R&D subsidies and productivity in eastern European countries

This paper shows that R&D subsidy policies at the European Union (EU) and national levels stimulated labor productivity in Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) in the years after their entry to the EU. However, the average impact of national funding on labor productivity was higher for countries in the Western control group than in the CEEC sample. EU R&D subsidies compensated the CEEC in part for the greater innovation impact of Western economies. Although they crowded out some R&D subsidies by local governments at the country level, the EU subsidies crowded in many national and local subsidies at the firm level. Local/regional state innovation aid to enterprises encouraged no increase in labor productivity in all but one of the sample CEEC countries. These impacts are assessed in a sequential structural econometric model estimated using Eurostat’s collection of Community Innovation Surveys covering the years 2006–2014.     

Privatization, Competition, and Budget Constraints: Disciplining Enterprises in Russia

We investigate whether privatization, competitive forces, and the hardening of budget constraints played efficiency-enhancing roles in Russia in the immediate post-privatization period. We find evidence of a positive impact of privatization on labor productivity: a 10% point increase in private share ownership raises real sales per employee by 3–5%. The evidence on product market competition is weaker, depending on model specification. Soft budget constraints are usually found to reduce restructuring but the effect is small and insignificant. We find that in terms of their impacts on productivity, privatization and subsidy reduction are substitutes; privatization and competition (measured as the geographic scope of markets) are complements; and that competition and subsidy reduction are independent. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A comparative assessment of the productivity of Australia's public rail systems 1971/72–1991/92

There is a growing interest in the establishment of suitable measures of the overall performance of government business enterprises, particularly railways, which are a major recipient of government subsidy. They must improve their performance and become more cost efficient. Any policy designed to reduce costs must consider the implications of resultant actions on the overall productivity of a business. We propose the use of the total factor productivity index as an appropriate reference benchmark, to enable each railway to evaluate the productivity implications of any change to the operating and managerial environment. Using the Institute of Transport Studies' rail database, total factor productivity indices are derived annually from 1971/72 to 1991/92 for the 5 major public rail systems in Australia and sources of variation are identified.The paper recognizes the need to identify sources of variation in productivity which translate into operational guidelines for management in assisting them to improve performance over time. A contribution is the recognition of the importance of including both demand side (final output) and supply, side measures of output (intermediate output). Final output may be more important for monitoring the performance of an enterprise from a cost-effectiveness perspective, but a supply side measure is often more useful to operators because it is the dimension of output over which they have more control.The research reported in this paper was partially funded by an Australian Research Council grant (No. A78930595).     

Innovation subsidy under duopoly

Innovation plays extremely important roles in the society, and underinvestment in innovation popularly exists. This article aims to capture innovative subsidy with game theory model. First, unilateral subsidy stimulates both innovation and outputs of subsidized firms, while it deters those of opponents. Second, under innovation subsidy, relationship between subsidized firm's innovation and product substitutability satisfies a U shape. For opponents, it is also a U-shaped relationship. Third, under unilateral subsidy, subsidizing high-efficiency firms yields more innovation than subsidizing low-efficiency firms. Finally, bilateral subsidy stimulates more innovation than unilateral subsidy. This study supports theory to subsidize innovation efficiently.     

城市公交成品油价格补助政策浅析

为消化油价调整给公交行业带来的成本负担,国家于2006年开始出台了一系列成品油价格补助政策,给予城市公交企业成品油价格补助。本文根据成品油价格补助政策产生的原因及现状,分析目前成品油价格补助政策存在的问题,并为成品油价格补助政策的有效实施提出建议。     

Innovation,firm size and the Canada-U.S. productivity gap

This paper evaluates the importance of innovation spending for understanding Canada-U.S. firm size and productivity differences. A standard model of heterogenous producers, amended to include a channel for innovation, is calibrated to the U.S. to serve as a benchmark. Canadian specific features that affect innovation spending, namely tax/subsidy policy, regulatory burden and innovation costs are applied to this benchmark, together and in isolation, to quantify their importance. When applied together, the model replicates many aspects of the Canadian economy and predicts lower innovation spending, average firm size and productivity, closely in line with the evidence. Differences in innovation costs account for the majority of firm size and productivity differences, while fairly modest differences in regulatory burden translate to sizeable aggregate losses because they alter incentives to innovate. Subsidies to innovation have subdued effects due to higher innovation costs and regulatory burden, but imply larger productivity differences if absent.     

国外城市公共交通财政补贴政策研究

城市公共交通是城市交通系统的重要组成部分 ,为促进城市公共交通事业的发展 ,保障公交企业的正常运营 ,世界各发达国家和地区无不实行了公交财政补贴政策。本文在若干发达国家公交财政补贴政策分析的基础上 ,结合我国城市的特点 ,提出了我国城市公交财政补贴的改进建议。     

Organized crime and business subsidies: Where does the money go?

Business support policies are widespread in advanced countries, to foster employment and productivity. This paper analyses the role of organized crime in the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an innovative data set on the Italian mafia at municipality level and test whether mafia-ridden municipalities receive a disproportionally higher amount of funds. We exploit exogenous variation at municipality level to instrument mafia activity and show that the presence of organized crime positively affects the probability of obtaining funding and the amount of public funds. Organized crime is also found to lead to episodes of corruption in the public administration sector. A series of robustness checks confirms the above findings.     

Exponential environmental productivity index and indicators

The major contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it introduces an exponential environmental productivity indicator and its ratio-based counterpart constructed through an exponential distance function. These innovative exponential environmental productivity index and indicator inherit the basic structure of both Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index and environmental Luenberger productivity indicator. Thereafter, an exponential version of the environmental Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen productivity indicator is proposed. Such a specification allows to overcome the special issue of infeasabilities. Second, looking from a dynamical viewpoint, we propose an exponential generalized dynamical distance function. This new efficiency measure shows the degree of efficiency of an observation, taking into consideration its technical efficiency and/or technological variation adjustment path. A sample of 11 representative French airports is considered over the period 2008–2011, in order to implement these new exponential environmental productivity index and indicators.     

Network Effects and Infrastructure Productivity in Developing Countries*

This study proposes to investigate the threshold effects in the productivity of infrastructure investment in developing countries. It concludes to their presence in the relationship between output and private and public inputs as well as network effects in the productivity of infrastructure. When the available stock of infrastructure is low, investment has the same productivity as non‐infrastructure investment. On the contrary, when a minimum network is available, the marginal productivity of infrastructure investment is greater than the productivity of other investments. Finally, when the main network is achieved, its marginal productivity becomes similar to the productivity of other investment.     

The impact of adjustment and stabilization policies on infrastructure spending in Central America

During the 1980s and 1990s the countries of Central America experienced protracted fiscal crises and debt repayment problems which resulted in the implementation of structural adjustment agreements. Apart from attempting to reestablish fiscal balance and to control inflation, the proponents of adjustment policies sought to enhance growth by de-emphasizing the wasteful aspects of state spending while maintaining public expenditures on physical and human capital, which were believed to promote private sector productivity. By comparing a pre-debt crisis period with the period given by debt crisis and adjustment, the study reveals that the shares of government spending on human and, particularly, physical infrastructure dropped precipitously during the adjustment period. At the same time, the shares devoted to defense and subsidy categories—as well as interest payments on external debt—generally registered notable gains. The experience of adjustment policies in Central America indicated that substantial discrepancies existed between the idea and the reality.     

An Income Tax Increase to Fund Higher Education: A CGE Analysis for Chile

An increase in income taxes to fund education was one of the demands made by the social movements that emerged in Chile in 2011. Currently, the Chilean Congress is enacting a tax reform to raise money for higher education. This study aims to show the dynamic effects on the general equilibrium of the Chilean economy under two alternative approaches: a subsidy to lower the price of higher education (public and private), and greater spending on public higher education to reduce household payments for education. The social accounting matrix (SAM) used to calibrate the computable general equilibrium (CGE) model has 38 economic sectors, including the production structure of private education and public education. The study mainly concludes that a subsidy policy has significant advantages over increasing higher public education spending, regarding its effects on variables such as GDP, investment, and household incomes, while both policies have a similar effect on poverty and income distribution.     

Public capital formation and productivity growth: Some international evidence

This paper examines the proposition that public capital spending fosters productivity growth in the private sector using a pooled sample of seven OECD countries over the 1963–1988 period. The results indicate that there is a statistically significant positive relationship between public capital formation and the growth rate of labor productivity. This result is not sensitive to whether there is constant returns to scale to some or all inputs, whether the stochastic formulation of the pooled model is a fixed- or a random-effect specification, whether the model includes an energy variable, or whether the data are expressed in the log-differenced or logarithmic form.     

“家电下乡”政策的补贴问题分析——从政策执行系统模型的角度

2008年年底,国家在新形势下推出了一项惠农惠民政策——"家电下乡"政策。经调查,许多农民买主在提出申请后的三个月乃至半年都未领到补贴,"补贴到账时间过长"、"手续繁琐、办理效率低"等成为政策执行的瓶颈。本文从行政管理理论出发,利用政策执行系统模型系统分析该政策补贴申领环节各个因素及其相互作用关系,找出补贴问题的原因及解决思路。     

Dynamics of productivity in higher education: cross-european evidence based on bootstrapped Malmquist indices

This study examines patterns of productivity change in a large set of 266 public higher education institutions (HEIs) in 7 European countries across the time period 2001–2005. We adopt consistent bootstrap estimation procedures to obtain confidence intervals for Malmquist indices of HEI productivity and their components. Consequently, we are able to assess the statistical significance of changes in HEI productivity, efficiency and technology. Our results suggest that, assessed vis-à-vis a common ‘European’ frontier, HEI productivity rose on average by 4 % annually. Statistically significant changes in productivity were registered in 90 % of observations on the institutions in our sample, but statistically significant annual improvements in overall productivity took place in only 56 % of cases. There are considerable national differences, with German, Italian and Swiss HEIs performing better in terms of productivity change than HEIs from the other countries examined.     

Central government subsidies to local public goods

We examine the welfare effects of a central government's subsidy for a local public good in a Nash equilibrium model with two types of public goods. We first show that the welfare effect depends on the substitution and evaluation effects. We also investigate the optimal subsidy rate in a second-best framework and explore how the optimal subsidy scheme depends on the relative evaluation of the two types of public goods. Received: August 20, 1998/accepted: February 12, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We are grateful to John Quigley, Minoru Kunisaki, Tom Panella, Andy Haughwout, Steven Craig, William Hoyt, Michael Ash, Konrad Stahl, Amihai Glazer, David Wildasin and two referees for helpful comments and suggestions, An early version of this paper was presented at a seminar at University of California, Berkeley and at conferences at JAEE Annual Meeting in Japan, North American Meetings of The RSAI in Washington, WSAI conference in Hawaii, Public Choice Meeting in San Francisco.     

Technological spillovers and productivity in Italian manufacturing firms

We study whether a firm’s total factor productivity dynamics is positively influenced by its own R&D activity and by the technological spillovers generated at the intra- and inter-sectorial level. Our approach corrects simultaneously for the endogeneity and the selectivity biases introduced by the use of a firm’s own R&D as a regressor. The evidence suggests that a firm’s involvement in R&D activities accounts for significant productivity gains. Firms also benefit from spillovers originating from their own industries, as well as from innovative upstream sectors.     

Application of Baumol’s Cost Disease to Public Sector Services: Conceptual,theoretical and empirical falsities

This paper argues that justifying lack of productivity improvements in public services by referring to Baumol’s Cost Disease (BCD) is conceptually confused, theoretically misspecified and empirically blind. BCD misconceptualizes public services as categorically distinct from manufactured goods and is based on a theory of productivity not directly applicable to many public services, therefore failing to recognize evidence of substantial scope for improving public services’ productivity. Analysis of the structural and behavioural unbundling of value creation and decomposition of professional skills in service provision leads this paper to conclude that public services are not as technologically non-progressive as BCD asserts.     

The impact of RFID adoption on donor subsidy through for-profit and not-for-profit newsvendor: Implications for Indian Public Distribution system

Subsidy programs are sponsored by government and international agencies to improve affordability and accessibility of food and health products for socially deprived community. Although the donors in such programs allocate substantial resources to fund subsidies, a lot of it is wasted due to the inefficiency in the system arising out of product shrinkage and misplacement. This study analyzes the impact of private participation and advanced technology like RFID adoption on the donor subsidy under target consumption level. We formulate the problem as a donor funding the subsidy program through for-profit/not-for-profit newsvendor and compare the equivalent subsidy per consumption with and without RFID. We perform numerical analysis, collecting data from the public distribution system of India, and the results indicate that, unless the for-profit firm operates under a substantially reduced level of shrinkage and misplacement, the donor should always prefer a not-for-profit firm for program implementation. We also observe that among all the scenarios, a not-for-profit firm with advanced technology like RFID requires minimum donor subsidy to generate the target expected consumption.     

Strategies for innovation and productivity in Japan and America

The purpose of this paper is to describe the types of organizational settings in the West that have been especially conducive for innovation and productivity. Then the same predictive factors are tested for a sample of 44 Japanese factories in order to investigate the extent to which similar relationships are found in both nations.The results suggest that R&D and the innovation function is handled somewhat differently in Japan, but that the consequences of the scale of operations for innovation and productivity are basically similar. In general, large scale operations are more productive, but less innovative in both nations. However, emphasis on specialized R&D seems to be more characteristic of U.S. industry. Many small firms in Japan achieve innovative performances with relatively little expenditure on R&D per se. However, to what extent the Japanese formula which has worked in the past will continue to work in the high technology era of the 1980s remains an open question.