BOOK REVIEWSS

Gordon, John S. and Jack R. Arnold, Profitable Exporting: A Complete Guide to Marketing Your Products Abroad, New York: John Wiley &; Sons, 1988, vii + 358 pages.

Haggard, Stephan and Chung-in Moon (Eds.), Pacific Dynamics: The International Politics of Industrial Change, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989, ix + 389 pages.

Eichengreen, Barry, and Lindert, Peter H. (Eds.), The International Debt Crisis in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, 282 pages.

Cohen, Richard, World Trade and Payments Cycles: The Advance and Retreat of the Postwar Order, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989, xxiii + 229 pages.

Schaffer, Matt, Winning the Countertrade War: New Export Strategies for America, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989, xvii + 226 pages.

Grimwade, Nigel, International Trade: New Patterns of Trade Production and Investment, New York: Routledge, 1989, xv + 459 pages.

Salvatore, Dominick, International Economics, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990, xxxii + 695 pages.

Hibbert, Edgar P., The Management of International Trade Promotion, London: Routledge, 1990, x + 287 pages.

United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations, Services and Development: The Role of Foreign Direct Investment and Trade, New York: United Nations, 1989, x + 181 pages.

Friedländer, Michael (Ed.), Foreign Trade in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, xiii + 241 pages.

Rollo, J. M. C., The New Eastern Europe: Western Responses, New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1990, 137 pages.

Gill, William J., Trade Wars Against America: A History of United States Trade and Monetary Policy, New York: Praeger, 1990, xvi + 325 pages.

Destler, I. M., and C. Randall Henning, Dollar Politics: Exchange Rate Policy-making in the United States, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1989, xi + 174 pages.

Schott, Jeffrey J. (Ed.), Completing the Uruguay Round, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990, x + 223 pages.     

Endogenous job destructions and the distribution of wages

This paper considers a matching model with both idiosyncratic productivity shocks that hit jobs at random and heterogeneity of workers according to ex ante unobservable abilities. We argue that firms' decisions about reservation productivity can help explain the shape of wage distributions. This is shown from numerical experiments, calibrated to French data, by considering alternative ranges of productivity shocks.     

Assessing the Impact of Formal and Informal Regulations on Environmental and Economic Performance of Brazilian Manufacturing Firms

This study investigates the impact of formal and informal regulations on environmental and economic performance of Brazilian manufacturing firms. We adopt a dual approach where production technology is represented by a cost function, approximated by a translog form. Pollution is considered as a negative by-product that can be modified trough using either formal regulation (inspections or sanctions) or informal regulation (community pressure). A simultaneous equation model is estimated by three-stage least squares on a sample of 404 industrial establishments located in the state of S?o Paulo, Brazil. We show that pollution abatement costs for the Brazilian manufacturing sector are different from zero which suggests that pollution emissions are affected by environmental regulation. We also demonstrate that environmental performance of firms is jointly affected by formal and informal regulation. Lastly, formal regulation is largely influenced by informal regulation and more specifically by community pressure.     

Coping with drought with innovative pricing systems: the case of two irrigation water management companies in France

In recent years, France has been facing particularly severe drought periods especially in summer. In a country where agriculture is the largest water user, some irrigation management companies have implemented innovative pricing systems to handle this situation. The objective of this article is to analyze the impact of these new management systems on farmers’ incomes, the revenue of the management companies, and the amount of water used. To do that, we develop a methodology using a stochastic model that simulates the representative farmer's optimal behavior in a context of climatic variability. An empirical application is made with a crop growth model and data collected from the Midi‐Pyrenees region. The results show that using these specific nonlinear pricing systems allow irrigation water managers to reduce the impact of drought on production. Moreover, the type of pricing implemented depends on the characteristics and capabilities of the water company. More particularly, these pricing systems can be used to anticipate agricultural water demand in order to avoid imbalance with water availability.     

Mars or Mercury redux: The geopolitics of bilateral trade agreements

We analyse the role of economic and security considerations in bilateral trade agreements. We use the pre‐World War I period to test whether trade agreements are governed by standard gravity variables, or by instead—or in addition—geopolitical factors. While we like others find support for standard gravity variables, we also find that defence pacts boost the probability of trade agreements by as much as 20 percentage points. Our estimates imply that were the U.S. to alienate its geopolitical allies, the likelihood and benefits of successful bilateral agreements would fall significantly. Trade creation from an agreement between the U.S. and E.U. countries would decline by about 0.6 per cent of total U.S. exports.     

Risky public domestic debt composition in emerging economies

This paper explains why public domestic debt composition in emerging economies can be risky, namely in foreign currency, with a short maturity or indexed. It analyses empirically the determinants of these risk sources separately, developing a new large dataset compiled from national sources for 33 emerging economies over 1994–2006. The paper finds that economic size, the breadth of the domestic investor base, inflation and fiscal soundness are all associated with risky public domestic debt compositions, yet to an extent that varies considerably in terms of magnitude and significance across sources of risk. Only inflation impacts all types of risky debt, underscoring the overarching importance of monetary credibility to make domestic debt compositions in emerging economies safer. Given local bond markets' rapid development, monitoring risky public domestic debt compositions in emerging economies becomes increasingly relevant to global financial stability.     

DOES THE MISSION OF PROVIDERS MATTER ON A QUASI‐MARKET? THE CASE OF THE BELGIAN ‘SERVICE VOUCHER’ SCHEME

ABSTRACT 1 : In 2001, the Belgian government introduced a ‘service voucher’ scheme in the field of domestic (housework) services, following a quasi‐market mechanism which fosters competition between providers of different types as regards sector (for‐profit, public, third sector) and mission (seeking profits, home care provision to vulnerable groups and work integration of the unemployed). Empirical evidence suggests that third sector organizations focusing on a social mission recognized by a tutelary regulation are the best performing with regards to the quality of jobs and service organization, leading to a better ‘triangulation’ of the service relationship. On the other hand, for‐profit providers, especially temporary work agencies, seem to favour their capacity of adaptation to the desiderata of their clients and costs’ minimization to the detriment of the quality of jobs which are made as flexible as possible.