Estimating the adoption of Bt eggplant in India: Who Benefits from public–private partnership?

The study analyzes ex ante the adoption of insect-resistant Bt eggplant technology in India. Farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) is estimated using the contingent valuation method. Given the economic importance of insect pests in eggplant cultivation, the average WTP for Bt hybrids is more than four times the current price of conventional hybrid seeds. Since the private innovating firm has also shared its technology with the public sector, proprietary hybrids will likely get competition through public open-pollinated Bt varieties after a small time lag. This will reduce farmers’ WTP for Bt hybrids by about 35%, thus decreasing the scope for corporate pricing policies. Nonetheless, ample private profit potential remains. Analysis of factors influencing farmers’ adoption decisions demonstrates that public Bt varieties will particularly improve technology access for resource-poor eggplant producers. The results suggest that public–private partnership can be beneficial for all parties involved.     

Transferring hybrid maize technology : The role of the private sector

Developing countries have tried a variety of policies concerning new technology as a source of agricultural growth; there is still much debate on which is the most efficient. More study of private methods of technology transfer is needed. This article presents some preliminary statistical tests of the relationships among seed imports, private research, public research and yield. Seed imports and private research are found to be important potential sources of improved technology. Countries which restrict imports and activities by multinational seed companies may impose costs on their farmers and consumers in terms of foregone productivity.     

Development of Trust: A Study of Interfirm Relationships in Vietnam

The radical political and economic reforms sweeping through former socialist countries during the last decade have opened rich opportunities for privately owned businesses to emerge and develop. Since the market institutions and infrastructures in these countries are largely underdeveloped, private firms in transition economies rely extensively on interfirm partnerships. This raises the question of how—in the absence of institutions that legitimate markets, contracts, and private property—managers of new business ventures develop new relationships. This paper addresses this issue through analysis of multiple subcontracting relationships formed at a private garment company in Vietnam. This analysis suggests that firms in transition economies develop interfirm trust in ways that are quite different from their counterparts in more highly developed economies.     

The new communication age in Japan

Moriya Koyama, Japanese Vice-Minester of Posts and Telecommunications, outlines the need for and format of the recent reforms in Japan's telecommunications. Importantly, the principle of competition has been introduced throughout Japanese telecommunications, with private enterprises now able to provide main categories of service. The principles of impartiality between domestic and foreign suppliers and of fairness in competition have been enshrined in the reform. Further, Japan wishes to promote cooperation in the Pacific basin area to develop economic growth throughout the region.     

Food policy research for improving the reform of agricultural input and output markets in Central Asia

Agriculture is a significant component of the Central Asian economies. Since independence, the republics have implemented agricultural reforms in varying measure, yet production has fallen sharply across the region. The more ambitious agricultural reform programs have included measures aimed at liberalizing agricultural marketing, trade and prices. However, so far the expected supply response has yet to emerge. The objective of this paper is to highlight key policy and research issues surrounding reform of agricultural markets. It summarizes the main features of agricultural performance since the reforms, highlighting trends in grain and cotton, livestock, input use, and trade and analyzes key constraints to improvement of the sector, emphasizing price policy, sequencing problems, and institutional weakness. It presents a research agenda by identifying the main research needs for better agricultural policy design. It calls for more research on input and output market efficiency, private sector development, the effects of reform on farmers, sequencing issues, comparative advantage, water management, land tenure and farm size.     

The multidimensional effect of financial development on trade in Africa: The role of the digital economy

The issue of how financial development affects international trade has gained much attention in the literature, both theoretical and empirical, without investigating the various transmission channels of financial development on international trade. Significantly, how the digital economy modulates the effects of financial development on trade remains unexplored. Our study addresses these research gaps using panel data from 47 African economies spanning 1990 to 2019. Our findings based on the dynamic system GMM approach show that the direct impacts of financial development and the digital economy have been crucial in driving international trade in Africa in the short and long runs. Second, in the short and long runs, the digital economy serves as a vital channel through which financial development has the most significant impact on trade in Africa. Third, the robustness checks by excluding countries endowed with natural resources in Africa provide robust evidence that digital technology and finance matter for trade. Further, the study discloses an important novelty in that the marginal effects on trade increase when financial development in Africa interacts with the digital economy. In light of these findings, we conclude that policy reforms should focus on policies that encourage the development of the digital economy and its use in the financial sector in Africa.     

Decentralization and Pay Reform in Central Government: a Study of Three Countries

Over the past decade central governments of the UK, Sweden and Australia have been engaged in significant reforms in the way they pay their employees. These reforms have generally taken the form of the decentralization of pay bargaining and the individualization of pay. This paper details the policies that have been implemented in central government in these countries and presents some preliminary results on the effects of these. While the actual implementation has varied quite substantially across the countries and the analysis of the outcomes must be regarded as preliminary, there is some evidence that the reforms have led to an increase in earnings dispersion.     

Can the public sector meet the challenge of private research? Commentary on “Falcon and Fowler” and “Pingali and Traxler”

The growth of private sector participation in agricultural research has serious implications for pro-poor technology development, but there are other factors that must be considered. New plant varieties are not the only things standing between resource-poor farmers and secure livelihoods, and institutional strengthening is also necessary. In addition, the current state of public agricultural research is cause for concern. It is not clear how many effective public–private partnerships can be formed; the public sector needs a much clearer definition of its targets and priorities; and funding strategies for national and international agricultural research must be overhauled.     

供给侧改革视角下我国物流业的技术效率评价——基于生产前沿模型和β收敛的实证

供给侧结构性改革是从供给、生产端入手,使要素实现最优配置,提升经济增长的质量和数量的过程。物流业既是其他产业发展的供给方,又对最终的需求实现具有重要影响,供给侧改革对于物流业的发展,必然产生重大作用。本文以2005～2014年中国30个省区的面板数据为基础,利用随机前沿的技术生产前沿可改进区间来估计供给侧改革在物流业的作用空间。研究发现：物流技术效率逐年增长,但近年出现下降趋势,东部地区的物流技术效率最高,中部居中,西部最低。β收敛分析结果显示：物流技术效率存在条件收敛,重点应从产业结构、创新环境以及物流专业化程度3个方面开展物流业的供给侧结构性改革。     

Strengthening intellectual property rights: Experience from the 1986 Taiwanese patent reforms

Do stronger intellectual property rights spur inventive activity and foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries? What are the characteristics of industries where strengthening patent rights has the most favorable impact? In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper uses the 1986 Taiwanese patent reforms to examine the effects of strengthening patent rights in a developing economy. I find that the reforms encouraged R&D effort across industries. In addition, industries that were highly R&D intensive witnessed a marked increase in their patenting in the United States. The reforms also induced additional FDI.     

Why should managers be thinking about technology policy?

Courses on the management of innovation and technology seldom treat government technology policies, and the issues they pose for business management. This is unfortunate. In many fields business has a big stake in government technology policies. They can help business, be a waste of money, or actually hurt business. This essay considers three broad issues in contemporary technology policy, that are of significant consequence to business: government support of applied research, the question of how to deal with the decline in business-funded basic research, and the complex questions about intellectual property rights.     

What can we learn from past price stabilization policies and market reform in Mexico?

This paper reviews experience with policy reforms in the maize sector in Mexico, beginning in the 1980s with particular reference to impacts on price variability. It analyses Mexico’s transition from past price stabilization policies under a state-trading enterprise to market reforms implemented during the 1990s. The nature, extent, and costs to producers and consumers of maize policies is discussed for both the pre-reform and the reform periods. Although wide ranging reforms have been introduced, impacts on efficiency and fiscal outlays have been less than expected.     

After the reforms: how have public science research organisations changed?

Throughout the Western world, the provision of public good science research has undergone dramatic reforms over the past two decades. In the aftermath of these reforms, this paper asks whether the organisations engaged in science research and knowledge production have actually changed, and if so, how? Archetype analysis is used to explore the deep structures of four comparable case study organisations drawn from the New Zealand science sector. The study concludes that no new, stable organisational archetype has emerged following the reforms, but that in fact, a dynamic style of organisation that is in a state of endless transition is the most appropriate response to contemporary demands for knowledge production. The role of organisational leaders in this context is not only to make sense of the organisation's ever‐changing situation, but also to translate this sense into the actions of organisational members and other stakeholders.     

The Role of Public and Private Protection in Disruptive Innovation: The Automotive Industry and the Emergence of Low‐Emission Vehicles

In the automotive industry, the need to move toward more sustainable trajectories of innovation has received much attention. Car manufacturers have started to develop lower emission alternatives for the internal combustion engine, particularly electric, hybrid, and fuel‐cell vehicles. They face the challenge, however, of how to make a potentially disruptive, systemic, and societally embedded technology such as a low‐emission vehicle attractive to mainstream customers. While literature has suggested that companies can empower the initial stages of disruptive innovation by creating protected spaces themselves and/or by taking advantage of such spaces created by public actors, the specific role of these different types of protection levers—private and/or public—has remained unclear. This article therefore investigates to what extent and how private and public protection levers affect firm‐level strategies to increase the attractiveness of disruptive and systemic innovations to mainstream customers. This is explored empirically through a multiple case study of the emergence of low‐emission vehicles within three car manufacturers—Daimler, General Motors, and Toyota—in the context of European, Japanese, and U.S. policies. The empirical analysis is conducted on a data set consisting of more than 9000 articles from two trade magazines, a car magazine and a financial newspaper for the period of 1997–2010. As main findings, the article identifies regulation, tax incentives, and public–private partnerships as the public protection levers that impose or stimulate “new” performance metrics such as fuel economy and vehicle emissions. It also finds that resource allocation, niche occupation, and collaboration‐integration act as the main private protection levers. In addition, two protection levers emerge from the data that are rather prominent in this context: the use of regulation imposing large‐scale commercialization of low‐emission vehicles and dumping of products in the market below cost price. The article concludes with two different protection trajectories—a public protection trajectory and a private protection trajectory—which explain how car manufacturers leverage the various protection levers to deal with disruptive technology. The main implication of the two trajectories is that while the public protection trajectory stalled due to the systemic, socially embedded technological impediments of electric vehicles and fuel‐cell vehicles, the private protection trajectory picked up the remains of the public protection trajectory and has gained momentum, continuing until today.     

Private production and Chinese communes

The article by Ansell, Hay and Griffin, ¹ suggests a number of interesting, if guarded, conclusions about the impact of private production on the equality of income between teams and between households in Chinese communes. In general, the authors argue that an increase in the amount of income generated from private rather than collective sources may well be having an equalizing effect at both levels. As they rightly point out, developments in China of this nature are of great interest to all those concerned with alternative development strategies, given the stated aim of previous Chinese policies to produce growth with a high degree of equity. The major changes in Chinese rural policy in recent years have led to considerable re-evaluation of past performance, both within China and among outside observers. Furthermore, it is by no means clear that a stable set of policies is yet in place. In particular the introduction of the many types of production responsibility systems is having a major impact on almostall aspects of Chinese agriculture. Within this context, it becomes all the more critical to ensure that hypotheses and conclusions drawn from recent developments are soundly based and take account of the comprehensive restructuring which is underway.     

Time allocations across collaborations of academic scientists and their impact on efforts to commercialize novel technologies: is more always better?

We investigate how time spent in different collaborative research arrangements by academic scientists affect their propensity of involvement in the commercialization of novel, university-originated technologies. Three common collaborative strategies used by academic scientists: (1) internal (within the research group or within the home university) research collaboration; (2) cosmopolitan research collaboration (with scientists in other US or foreign universities); or (3) university–industry research collaboration are assessed. Drawing on the concepts of cognitive and spatial distance, the empirical findings suggest that only one internal research collaboration strategy has a significant impact on the propensity of academic scientists to engage in the commercialization of novel technologies with a private firm; however, this relationship is inverse U shaped. More importantly, academic scientists adopting a university–industry collaboration strategy and spending more research time in such an arrangement have a significantly stronger propensity for being involved in technology commercialization with a private firm; however, this relationship is inverse U shaped as well. We discuss the managerial and policy implications of the findings.     

中国民营石油企业发展状况和前景展望

民营石油企业主要集中在中下游,是中国石油市场的重要组成部分,其发展历程反映了中国石油市场的曲折发展和国家政策的变化.无法获取稳定油源一直是民营石油企业发展的瓶颈,而国家政策的调整是影响其兴衰的主要因素.从长期看,由于在资金、技术和管理等方面的不足以及政策环境的制约,民营石油企业未来的发展空间有限.但是,它们具有顽强的生命力,在较长的时期内仍将继续存在并发挥作用,是推进中国石油市场体制改革的重要力量.     

Foreign‐Born Academic Scientists and Their Interactions with Industry: Implications for University Technology Commercialization and Corporate Innovation Management

This study examines and characterizes the way foreign‐born academic scientists interact with private firms. Using status characteristics theory, this inquiry explores how foreign‐born tenured and tenure‐track academic scientists in the 150 most research‐intensive U.S. universities interact with the private sector by means of six discrete interaction modes. The study further investigates whether foreign‐born academic scientists' interactions with private firms are more of a formal or informal nature vis‐à‐vis those of native‐born scientists'. The empirical analysis indicates that foreign‐born academic scientists have lower odds of having been approached by private firms to ask about their research activities, lower odds of having served as a paid consultant to firms, and lower odds of having been engaged in the joint transfer and commercialization of technologies with private firms relative to their U.S.‐born counterparts. In contrast, foreign‐born academic scientists have significantly higher odds of having coauthored scientific articles with private firms than their U.S.‐born counterparts. The paper discusses the implications for university technology commercialization and innovation management in firms.     

Institutional variety in communications regulation. Classification scheme and empirical evidence from Austria

In recent decades, major regulatory reforms have changed the role of the state in the liberalised and convergent communications sectors of developed economies worldwide. The central characteristics of this transformed statehood in communications are, inter alia, a rising importance of independent national regulatory agencies (NRAs) and a growing reliance on alternative modes of regulation, i.e. self- and co-regulation. While the advent and activities of NRAs are often analysed in current literature, the institutional variety and regulatory contributions of private actors through self- and co-regulation are largely neglected. This article contributes to closing this research gap. A newly developed classification scheme of regulatory modes makes it possible to grasp the numerous and often intertwined contributions of both state and private actors. Furthermore, a case study of Austrian regulatory institutions active in the convergent communications sector demonstrates the potential of this new analytical tool and provides an in-depth analysis of various kinds of self- and co-regulation, which have substantially increased in communications regulation in Austria in the past decade.