Pollution Abatement Subsidies and the Eco-Industry

This paper considers the combination of pollution taxes and abatement subsidies when some polluting firms procure their abatement goods and services from an oligopolistic eco-industry. The regulator must here cope with two simultaneous price distortions: one that comes from pollution and the other which is caused by the eco-industry’s market power. In this context, we show that taxing emissions while subsidizing polluters’ abatement efforts cannot lead to first-best, but the opposite occurs provided it is the eco-industry’s output which is subsidized. When public transfers also create distortions, welfare can be higher if the regulator uses only an emission tax, but subsidizing abatement suppliers while taxing emissions remains optimal when the eco-industry is concentrated.     

Entry and capital structure mimicking in concentrated markets: The role of incumbents’ financial disclosures

We examine whether the public availability of product market incumbents' financial disclosures leads to greater capital structure mimicking of incumbents by entrants. Exploiting a change in disclosure enforcement for German private firms in the mid-2000s, we find entrant-incumbent mimicking rises substantially in concentrated markets once incumbents' financial statements are publicly available. Additional tests exploring potential mechanisms are more consistent with interfirm learning underlying the effect than alternative channels. Our findings shed light on the effects of competitor financial statement disclosure on private firms’ initial financing decisions and highlight how capital structure dependencies among peer firms arise.     

THE REGIONAL AGGLOMERATION IMPACAT OF JUST-I-TIME INPUT LINLAGES: EVIDENCE FROM THE SCOTTISH ELECTONICS INDUSTRY

There is no clear consensus as yet concerning the possible regional agglomeration impacts of Japanese Just-In-Time manufacturing techniques. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical structure to discussing such questions and then uses a logit model to analyse evidence from the Scottish Electronics Industry. The results provide support to the suggestion not only that the adoption of such techniques within the UK will encourage the shortening of input linkages, but also that this phenmenon is not restricted purely to the case of the automotive industry.     

Conference Reports

Governments at all levels have assumed greater responsibility for, and involvement in, tourism destination planning and development. In the post-Brundtland era local governments in particular have been under closer scrutiny for their role in driving the sustainable development agenda in tourism destination contexts. Yet, a notable research gap still exists despite the increased focus on local government, particularly in terms of empirical research investigating the roles and responsibilities of local government in addressing sustainable tourism development. Given this context, this paper explores the role of local government in facilitating, or indeed inhibiting, sustainable development objectives in a tourism destination context. To assess this issue, it uses in-depth interviews with local government representatives and key destination stakeholders from five local government areas in Queensland, Australia. It shows that local government had assumed responsibility for facilitating the sustainable tourism agenda, due to the absence of strong industry leadership and due to top-down directives from state and federal governments. However, power struggles, tokenistic public participation and the strong influence of the local government authority in local governance structures were found to be inhibitors to sustainable tourism development.     

Jost Krippendorf

The paper examines the extent to which tourism in the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics World Heritage Areas can be said to be sustainable. To do this it provides a definition of sustainable tourism for protected areas, in terms of ecological economics criteria. Tourism, and its management, in the two World Heritage Areas is described, and the outcomes are assessed against the definition of sustainable tourism. The available data is not sufficient to permit a definitive overall assessment. However, a favourable interim verdict appears justified against environmental criteria in the case of the Great Barrier Reef. There is in both cases a dearth of suitable data for proper assessment against economic criteria. The criteria proposed and the assessment exercise reported provide a contribution to developing ways to evaluate sustainable tourism.