Government-Owned Businesses: Market Presence, Competitive Advantages and Rationales for Their Support by the State

A bstract . In the aggregate, within industries and within non-socialist countries, the market presence of State-owned businesses is large and growing. Such concerns accounted for 15 percent of world trade in 1979 and they produced 70 percent of world oil production , 40 percent of world iron and bauxite and they accounted for 40 percent of the world's banking assets. Certain governments tend to accord them competitive advantages. Reasons given for doing so range from the belief that they foster economic growth and employment , that they equalize the domestic businesses' power to compete with big multinational companies , that they make national planning possible, to the idea that government favor should not go to benefit private owners , even domestic ones, and that the country, rather than the corporation, is the relevant unit of competition.     

Pluralism in the mass media: Can management participation help?

Concentration and lack of plurality of media control is significant and appears to be increasing. The potential danger to a democracy of a lack of plurality of media control is serious. There are opportunities for greater plurality and freedom of expression through professional employee decision making partcipation. There are practical precedents for professional employee management participation in the media. Therefore, professional media employee management participation deserves to be seriously considered. Limitations of the principle are also considered.Richard P. Nielsen is Associate Professor at the School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. Professor Nielsen publishes frequently in the areas of philosophical and social issues in management as well as strategy and consensus building.The author would like to thank Professor William Torbert of Boston College for his helpful criticism of this article.     

Inflation adjustment in the open economy: an I(2) analysis of UK prices

This paper estimates a cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model for UK data on consumer prices, unit labour costs, import prices and real consumption growth. The estimated VAR indicates that the nominal variables are characterised by I(2) trends, and that a linear combination of these processes cointegrate to I(1). This supports an analysis in which I(1) and I(2) restrictions are imposed. A key finding is that an increase in real import prices reduces productivity adjusted real wages, such that the change in domestic inflation is moderated. This may explain why the depreciation of sterling in 1992 left inflation unchanged.

Exploring interactions between real activity and the financial stance

In this paper we empirically study interactions between real activity and the financial stance. Using aggregate data we examine a number of candidate measures of the financial stance of the economy. We find strong evidence for substantial spillover effects on aggregate activity from our preferred measure. Given this result, we use a large micro-data set for corporate firms to develop a macro–micro-model of the interaction between the financial and real economy. This approach implies that the impulse responses of a given aggregate shock will depend on the portfolio structure of firms at any given point in time.