How does perceived firm innovativeness affect the consumer?

We present a broad-based, consumer-centric view of innovation—referred to as “perceived firm innovativeness” (PFI). PFI is conceptualized as the consumer's perception of an enduring firm capability that results in novel, creative, and impactful ideas and solutions. We develop and validate a PFI scale and show that PFI impacts consumer loyalty via two processing routes: a functional-cognitive route and an affective-experiential route. Our results indicate that a firm needs to consider consumer perceptions of the firm as a whole, and not just new products and technologies, and take into account a functional-cognitive perspective as well as consumer emotions and experiences.     

The Determinants of Firm Profitability Differences in EU Food Processing

This paper decomposes the variance in EU food industry return‐on‐assets into year, country, industry and firm effects using a hierarchical linear model (HLM). The HLM approach accounts for some of the methodological drawbacks of conventional approaches of variance decomposition such as anova and components of variance and additionally allows the estimation of the impact of covariates within each effect level. The results for selected EU countries show that firm effects are far more important than industry structure in determining food industry profitability. In particular, firm size and industry concentration are drivers of profitability while firm risk and age as well as industry growth have a negative influence.     

A critique of some fundamental theoretical and practical tenets of present consumer policy

The paper begins with a critique of the normative foundations of present public consumer policy. In particular, the lack of an indispensible link between the policy goals and the interests of those concerned is stressed. The authors go on to characterize the available set of policy instruments as being frequently arbitrary, interchangeable, and not suitable for systematic evaluation. The conclusion is reaches that present consumer policy has an ex-post character, and the paper closes with an attempt to formulate the goals of a superseding policy with an ex-ante orientation.

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Kritik einiger theoretischer und praktischer Grundannahmen der gegenwärtigen Verbraucherpolitik

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag entfaltet die Kritik an der normativen Basis der gegenwärtigen Verbraucherpolitik in einem kurzen Überblick. Die Verankerung verbraucherpolitischer Ziele, Programmatiken und Handlungsweisen am Marktparadigma wird problematisiert und der Prozeß der Zielbildung bei der programmatischen und pragmatischen Verbraucherpolitik als elitärer Zielfindungsprozeß charakterisiert, dem die Rückbindung an die Interessen der unmittelbar Betroffenen fehlt.Die Kritik an der unzureichenden Diskussion verbraucherpolitischer Zielsetzungen und ihrer Begründung bzw. Rechtfertigung bei der vorherrschenden Verbraucherpolitik wirkt sich notwendigerweise auch auf ihre Versuche zur Instrumentalisierung der genannten Zielsetzungen aus. Da die Ziele weitgehend leerformelhaft und in nicht-operationalisierter Form formuliert sind, bleiben die von verbraucherpolitisch orientierten Wissenschaftlern und Praktikern gemachten Vorschläge zu einer »effizienten« Instrumentalisierung in den Bereichen Verbraucherinformation, Verbraucherschutz und Verbraucherbildung auch meist willkürlich und austauschbar und entziehen sich vor allem einer systematischen Evaluation bezüglich ihrer Wirkungsweise bei der Zielerreichung.Die Ausführungen zur Organisationsproblematik von Verbraucherinteressen zielen vor allem darauf, den Charakter der Verbraucherorganisationen als Formen der Fremdorganisation herauszuarbeiten und auf deren besondere Legitimationsprobleme hinzuweisen.Die vorfindbare Verbraucherpolitik läßt sich grundsätzlich als ex post orientierte Verbraucherpolitik charakterisieren. Am Schluß des Beitrages werden Umrisse einer Umorientierung dieser ex-post-Verbraucherpolitik thematisiert, die prinzipiell dadurch charakterisiert ist, daß sie versucht, verbraucherpolitische Probleme durch rechtzeitige Einflußnahme und Eingriffsmöglichkeiten zu regeln. Ausgewählte Ansatzpunkte für eine solche ex-ante-Orientierung der Verbraucherpolitik werden zur Diskussion gestellt.

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Reinhard Rock is Professor of Business Administration and Bernd Biervert is Professor of Economics, both at the Gesamthochschule Wuppertal, P.O. Box 10 01 27, D-5600 Wuppertal, West Germany. Wolf F. Fischer-Winkelmann is Professor of Business Administration at the Hochschule der Bundeswehr München, Schwere-Reiter-Straße 35, D-8000 München 40, West-Germany.     

The future of value-added taxation in the European Community

The completion of the Single Market by 1993, with the removal of internal borders which this involves, means that the European Community's present VAT system has to be reformed. Although the basic choice as to the future VAT system has been made recently, the long-term destiny of VAT is still open. Professor Spahn examines the various alternatives.     

Evaluating China’s Integration in World Trade with a Gravity Model Based Benchmark

This paper assesses China’s “natural” place in the world economy with a new set of trade integration indicators, which are used as a benchmark in order to examine whether China’s share in international trade is consistent with fundamentals such as economic size, location and other relevant factors. They constitute a better measure of trade integration that incorporates many more factors than traditional openness ratios. The model tracks international trade well and confirms that China is already well integrated in world markets, particularly with North America, several Latin American and East Asian emerging markets and most euro area countries.

Monetary policy in the Euro area – lessons from the first years

This paper investigates in a consistent semi-structural empirical framework three current issues of monetary policy in the euro area. First, regarding policy transmission we offer a three-stage procedure to combine the estimation of economic structure prior to EMU with current ECB monetary policy. Second, we test whether the regime change leads – before or after – EMU to structural instability. Third, we investigate the stance of monetary policy in Europe. We compare a counterfactual ECB reaction function based on average interest rates prior to EMU with actual ECB policy. Furthermore, we analyse actual ECB policy with interest rate projections using Bundesbank reaction functions and euroland data.We thank two anonymous referees, participants of the Royal Economic Society Conference in 2003, the Money, Macro, and Finance Annual Conference in 2002, research seminars at the Universities of Augsburg, Bochum, Bonn, Frankfurt and Bloomington/Indiana for helpful comments. Obviously, we are responsible for all remaining shortcomings.