Legacy sectors: barriers to global innovation in agriculture and energy

The US national innovation system has a dual structure: part suited to rapid innovation, and part stubbornly resistant to change. The complex, established ‘Legacy sectors’ that resist change, particularly disruptive innovation, share common features that obstruct the market launch of innovations, over and above the ‘valley of death’ and other obstacles that have been the traditional focus of innovation policy. Innovations in Legacy sectors must penetrate a well-established and well-defended technological/economic/political/social paradigm that favours existing technology, characterised by (1) ‘perverse’ subsidies and price structures that create a mismatch between the incentives of producers and broader social goals, such as environmental sustainability, public health and safety, and geopolitical security; (2) established infrastructure and institutional architecture that imposes regulatory hurdles or other disadvantages to new entrants (3) market imperfections beyond those faced by other innovations: network economies, lumpiness, economies of scale, split incentives, needs for collective action, and transaction costs (4) politically powerful vested interests, reinforced by public support, that defend the paradigm and resist innovations that threaten their business models (5) public habits and expectations attuned to existing technology and (6) an established knowledge and human resources structure adapted to its needs. Beyond these obstacles, more socially desirable technologies that are driven by environmental or other non-market considerations must overcome the lack of agreed replacement standards against which putative alternatives can be judged. We have developed a new, integrative analytic framework for categorising the obstacles to market launch faced by Legacy sectors, and earlier applied this method to energy, health delivery, the long-distance electric grid, building, and air transport. In energy especially, the requirement for innovation is sufficiently urgent that large-scale domestic and collaborative international research should take place even at the cost of possible competitive disadvantage and even if it is some time before the USA adopts carbon charges and thereby puts pressure on the prevailing paradigm of fossil fuel use. We now extend this method to sustainable agriculture. American paradigms in agriculture and in energy are exported worldwide, delaying the development and spread of needed innovations that are not consistent with them. Foreign manufacturers wishing to enter US markets must suit their products in these sectors to American paradigms, while American exports of technology may be insufficiently cost conscious or respectful of environmental sustainability. Developing countries are technology takers and suffer from asymmetric innovative capability. They need to choose sources of technology best suited to their situation. India and China constitute new competitive threats, but also represent ‘innovative developing countries’ that have large domestic markets in which they are launching innovations aimed at their lower income populations.     

Government policy in the formal and informal sectors

The paper quantitatively investigates, in general equilibrium, the interaction between the firms' choice to operate in the formal or the informal sector and government policy on taxation and enforcement, given a level of regulation. A static version of Ghironi and Melitz's (2005) industry model is used to show that firms with lower productivity endogenously choose to operate in the informal sector. I use cross-country data on taxes, measures of informality, and measures of regulation (entry and compliance costs, red tape, etc.) to back out how high the enforcement levels must be country by country to make the theory match the data. The welfare gains from policy reforms are on average 1.2% (measured in terms of consumption) for OECD countries. I also find that the welfare gains from reducing regulation are on average 2.1%. Finally, performing a similar decomposition to that of Hall and Jones (1999), I find that distortions associated with informality account for a factor of 1.5 of the output per capita difference between the richest and the poorest countries.     

债务重组上市公司重组绩效与证券市场监管

本文利用2006年债务重组准则实施前后两年进行债务重组的上市公司相关数据研究债务重组上市公司重组绩效与证券市场监管关系问题。结果表明,2006年发生债务重组收益公司重组后会计业绩显著提高,股票回报率与市场总体无显著差异,2007年发生债务重组收益公司重组后会计业绩无显著变化,股票回报率显著高于市场总体,说明证券市场监管政策的扭曲导致资源的严重错配。     

“以工哺农”、“以工促农”与我国传统农业现代化

在市场经济条件下,“以工哺农”主要是借政府“有形之手”实现工业对农业的利益回馈,“以工促农”则是借市场“无形之手”实现工业对农业的自然促动。推进我国传统农业的现代化,“以工哺农”与“以工促农”不可偏废,一方面要通过“以工哺农”来为“以工促农”创造条件,另一方面又要通过“以工促农”来引导“以工哺农”的方向。     

论中国社会改革的渐进路径--从经济体制改革透视政治体制改革

在过渡经济学研究领域，人们通常把传统体制的改革分为两种主要的方式或类型，即中国的“渐进式改革”和前苏联及东欧国家的所谓“激进式改革”，或称“休克疗法”。激进式改革基于决策者是“经济人”的理论假设，强调“整体推进”和“理论设计先行”的观点和做法。而我国自1978年以来实施的是所谓“摸着石头过河”的渐进式改革策略。事实证明，这种独特的改革路径使中国社会稳定，经济持续强劲增长，对这一路径的研究正在成为具有重大理论和现实意义的课题。     

市场营销专业网络营销课程教学的探索

在现有的教学体系基础上,对市场营销专业网络营销课程的教材选用、教学设计、实验和实训设计等方面进行了探索性改进。充分考虑了市场营销专业学生的特点和课程目标的要求,突出实用性,取得了良好的教学效果。     

Trade and product market policies in upstream sectors and productivity in downstream sectors: Firm-level evidence from China

This paper explores the heterogeneous productivity impact of trade, product market and financial market policies over the last decade in China. The paper makes a critical distinction between downstream and upstream industries, focusing on the indirect effects of regulation in upstream industries on firm performance in downstream manufacturing industries. We identify the differential effect of these policies on firm productivity growth depending on how far incumbents are relative to the technological frontier. Trade and product market reforms are found to deliver stronger gains for firms that are closer to the industry-level technological frontier, while the reverse holds for financial market reforms. The key conclusion that can be derived from the empirical analysis is that further product, trade and financial market reforms would bring substantial gains in China and could therefore speed up the convergence process. Taken at face value, the empirical estimates would imply that aligning product, trade and financial market regulation to the average level observed in OECD countries would bring aggregate manufacturing productivity gains of respectively 9%, 3% and 6.5% after 5 years.     

Trade costs and productivity in services sectors

This paper provides the first evidence linking lower international trade costs with higher productivity in services sectors. On average, lowering trade costs by 10% is associated with a gain in total factor productivity of around 0.5%, which is an effect of similar magnitude to that for goods sectors.     

机会主义资产重组与刚性管制

本文选择 1 993— 2 0 0 0年间上海证券交易所 1 2 0 2例上市公司资产重组事件为研究样本 ,考察了资产重组与政府管制之间的关系。研究发现 ,1 997年我国宏观经济由过热转向软着陆 ,而监管部门对上市公司的配股管制 ,却仍然采用经济过热时期制订的标准 ,由于管制标准偏离了实际经济情况和投资者的机会成本 ,许多上市公司采取了相应的对策———“机会主义资产重组”来规避管制。本文的发现为我国的“替代性管制”提出了新的不利的证据。     

Balance Sheet Restructuring and Investment

Abstract
This article looks at the evolution of corporate balance sheets and investment over the past few years .
We find that many companies have significantly improved their balance sheets in this time. Leverage has been reduced, and this, coupled with lower nominal interest rates, has improved the interest cover and cash flows of the corporate sector. For many firms, the process of balance sheet repair has proceeded a long way so that the extent to which the financial position of firms will impinge on investment is much lower than it was a few years ago.
Looking further ahead, it appears that the rate of return to investing in capital is relatively high, at least when judged against the standards of earlier downturns. With the recovery picking up pace we should, therefore, see firms more inclined to expand their capital expenditure and less focused on financial restructuring.     

低碳经济与产业结构调整

随着被喻为拯救人类的最后一次机会的哥本哈根气候大会的召开,全球气候变化促使低碳经济走上世人面前。中国产业发展受到了前所未有的二氧化碳减排压力,但同时全球气候变化和发展低碳经济也给中国产业的发展带来了机遇。发展低碳经济意味着中国能够避免走西方国家的高能耗、高污染的工业化发展道路,走出一条低能耗、低污染、低排放的新型工业化道路。以低碳经济为依托助推产业结构升级,中国将转向更为高效的制造业和低碳产业结构,这有利于中国保持国际贸易领域的持久竞争力,同时可以避免国外的碳关税而有利于出口经济的可持续发展。     

经济转型与民生福利

随着中国经济崛起,经济改革将进入"激流区"。国际上面临承担大国责任,国内面临经济结构调整、通货膨胀预期预防,收入合理分配等诸多难题。文章就加快经济结构调整,实现经济二次转型,防止通货膨胀,保持经济增长,合理分配收入,改善、提高民生福利提出具体的意见和建议。     

论绿色营销——以饭店营销为例

节约能源,减少消耗,保护环境,倡导绿色消费,提供绿色服务,将成为我国饭店业发展的重要战略。作为＂绿色管理＂核心内容之一的绿色营销也在环保潮流推动下产生,在绿色消费趋势下发展。     

Returns to scale and externalities in the consumption and investment sectors

Using data on US manufacturing, I estimate internal returns to scale and external effects for the consumption and investment sectors. I construct panels of data at the industry level and use results of gross output production function estimation to derive implied estimates in a value added specification. For the investment sector, returns to scale appear to be slightly increasing, with evidence of a positive external effect. For consumption, the evidence indicates decreasing to constant returns to scale. I discuss the implications of these results for the empirical plausibility of indeterminacy in recent multi-sector models of the business cycle.     

Training and employee mobility in the British private and public sectors

The realization of the value of training for employees can take time as the training contributes dynamically to an extended development process. This research examines the empirical returns to training in three post-training situations: when the employee remains in the same job and with the same employer; when the employee transfers to a different job but remains with the same employer (internal mobility); and when the employee moves to a different employer (external mobility). Panel data and fixed effects (FE) methodology are used to quantify the joint effects of in-job training and mobility, while minimizing the potentially biasing effect of unobserved ability. In a period when public sector employment in Britain was contracting sharply, the short-term returns to training are nonetheless greater in the public sector, while the medium-term returns for both public sector and private sector employees depend on remaining within sector. The general/specific training mix, institutional influences, adverse selection, and the concept of ‘transferable’ training, all contribute to interpretation.     

Economic development by the creation of new sectors

The basic theme underlying this paper is qualitative change taking place during economic development. These changes in the composition of the economic system should become one of the most important variables in models of economic growth and development. Our knowledge of the relationship between economic development and qualitative change, however, is still very limited. This paper attempts to shed light on some important aspects of the role played by qualitative change in economic development, by laying the foundations of a model in which changes in the composition of the economic system are endogenously generated by the evolution of the system itself and, in turn, affect its future development. The model has a strong Schumpeterian flavour in that the first entrepreneur entering a market enjoys a temporary monopoly. This temporary monopoly is eroded by the entry of imitators, that gradually increases the intensity of competition. The saturation is reinforced as the demand for what was a new product comes to be satisfied. In this way the adjustment gap initially created by the innovation is eliminated transforming a niche into a mature market, which becomes one of the routines of the economic system. As soon as a sector becomes saturated there is an increasing inducement for incumbent firms to exit and to create a new niche, where once more they will have a temporary monopoly. To put it in another, slightly different, form, we can say that economic development is a process in which new activities emerge, old ones disappear, the weight of all economic activities and their patterns of interaction change.JEL Classification: O0, O12; O30Correspondence to: Pier Paolo Saviotti