LONG WAVES IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 , New York: Random House, 1987; and Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age , New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.     

FULL EMPLOYMENT AND THE NEW ECONOMICS -A COMMENT

Professor Killingsworth's paper 'Full Employment and the New Economics'¹ contains many controversial hypotheses. I prefer to avoid the pitfalls of the 'aggregate demand' versus 'structural change' controversy, and will just comment on some of the strained interpretations Killingsworth places on the data.     

THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL POLICY: SOME LESSONS FROM THE U.S. AND ABROAD

The accelerating United States trade deficit has again focused widespread political attention on industrial policy issues. However, given the breadth and complexity of the industrial policy issues, we can be confident that strengthening the U.S. international trade position will not be sufficient to quell concern over this area of economic policy.     

THE ECONOMICS AND THE NONECONOMICS OF THE WORLD WAR INDUSTRY

The world war industry is defined as the part of human income-earning activity devoted to producing, maintaining, and sometimes utilizing means of destruction. Most of the industry consists of what is purchased with national states' military budgets, which are spent by unilateral national defense organizations. These organizations are basically noneconomical, in the sense that they do not have a balance sheet, do not show a "bottom line" or net worth, and therefore there is no way to estimate their profitability. They have economic aspects in terms of decisions that balance marginal benefits against marginal costs. The benefits, however, are mainly psychological in the minds of the decision makers. Wars of conquest, especially those resulting in empires, have not paid off very well for the conquering power. Military defeat often leads to cultural and economic development. Nuclear weapons and long-range missiles have made national defense essentially obsolete and the greatest enemy of national security. Military leaders may respond to this development as they recognize their traditional culture of courage, heroism, and fighting has been replaced by child roasting and perhaps universal destruction. There seem to be few economies of scale in the national state, and perhaps we should look forward to a world of 500 national states in stable peace with a very limited, functional world government.     

PLAGIARISM AND ITS IMPACT ON THE ECONOMICS PROFESSION

This paper integrates survey data on economists' experiences and perceptions of plagiarism with a game‐theoretic model of author strategies to investigate whether information is being efficiently transmitted within the profession. The surveys reveal editorial misperceptions of the nature of plagiarism (e.g., plagiarism versus copyright infringement) and narrow assumptions about who bears the cost of plagiarism. Further, a wide disparity in author strategies to protect intellectual property rights exists, due to uncertainty over editorial response. These considerations are shown to lead to a Pareto‐dominated publication process. By contrast, simple measures such as a code of ethics and web‐based anti‐plagiarism software can improve the flow of information.     

ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS AND THE SOCIAL COST OF SMOKING

A widely prevailing assumption is that taxing and regulating smoking are justified on efficiency grounds since smokers impose a significant cost on others. Supposedly, the same economic analysis that has been used to justify taxing and regulating environmental pollution also applies to smoking. But two serious problems undermine the efficiency argument for taxation and regulation to internalize the cost of smoking. First, the largest external cost that smoking supposedly generates does not exist. Second, even if smoking does generate an external cost in the form of environmental tobacco smoke, one cannot justify either taxing or regulating smoking when one properly applies the principles of environmental economics.     

THE NUMBER OF FIRMS AND THE POLITICS OF STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY

Incorporating home firms' lobbying in a country into a third market model of oligopoly, this paper studies how such lobbying affects the government's strategic export policy scheme. We pay special attention to the home firms' lobby formation and its effect on domestic welfare. The home firms can organize a lobby more easily when the number of their rival foreign firms is larger than that of them, and/or when the government is overly concerned with political contribution relative to domestic welfare. The strategic export policy under lobbying cannot improve the domestic welfare, which depends on the number of firms, the government's concern about political donation and the level of socially wasted lobbying costs.     

THE EVOLUTION OF SPATIAL ECONOMICS: FROM THÜNEN TO THE NEW ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

This paper presents a review of the evolution of spatial economics over the past two centuries. The focus is on the evolution of what I consider to be the most fundamental theory of spatial economics, i.e., general location theory . The paper starts with a review of Thünen (1826 ), and ends with a review of the New Economic Geography initiated by Paul Krugman in the early 1990s. It is shown that the study of general location theory has been successful at shedding light on many important features of actual spatial economies.