Evolving China Strategies: How the Japanese Compare

Taking a sceptical view of the ‘Asian miracles’ proposition that government failure is the main culprit behind development failure, this article reviews the Philippine development experience. The Philippine configuration consists of a weak state carrying out industrial promotion and a large private sector whose dynamics depend heavily on state-managed privileges. In the final section, the article proposes an alternative to the rent-seeking model, in which rents defined as returns contingent on political position and rivalry over political position determine private investment behaviour. In such a society, there is limited internal basis for structural change and growth is accidental to external developments.     

GENERAL AND PARTIAL EQUILIBRIA IN A CONSUMPTION ECONOMY

We consider a simple aggregative consumption economy, where there is a market for commodities and four financial markets: for bonds, deposits, credits and some speculative asset. There is a Wicksellian central bank. The existence of temporary equilibrium is discussed by considering partial equilibria in the different markets.     

Local water markets for irrigation in southern Spain: A multicriteria approach

Spanish authorities have recently approved a new legislative framework for the creation of local water markets to improve allocative efficiency for this scarce resource. This paper analyses the potential impacts of the policy. A utility function for three groups of farmers was elicited, using a method that does not require interaction with the decision-makers. Utility was measured as a function of the first two moments of the distribution of total gross margin. The utility functions were then used to simulate farmers' responses to changes in the price of water.     

Technical efficiency in the Spanish agrofood industry

This study estimates frontier production functions with cross-section data lor the Spanish agrofood industry by using deterministic and stochastic parameuic approaches. We compute the individual technical efficiency for each firm, compare the results and explain the relationship between technical efficiency and other relevant quantitative variables. The results indicate that the Spanish agrofood industry has a level of efficiency between 68% and 93%; which means that it is potentially capable of increasing production without increasing its Consumption of inputs. This efficiency level is positively related to factor productivity and unitary labour costs.     

Die Kosten des Klimaschutzes am Beispiel der Strompreise für private Haushalte

Power prices in Germany have been surging since the outset of the new millennium. Among the major reasons for this tendency are newly raised taxes and levies on electricity prices, whose introduction is primarily motivated by climate concerns. Without these taxes and levies, net electricity prices would have remained constant for private households. This article discusses these taxes and levies that have been responsible for the cost increases in private households’ electricity consumption. Most influential have been the feed-in tariffs for renewable energies, above all photovoltaics. According to our calculations, the levy for renewables will further increase in the up-coming years, thereby pushing consumers’ electricity cost once again. Our calculations also show that within the next couple of years, there will be a fierce competition among renewable energy technologies, most notably between photovoltaics and wind power. Politics would be well-advised, therefore, to limit the annual capacity of newly installed solar modules in order to avoid both the explosion of consumers’ electricity bills and strong competition among renewables.     

Do stable strategic time periods exist? Towards new methodological and theoretical insights

This paper investigates a fundamental issue in the current research on strategic groups: the existence or non‐existence of the so‐called ‘stable strategic time periods’ (SSTPs). Our study provides new evidence by adding new methodological and theoretical insights. The research setting is the Spanish banking industry over a 15‐year period, 1983–1997. Unlike all prior longitudinal research that found SSTPs, the multi‐method procedure that we used in this study (i.e. equality of variance and covariance matrix and mean vector of strategic variables and a subsequent grouping analysis performed through the MCLUST) has led us to reject the existence of SSTPs in the industry under study. Based on these original findings, we conclude by suggesting a proposition which should be corroborated in future empirical studies on strategic groups. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asymmetric rivalry between strategic groups: response,speed of response and ex ante vs. ex post competitive interaction in the spanish bank deposit market

The objective of this study is to examine asymmetric rivalry between strategic groups in a given industry. Two research hypotheses argue for the existence of asymmetric rivalry in the sense that strategic groups of small companies have a greater degree of response but a slower speed of response to the actions of strategic groups of large companies, than vice versa. To test this, we use an ex post approach that examines the news releases published on the strategic actions and reactions of firms. A third hypothesis compares ex ante competitive expectations with ex post asymmetric rivalry between strategic groups. To test this, we compare ex post news on actions/reactions with an ex ante approach that estimates conjectural variations. The empirical application carried out on bank deposits in the Spanish market defines strategic groups in terms of size due to the historical and institutional conditions of the industry (deregulatory change). The results obtained show that rivalry patterns between strategic groups in terms of company size can be predicted as asymmetric in the sense that smaller bank strategic groups have a greater degree of response (Stackelberg ‘leader–follower’ competitive interaction), and a slower speed of response to the actions of larger bank strategic groups than is found the other way around. Moreover, ex ante expectations of aggressiveness on the part of larger strategic groups characterize greater ex post reactions from the smaller‐size strategic groups. Therefore, the size distribution of strategic groups is valuable to research on complex industries with deregulation changes. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of database choice on international accounting research

Data availability is one of the traditional obstacles confronting researchers carrying out international empirical studies in accounting. In recent years several databases have claimed to offer comprehensive coverage of accounting and financial data of firms worldwide. We analyse whether the choice of database has an effect on the results of empirical studies. We find that the results of a simple empirical adaptation of the Ohlson (1995 ) model for fourteen member states of the European Union change significantly depending on the database chosen (Datastream, Global Vantage, Company Analysis, Worldscope, Thomson Financial, Financials and BvD Osiris). These differences are mainly attributable to differences in the samples across databases. When we match observations across all databases the differences persist but are much less pronounced. Our main conclusion is that database choice matters, as it leads to different results when the same research design is used.