Construction industry in Spain,is it guilty of the current crisis?

This article presents an analysis of the construction sector in Spain over the last decade. Several indicators are constructed based on Input–Output tables that demonstrate that the importance attributed to this sector does not correspond to its true role in the overall Spanish economy. Although it is true that the construction industry is important for other sectors of the economy, it is also true that the sector shows indicators that are average for the Spanish economy and lower than those of the industrial sector.     

家族创始人职业经历与企业风险承担*

基于创始人自身特征的异质性,本文研究家族创始人职业经历与企业风险承担的关系。研究发现,相对于家族创始人具有公共部门职业经历的企业,创始人具有企业部门职业经历的企业风险承担水平更高。进一步地,在产品市场竞争激烈的行业,家族创始人的企业部门职业经历与企业风险承担水平的正相关关系更强。研究表明,具有企业部门职业经历的家族创始人更偏好风险,其所掌控企业的风险承担水平也更高。本文发展了基于代理理论和控制权理论的家族企业风险承担研究,论证了家族创始人职业经历特征对企业风险承担的重要作用。同时,本文研究结论有助于投资者识别企业风险。     

公私伙伴关系的定位与调适

供给主体单一会导致公共服务质量低下,应利用公私部门间各自优势,引入市场机制,理顺公共部门与私营部门间关系,构建政府、市场与社会三者间共同参与公共服务供给的新模式,以期提升公共服务供给水平。     

大学图书馆管理创新刍议

大学图书馆作为高校的文献信息中心和直接为教学与科研服务的学术性机构,在学校教学与科研工作中具有重要的信息职能,负有特殊的教育使命。从管理模式、组织结构、管理手段以及服务方式等四个方面探讨大学图书馆的管理创新。     

英国创新中介机构之NESTA模式

NESTA是英国一家创新中介机构,目前是英国最大的唯一支持创新发展的非政府机构,致力于为政府、社会、创新机构、企业和个人提供支持。NESTA通过与其他机构和公司合作来协助创业公司取得发展,同时从事创新政策研究、公益事业发展,定期发布创新研究成果和报告,对英国的创新政策制定有重大的影响。NESTA模式集聚了政府、投资机构、企业各方面的资源,在英国的创新企业金融服务市场中扮演着极其重要的角色,值得推广和学习。     

An empirical study of collaborative partnering among enterprises and government organizations for information system outsourcing

Most researches on information systems (IS) outsourcing indicate that public sector decides to outsource information technology (IT) services due to the belief that private vendors offer more cost advantages. This research explores government sectors of outsourcing and focus on the role of relationship for IS-service providers. Quantitative data of 126 questionnaires and 30 IS demonstrate that trust, mutual dependence, equipment investment and information sharing are contributing factors to successful outsourcing long-term partnerships. Information sharing between the service receiver and provider is also vital in terms of equipment investment in long-term partnerships, and is affected by the level of trust that each party holds for the other within the outsourcing process. Conceptual model is useful in explicating important government-business partnering strategies – the model highlights not only the economic benefits that the IS-outsourcing relationship brings based on social exchange theory characteristics, but also suggests many additional relevant elements.     

Does trade creation by social and business networks hold in services?

Recent literature on the border effect has shown that the intensity of trade in goods is positively correlated with the migration stocks between any pair of countries/regions. The number of references for business networks is more limited, but they are also related with a reduction on information costs. In this article we investigate whether such a relation holds also for Spanish domestic trade flows in consumer services. To this end, we use a gravity model rooted in the Dixit–Stiglitz–Krugman theoretical framework and a unique data set on interregional trade flows for some of the main tourism service sectors, namely, accommodations and restaurants. Our industry-specific analysis finds a large positive effect for restaurants but a more limited effect for accommodations. Forces driving the demand in each sector explain this result and suggest the idea that although social networks can act as a substitute of firms in some sectors at the same time they can enhance trade flows in other sectors. We perform the same kind of analysis with a data set (obtained by a similar method) for domestic trade in goods and discover a different response to social and business networks. Finally, we treat the potential endogeneity by taking the instrumental-variable approach of the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator and thus obtain consistent results.     

Pollution havens: international empirical evidence using a shadow price measure of climate policy stringency

Given the ambiguous empirical results of previous research, this paper tests whether support for a climate policy-induced pollution haven effect and the pollution haven hypothesis can be found. Unlike the majority of previous studies, the analysis is based on international panel data and includes several methodological novelties: By arguing that trade flows of dirty goods to less dirty sectors may also be influenced by changes in policy stringency, trade information on primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors are included. In order to clearly differentiate between dirty sectors and sectors with high pollution abatement costs, separate measures for pollution intensity and policy stringency are implemented. For the former, two intensities, namely the sectors’ carbon dioxide emission intensity and the emission relevant energy intensity, are used to identify dirty sectors. For the latter, an internationally comparable, sector-specific measure of climate policy stringency is derived by applying a shadow price approach. Potential endogeneity between climate policy stringency, trade openness and the trade balance is controlled for by employing a dynamic panel generalized method of moments estimator. The results provide evidence for a pollution haven effect that is also present for non-dirty sectors, i.e., a sector’s net imports rise in general if the sector faces an increase in climate policy stringency. Moreover, a stronger pollution haven effect regarding carbon dioxide intensive and emission relevant energy-intensive sectors is revealed. However, no support for the stronger pollution haven hypothesis can be found.     

福建省非公有制新经济企业和经济类新社会组织思想政治工作调研及对策思考

非公新经济组织和新社会组织是创意经济和社会管理的生力军,思想政治工作担当着人的价值建设的历史使命。在对福建省非公新经济组织和新社会组织调研的基础上,提出完善社会化思想政治工作的“三层次四模块”模式,着力建设以“共建共享”长效激励为基石的学习型组织,以推动企业思想政治工作的现代化。     

The impact of monetary policy on housing market activity: An assessment using sign restrictions

Existing research demonstrates that housing, particularly residential investment, plays an important role in the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the overall economy. With this in mind, this paper investigates the relationship between monetary policy and housing market activity using a relatively new method for identifying monetary shocks. More specifically, a monetary policy shock is identified by explicitly imposing sign restrictions on impulse response vectors. The extra information from sign restrictions is important for new insights regarding the transmission of monetary policy to the housing sector – notably, the results indicate that residential investment is less sensitive to a contractionary shock than standard estimates with recursive restrictions. Given that the response of the housing sector using sign restrictions is smaller than other work using standard identification methods, the work indicates that further research is needed to examine whether other sectors of the economy may be less sensitive to monetary policy than previously thought.     

Competition,taxation and economic growth

The paper mainly examines the relationship between economic growth, tax policy and sectoral labor distribution in an endogenous growth model with expanding varieties. For analyzing these relationships, we consider an economy where three sectors of production are vertically integrated: final goods sector, intermediate goods sector and research sector. We show that the extent of imperfect competition in the intermediate products market affects both economic growth and the allocation of the available labor to all the sectors employing this input. The resources from capital taxation, which are used for financing research sector, have a U-shaped effect on growth and lead to a movement of the labor from research sector to final goods sector. Additionally, we show that if there exists a higher competitive structure in an economy, the probability of the positive effect of an increase in tax on growth gets higher.     

Higher education and public sector employment: evidence from Finnish data on twins

Using data from Finland on twins, this paper examines the effect of labour quality, as measured by education, on the choice to work in the public sector. A distinction to previous studies is made by allowing controls of family background and genetics effects that could drive the positive relationship between higher education and public sector employment. The conditional (fixed effects) logit regression estimates indicate that highly qualified employees are more likely to seek public sector employment. The paper also utilizes the longitudinal structure of the data to examine whether the results vary over time. These results indicate that the association between public sector work and higher education is counter-cyclical. In other words, highly qualified workers are more likely to hold public service positions and to have greater access to public sector jobs during economic downturns.     

Capital-labor substitution in a developing country: the case of Greece: A note

Estimates of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the manufacturing sector of the Greek economy are obtained by using a cost-function approach and are compared with the results of previous research. Such previous results show the elasticity of substitution to be significantly higher than one, while our results, using the same time-series data for 17 two-digit manufacturing sectors for the period 1958–1973, give much lower estimates.     

Economic Takeoffs in a Dynamic Process of Globalization*

The paper develops a dynamic general‐equilibrium framework to illustrate that trade liberalization may speed up the process of globalization and industrialization by enabling a small open economy to reallocate production factors to modern export sectors where increasing returns to experience are present. The authors emphasize the role of knowledge in service activities related to the export of modern sector goods, which has the form of a public good that can be utilized in exporting of other modern sector goods. As a consequence of this knowledge accumulation, the economy begins to take off and exhibits more rapid rates of wage and output growth. The accumulation of knowledge also shifts comparative advantage in the modern sector to more service‐intensive goods, thus leading to a natural evolution of comparative advantage. These results lend theoretical support to the different development experiences in the 1960s between East Asia and Latin America.     

Deindustrialization in the UK: a comparison analysis with Japan

As a mature economy, the UK has experienced continuous decline in manufacturing competitiveness under the process of deindustrialization. On the other hand, the service sector has been developing a comparative advantage and creating new jobs. This article attempts to recognize the change in inter-dependence between industries, particularly the manufacturing and service sectors, in the process of deindustrialization. Using partitioned multiplier effects, I analyse the extent to which deindustrialization, particularly expansion in the service sector, has benefited the UK economy. I show that the contribution of the service sector to the UK economy has not been significant.     

Recent rural growth in China: the performance of the rural small-scale enterprises, 1980–86

This article focuses on the evaluation of the process of growth in rural China since the 1978 rural economic reforms. By dividing the rural economy into two sectors: the agricultural sector and the RSE (rural small scale enterprises) sector, it analyses the relative contributions of labour, capital and other factors. Two major findings are that the RSE sector has its marginal labour productivity double that of the agricultural sector over 1980–86 and the high-income regions (mainly the coastal provinces open to world exports) exhibited a positive role of increasing returns to scale. This trend lends strong support to the market-based incentives offered by the openness in free trade which influenced the coastal provinces of the RSE sector.     

Location factors of FDI and the growing services economy1

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has increasingly shifted toward the service sector. This change in the industrial composition of FDI and the non‐tradable nature of services may have altered the importance of location factors for investment decisions. To capture potential changes in FDI determinants, a contrasting sectoral analysis is performed. Based on FDI stock data from eight new EU member states for the period 1998–2004, we implement a dynamic panel approach allowing the speed of adjustment to the equilibrium investment level to vary across sectors. Results support our assumption that investment into the service sector, which is characterized by low installation costs, adjusts much faster to its desired level than manufacturing FDI. Thus, government interventions to attract FDI are likely to boost the service sector immediately while having a slower impact on manufacturing FDI. Furthermore, as services are mostly non‐tradable, FDI into this sector is largely based on market‐seeking motives while FDI in the manufacturing sector is also driven by international price competitiveness measured by real unit labour costs.     

DOES THE MISSION OF PROVIDERS MATTER ON A QUASI‐MARKET? THE CASE OF THE BELGIAN ‘SERVICE VOUCHER’ SCHEME

ABSTRACT 1 : In 2001, the Belgian government introduced a ‘service voucher’ scheme in the field of domestic (housework) services, following a quasi‐market mechanism which fosters competition between providers of different types as regards sector (for‐profit, public, third sector) and mission (seeking profits, home care provision to vulnerable groups and work integration of the unemployed). Empirical evidence suggests that third sector organizations focusing on a social mission recognized by a tutelary regulation are the best performing with regards to the quality of jobs and service organization, leading to a better ‘triangulation’ of the service relationship. On the other hand, for‐profit providers, especially temporary work agencies, seem to favour their capacity of adaptation to the desiderata of their clients and costs’ minimization to the detriment of the quality of jobs which are made as flexible as possible.     

IS SELF‐MANAGEMENT POSSIBLE? A STUDY ON THE RECOVERED FACTORIES IN BRAZIL

The scenario outlined by the productive restructuring associated with the economic crisis and other changes in the Brazilian economy in the 1990s led to the bankruptcy of many businesses and resulted in an increase in unemployment and uncertainty in work relations. Thus, the workers sought other forms of survival, including associated work. Some groups began to organize themselves with the aim of collectively assuming the management of bankrupted factories in order to keep their jobs. The first ‘recovered factories’ appeared in Brazil. In this context, some supporting institutions were also born, in order to support these experiences, as well as other initiatives within the cooperative and social economy. Our proposal is to make a general analysis of the current situation of the recovered factories in Brazil, discussing whether and how the values of cooperativism and self‐management are present in these factories today.     

Measuring Productive Efficiency in Input–Output Models by Means of Data Envelopment Analysis

The goal of the present research is to evaluate productive efficiency in an input–output framework by means of data envelopment analysis (DEA). This mathematical programming technique allows researchers to assess potential efficiency improvements in the form of input requirements reduction. By constructing envelopment unitary isoquants corresponding to comparable sectors across different local, regional or national economies, e.g. agriculture and manufacturing, DEA identifies as productive benchmarks those economies that exhibit the lowest technical coefficients, i.e. lowest input amount to produce one unit of output. Once these reference frontiers have been defined, it is possible to assess what would be the potential efficiency improvements available to the inefficient economies if they were to produce according to the best practice technologies of their benchmark peers. From an equivalent perspective, these simulations identify the necessary changes that each productive sector needs to undertake in order to reach the efficiency levels of the most successful economies. Finally, within Leontief’s analytical construction, these calculations allow us to assess what would have been the economy‐wid,e benefits for the inefficient economies—in terms of intermediate consumption reductions and final demand increases—of producing with best practice technologies. The model is empirically illustrated using the input–output tables for a set of OECD countries.