. We also allow for financial effects via the real user cost of home ownership. House prices are assumed to adjust so as to clear the housing market. The proposed model is found to have structurally stable parameters across the housing market downturn since 1990. Statistical comparisons with the more conventional models in use at HM Treasury and the Bank of England during the early 1990s provide additional evidence in favour of our proposed approach.     

A cost-utility analysis of adjunctive treatment with newer antiepileptic drugs in the UK

Summary

A recent review found that economic assessment of epilepsy treatment relies largely on hypothetical modelling of outcomes and combining these with resource and cost data from different sources. Prospective evaluations combining cost studies with outcome assessments are lacking. However, such a prospective observational study has been carried out previously, but only partially reported. We present a comprehensive cost-utility analysis of adjunctive newer antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) based on observational data from that study, and assess the uncertainty of the results using bootstrapping.

A total of 125 patients with intractable epilepsy were recruited. Each patient was about to start treatment with a new adjunctive AED [clobazam, (non-proprietary) gabapentin (Neurontin®, Parke-Davis, UK), lamotrigine (Lamictal®, GlaxoSmithKline, UK), topiramate (Topamax®, Janssen-Cilag, UK), or vigabatrin (Sabril®, Aventis Pharma, UK)]. Patients completed semi-structured interviews on resource use, side effects, and the EuroQol EQ-5D. Patients were followed up for 6 months. Patient-specific cost and utility data were analysed separately for each AED on an intent-to-treat basis. Uncertainty in the estimated incremental cost-utility ratios was quantified using the non-parametric bootstrap method, and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves were calculated.

At 6 months, 78 patients were still on their prescribed drug. Only topiramate and vigabatrin patients showed an increase in EQ-5D scores, and therefore dominated

other AEDs. Topiramate had an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of £7,869/QALY compared with vigabatrin, and had more than a 50% chance of being optimal if the ceiling ratio was above £10,000/QALY.

Observational studies provide a valuable source of information for the economic evaluation of AEDs. In this study non-parametric bootstrapping was used to confirm the cost-effectiveness of adjunctive topiramate for patients with refractory epilepsy.     

Foreign direct investment in the UK: evidence from a disaggregated panel of the UK food sector

Most empirical studies of foreign direct investment (FDI) typically use either a cross-sectional (capturing ownership-specific and industry determinants) or time-series (capturing the determinants of FDI over time) approach. Panel data techniques, however, have the advantage of combining both aspects of the data. Using disaggregated panel data for the UK food sector – a leading recipient of FDI in the UK – the results in this paper highlight the predominance of ownership-specific and industry characteristics in determining the presence of foreign-owned firms in this sector while macro-economic factors have a more marginal effect.     

A comparison of clustering dynamics in the US and UK computer industries

This paper compares the dynamics of the process by which geographical clusters emerge in the US and UK computer industries, by modelling the evolution of firm growth and entry. In both countries, new companies are attracted by industry strength in particular sub-sectors in a particular region. Moreover, incumbent firms located in a cluster that is strong in their own sub-sector of the industry tend to grow faster than average. While there are some second order differences between the models estimated for the US and the UK, it appears that the dynamics of clustering are similar. In particular, there is no evidence that clustering effects are weaker in the UK than in the US.     

Laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding vs standard medical management in obese patients with type 2 diabetes: a budget impact analysis in the UK

Abstract

Objective:

To evaluate the financial consequences of using laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding (LAGB) in place of standard medical management (SMM) in obese patients with type 2 diabetes from a UK healthcare payer perspective.     

An investigation of regime shifts in UK commercial property returns: a time series analysis

The random-walk hypothesis, vis-à-vis asset price, suggests that prices traded in a market cannot be predicted based on historical information. Employing unsecuritized UK commercial property returns, we analyse this hypothesis by investigating regime shifts or multiple changes in persistence in the series. Our results uncover regime shifts in both the aggregate and sector-specific data. Specifically, the shifts are less frequent in the Industrial sector, compared to the Office, Retail and Aggregate returns data. We highlight some implications for academics, practitioners and regulators.