Innovation Performance and Innovation Policy: the Case of the Netherlands

Recent productivity growth has been sluggish in the Netherlands. Baumol suggests that future productivity performance might be hampered by inadequate arrangements and institutions between the four sectors that drive innovation and growth: large firms, small firms, the universities and the government. In this paper we present the facts and figures of innovation and growth performance in the Netherlands. We also discuss Dutch innovation policies. While our findings show that the Netherlands still ranks highly in terms of actual levels of productivity and innovation, the developments in both areas are reason for concern. A structural reform of the industry-science interface in the Netherlands could lead to an improvement in the situation for the Netherlands in the medium term.JEL classification: E61, O10, O30     

The strange birth of liberal Denmark: Danish trade protection and the growth of the dairy industry since the mid‐nineteenth century1

The usual story of the ‘first era of globalization’ at the end of the nineteenth century sees Denmark as something of an outlier: a country which, like the UK, resisted the globalization backlash in the wake of the inflow of cheap grain from the New World, but where agriculture, rather than going into decline, in fact flourished. Key to the success of Danish agriculture was an early diversification towards dairy production. This article challenges this simple story which sees Denmark as something of a liberal paragon. Denmark's success owed much to a prudent use of trade policy which favoured dairy production. Moreover, this favouritism continued even after a more general movement to free trade in the 1860s. Using micro‐level data from individual dairies, we quantify the implied subsidy to dairy production from the tariffs, and demonstrate that in many cases this ensured the profitability of individual dairies.     

Catching up to the European core: Portuguese economic growth, 1910–1990

This paper analyses the causes of Portuguese catching-up to the European core, in the 20th century, within a growth accounting framework. It concludes that investment in human and physical capital was the main driving force of economic growth and that variation in output growth rates are attributable to changes in total factor productivity growth. The paper explains the decline in TFP growth after 1973 in terms of structural change in the industrial sector.     

Identifying the woes of the cotton textile industry in Bengal: tales of the nineteenth century

This article seeks to answer three basic questions about the nineteenth‐century cotton textile industry in Bengal that still remain unresolved in the literature; namely, when did the industry begin to decay, what was the extent of its decay during the early nineteenth century, and what were the factors that led to this? In the absence of data on production, this article seeks to settle the debate on the basis of the industry's market performance and its consumption of raw materials. It contests the prevailing hypothesis that the industry's perpetual decline started in the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century. Instead, it is argued that the decline started around the mid‐1820s. The pace of its decline was, however, slow though steady at the beginning, but reached crisis point by 1860, when around 563,000 workers lost their jobs. Regarding the extent of its decay, this article concludes that the industry was diminished by about 28 per cent by the mid‐1800s. However, it survived in the high‐end and low‐end domestic markets. Evidence is also gathered in favour of the hypothesis that, although British discriminatory policies undoubtedly depressed the industry's export outlet, its decay is better explained by technological innovations in Great Britain.     

西部现代服务业主导产业选择——基于技术进步的视角

一个地区在其现代服务业的发展过程中,如何因地制宜地选择和培育现代服务业主导产业是其在经济发展过程中需要认真思考的问题。文章从技术进步的视角出发,在对我国西部地区服务业各细分行业进行资本存量估算的基础上,分析和测度服务业各细分行业的全要素生产率(TFP)和技术进步率,并建立现代服务业主导产业的选择指标体系,采用因子分析法对各指标体系进行实证分析,最终确定批发零售贸易和餐饮业、房地产业、信息传输及计算机服务和软件业、租赁和商务服务业、交通运输及仓储和邮政业、卫生及体育和社会福利业为我国西部地区现代服务业主导产业。     

Was 19th century British growth steam-powered?: the climacteric revisited

This paper establishes that there are serious problems with the hypothesis that the Victorian climacteric was driven by the decline phase of steam as a General Purpose Technology. This is primarily because steam’s contribution to industrial output and labour productivity growth was stronger after 1870 than before and that the non-steam-intensive sectors exhibited an inverted U-shape in trend output growth through the 19th century, experiencing a marked slowdown between 1830 and the 1870s. Seeking to base an account of 19th century British growth primarily on the implications of steam is thus misconceived.     

Technology adoption and multiple growth paths: An intertemporal general equilibrium analysis of the catch-up process in Thailand

As opposed to the Veblen—Gerschenkron catching-up hypothesis, the recent literature allows for technological divergence in backward economies. We extend a nonlinear adoption function to include openness and interact with capital accumulation in an intertemporal general equilibrium framework. The threshold gap necessary to catch up is endogenously determined by the economy's absorptive capacity. The model generates multiple transition growth paths depending on whether technological catch-up is achieved, and due to the endogeneity of the threshold gap, endogenous switching between development paths might be observed. Our simulations of the Thailand experience show how lack of investment in education and protectionism generate loss of transition growth and technological divergence. The paper highlights the role of absorptive capacity, and especially its importance for economies on the balance between low growth and high growth paths. JEL no. O41, O53     

Gresham on horseback: the monetary roots of Spanish American political fragmentation in the nineteenth century1

This article deals with the political economic consequences of the disappearance of the Spanish silver peso standard in Spanish America, the longest monetary union that ever existed. With the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808, the fiscal and political structure of the empire imploded and most colonies became independent. Regional competition for revenues exacerbated budget shortfalls driven by military expenditure. Local elites established in former colonial Treasury districts started highly diverse monetary experiments to procure funds. Those in control of mint houses started minting their own coins or debased existing silver currency. Elsewhere, inconvertible paper currency was also created to meet budget deficits. As a result, the most valuable feature of the Spanish American silver peso, its quality standard, was broken and the standard that had organized the early modern international economy for more than 300 years ceased to exist altogether. In Spanish America, as diverse monies co‐existed within a formerly highly integrated economic space, a widespread Gresham's law effect exacerbated the conflict among local and regional elites. This fostered the political fragmentation of colonial Spanish America into an increasing number of political and monetary sovereign entities during the nineteenth century.     

Danger on the exchange: How counterparty risk was managed on the Paris exchange in the nineteenth century

In the nineteenth century, the Paris Bourse struggled to manage counterparty risk, revealing the awkward choices for the regulation of derivatives markets. The exchange, primarily a forward market, instituted a mutual guarantee fund to prevent broker failures from snowballing into a liquidity crisis. The fund then forced the Bourse to search for mechanisms to control moral hazard. With new archival data, we describe the evolving regulatory regime and analyze the determinants of broker failures. The Bourse faced a conundrum; when it finally imposed a tight regulatory regime that limited risk, trading began to migrate off the exchange to less regulated markets.     

Relative productivity and factor-intensity in the manufacturing sectors of the U.S. and the U.K. during the nineteenth century

Summary The main objective of the paper is to examine the relationship between relative factor-costs and relative factor-intensity in the American and British textile sectors during the nineteenth century. The empirical attempt is made within an explicit theoretical framework (a model). This framework is based primarily onimplicit analytical arguments made by E. Rothbarth and H. J. Habakkuk while explaining the causes for the superiority of American industrial efficiency as compared with the British. It is shown that various indicators for the textile sectors during most of the second half of the nineteenth century favor a higher capitalintensity in the U.S.This work is part of a Ph.D. thesis written for the University of Rochester Department of Economics. The author is deeply indebted to S. Engerman for his valuable help and comments. He has also benefited from comments by E. Drandakis, G. S. Maddala, F. J. de Jong and T. K. Kumar. Needless to say, the author takes full responsibility for the content of this paper. Currently the author is an Assistant Professor at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.A.     

An Examination of Labor Productivity Growth and Structural Changes in the Singapore Labor Force*

This paper ?rst examines the sources of growth in the Singapore economy by decomposing real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth into two components. It is found that, for the period 1974–1999, labor productivity was a signi?cant source of economic growth in Singapore. Conversely, the contribution of the rate of change in employment ratio was only of secondary importance. On further decomposition, the rate of change in employment ratio was due mainly to rate of change in population age‐structure ratio and rate of change in labor‐force participation rate. Growth patterns of the labor force were examined after it has been segregated according to gender, citizenship and age group independently. Labor productivity growth was highest in the transport, storage and communication sector, while labor productivity growth was lowest in the ?nancial, insurance, real estate and business services sector.     

Engel versus Baumol: Accounting for structural change using two centuries of U.S. data

In the last two centuries, the reallocation of labor out of agriculture has been a dominant feature of structural change and economic growth in the United States. This paper uses an accounting framework founded in economic theory to decompose this reallocation into three components: a demand-side effect due to the low income elasticity of demand for agricultural goods (Engel effect), and two supply-side effects, one due to differential sectoral productivity growth rates (Baumol effect), and the other to differential capital deepening. The results show that the Engel effect accounts for almost all labor reallocation until the 1950s, after which the Baumol effect becomes a key determinant. Our framework provides a unified account of long-run structural change, and demonstrates that historical interpretations and theoretical models that emphasize only one dimension of this process cannot properly account for the dramatic history of labor reallocation in the United States.     

Silk, regional rivalry, and the impact of the port openings in nineteenth century Japan

The centre of economic activities in Japan was once in western Japan. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, economic activities within Japan have been continuously shifting towards the east side of the country including Tokyo. Conventional wisdom associates the end of the Tokugawa feudal regime with this eastward shift. By applying a new economic geography model to the silk economy of Japan in the nineteenth century, this paper explains why the majority of industrial activities located initially in western Japan, and offers an alternative economic explanation for the eastward shift as an impact of the port openings in 1859.     

Investments and Changing Labour Productivity in Timber Floating:

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the change in labour productivity of timber floating on tributaries of northern Swedish rivers between 1930 and 1960. During this time, timber-floating operations were still relatively widespread but were put under economic pressure due to rapidly increasing labour costs and decreasing timber dimensions. This study examines various factors that could conceivably explain these changes in labour productivity in timber floating on the tributaries of the Ume and Vindel rivers. The results show that during the 1950s a partial phase-out of timber floating on the tributaries had a very small effect on labour productivity. Thus the combination of investment in the existing floatways and changes in the volumes of timber is the factor which best explains differences in labour productivity among different tributaries. Timber floating on the tributaries was influenced by annual variations in natural conditions, but since the relationship between investment costs and changes in labour productivity is significant, it still seems reasonable to draw the conclusion that investment in existing floatways resulted in increasing labour productivity during the examined period. These findings also contribute to the discussion of rationality and expectations as an explanation for investments in existing technologies, particularly in this type of transport system.     

Procyclical Productivity and Output Growth in China: An Econometric Analysis

This paper analyzes the procyclical behavior of Chinese Total Factor Productivity (TFP). It shows that measured Solow residuals are correlated to the growth rate of real imports per worker and to other macroeconomic variables that fluctuate at cyclical frequencies. The magnitude of the trend shift in TFP after the start of economic reforms in 1978 is found to be robust to the introduction of cyclical factor utilization and other systematic influences on productivity. The propagation mechanisms of macroeconomic shocks to output are also evaluated on the basis of a seven-variable VAR system. The empirical results indicate that the growing openness of the economy has contributed to sustaining the observed long run productivity increases and has raised spatial inequality.     

The niponic management of human resources in the performance of the enterprises in the Iberian Peninsula

This article had an objective of studying the niponic management of human resources in the performance of the enterprises that work in the Iberian Peninsula. The search was to evaluate the competition in these enterprises when the niponic management of human resources was used. There were two used data base： one with an economic nature treating the performance of productivity in an enterprise economic view, of salary and technologic, and the other about the niponic management of human resources adopted by the enterprises using an list of questions. Through statistic evaluations it was verified that the competition between enterprises with niponic capital, it＇s not induced by the economic competition, and the same enterprises used competitive strategies based on the qualification of the human resources and technological process.