A Fallen Idol? Japanese Management in the 1990s

The authors argue that the elevation of Japanese manufacturing management in the West rested on the idea that superior performance resulted from new productive techniques and different systems of management. The object of this article is to shift the balance of placing more weight on structural factors and less on management success or failure. Attention is drawn to the fact that Japanese industry operated in a favourable domestic environment. Output expansion at home and a favourable social settlement (wages, hours worked) operated to ensure that exports, sold in markets where quite different social settlements set higher prices, generated a great deal of cash for Japanese producers. It is argued that the erosion, if not disappearance, of these favourable conditions from the mid-1980s onward has contributed substantially to the recent difficulties of Japanese producers.     

Sinking Ships? Liberal Theorists on the American Economy

In the Asia-Pacific region, the conditions and consequences of East Asian success have understandably attracted more attention than the causes and implications of North American failure. In the American case, any failure must be relative when the US remains a bloc-sized market and the only surviving superpower. Thus, for Asians the US figures economically as an export opportunity and socially, for puritans like Lee Kuan Yew, as a warning about decadence. The discussion among Americans is altogether more interesting. This article analyses the debate about national competitiveness among American liberal democrats like Magaziner, Reich, Tyson and Krugman and looks behind the differences of position that separate these protagonists, with two conclusions. First, as the old 1980s problem of national uncompetitivencss is jettisoned in the 1990s; all the liberals now agree that Americans are no longer in the same boat, that while some are becoming increasingly successful, others are sinking fast. Second; the protagonists have moved from an industrial policy fix in the 1980s to an end of policy era in the 1990s where the question for American liberals is whether and how the political system can absorb the stresses createted by increasing inequality.     

Impact of firm size and age on the export behaviour of small locally owned firms: Fresh insights

This paper analyses the impact of size and age on small firms’ export behaviour. A review of the literature reveals that the extant conclusions are fragmented, inconclusive and limited in geographical scope. This study aims to address these limitations by analysing small, locally owned firms’ export behaviour from a novel location that has never been studied in the extant literature. The study draws on data from Jamaica, a small, open Caribbean economy. The statistical analysis revealed that size, not age, has a significant impact on export behaviour. Furthermore, other factors such as the owner’s previous international job experience and foreign travel experience also play an important role. These findings have implications for future research on the export behaviour of small firms, especially those from emerging environments. In addition, they provide export policy makers who are engaged in export stimulation among small, locally owned firms, with profile of firms that have a greater proclivity to export.     

Eliciting Individual Discount Rates

Controlled laboratory conditions using monetary incentives have been utilized in previous studies that examine individual discount rates, and researchers have found several apparently robust anomalies. We conjecture that subject behavior in these experiments may be affected by (uncontrolled) factors other than discount rates. We address some experimental design issues and report a new series of experiments designed to elicit individual discount rates. Our primary treatments include: (i) informing subjects of the annual and effective interest rates associated with alternative payment streams, and (ii) informing subjects of current market interest rates. We also test for the effect of real (vs. hypothetical) payments and for the effect of delaying both payment options (vs. offering an immediate payment option). The statistical analysis uses censored data techniques to account for the interactions between field and lab incentives. Each of the information treatments appears to reduce revealed discount rates. When both types of information are provided, annual rates in the interval of 15%–17.5% are revealed, whereas rates of 20%–25% are revealed in the control session. Each of the treatments also lowers the residual variance of subject responses.     

Antitrust and Liberalization in developing countries

A number of developing countries around the world have recently liberalized once highly protected regimes through privatization programs and by reducing impediments to market trade. Many of these countries have adopted an antitrust policy as an integral component of their market reforms. Recent assessments of trade liberalization programs show disappointing results. Such outcomes contradict long-held beliefs that free trade is sufficient to generate competitive outcomes in small economies. Antitrust advocates view these underwhelming achievements as further justification for extensive antitrust enforcement. We argue instead that the failure of liberalization suggests not the correctness but the inappropriateness of the enactment of antitrust policies. The continuance of market power after liberalization is due primarily to lobbying activities by producer interest groups to establish nontariff barriers rather than to collusive practices among producers. Interest groups find cartelization and rent seeking as substitutes in raising prices above competitive levels. Accordingly, the establishment of antitrust serves to improve the relative attractiveness of seeking nontariff barriers. Antitrust policies are ineffective in challenging the emergence of nontariff barriers and thus may have the unintended consequence of promoting anticompetitive activities.     

What else do unions do?: Race and gender in local 35

Most analyses of the relationship between job segregation and gender wage inequality do not examine the race-specific dimensions of occupational segregation. Using personnel data, we examine the impact of race-gender occupational segregation on occupational grading and wage setting within a service and maintenance union. Our empirical results show that the job grading and wage setting processes significantly favor white men’s jobs and penalize black women’s jobs.