New Technologies and International Locational Choice for Research and Development Units: Evidence from Europe

This study examines the factors governing the decision to locate new research and development facilities at locations distant from company headquarters. The 20 firms surveyed are German, Swiss, Dutch, Japanese and Finnish multinationals. Development laboratories, it was found, followed the established pattern of being located away from headquarters only when distant markets attain a critical size. For research laboratories, however, the decisive factor in all cases is a desire to tap into the expertise developing in 'centres of competence' such as the American Northeast in biotechnology. This factor only operates when the new technology is otherwise unfamiliar to the investing company. This factor overrides the conventional wish to minimize the costs of internal and external communications.     

在转型中迷失：通往资本主义道路上的生活满意度

在上世纪90年代东欧从社会主义向资本主义转型过程中，生活满意度随GDP的暴跌和回复而同步下降和上升，但其回复是与GDP的回复程度不相称的。2005年，在GDP比上世纪90年代初期平均高出25％的情况下，生活满意度却仅仅回复到其转型初期的水平，很可能仍低于转型前的水平。生活满意度在因物质生活水平的改善而提高的同时，却也因工作、保健和家庭生活而有所下降。在整个90年代，生活满意度的差异扩大，其中受冲击最大的，是受教育较少的人和年龄超过30岁的人；男人和女人同等受害。     

Ethics, Innovation and Innovation Studies

I argue that the critical potential of innovation studies can be considerably enhanced by including questions of ethics, both as an object of study and as an aspect of study. I approach this by first reviewing what we understand by ethics, secondly by speculating how two stylized opposing positions in innovation studies-radical epistemology and radical politics-might each treat the question of ethics, and finally by offering a position that is complementary to those whilst not attempting any resolution of their supposed dilemma.     

Measuring the effectiveness of non-price export promotion using a supply-side approach

In this paper we assess the effectiveness of the Market Promotion Program (MPP) in increasing U.S. exports and benefitting U.S. agricultural producers and food processors. Export shipments are linked to producer welfare using Kohli's (1978) profit maximization (GNP function) approach to modeling international trade. Using estimated profit functions in conjunction with a synthetic export demand function for processed agricultural products, we compute changes in farm and food processing sector profits that result from alternative own-price and advertising elasticities of export demand with and without the MPP subsidy. This approach allows us to investigate aggregate welfare effects of nonprice promotion without requiring the difficult task of estimating the export demand effects of market promotion activities for numerous commodities and importing countries. First version received: April 1999/Final version received: June 2000