Productivity and Employment in the Information Economy: What Kaldor’s and Verdoorn’s Growth Laws Can Teach the US

During the last decade of the 20th century the US economy experienced the longest economic boom since World War II. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are seen as one of the main reasons for this development and it is still an open question how ICT will affect growth and employment in the future. To evaluate this process Kaldors growth laws, especially Verdoorns law are reconsidered. It will be discussed which changes in the Verdoorn-Coefficient (VC) and the employment threshold (ET) can be expected due to ICT. Induced technical progress and increasing returns to scale could make future economic growth to be less labor-intensive. A simple OLS estimation using data for the US non-farm sector indicates that the VC increased in the second half of the 1990s. Thus, more output growth is required to keep employment constant.The author gratefully acknowledges the most valuable comments from two anonymous referees and the participants of the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association (NOeG) at the Vienna University of Economics (WU), May 21–22, 2004. Any remaining errors are my own.     

Ethical Education in Accounting: Integrating Rules,Values and Virtues

Ethics in accounting and ethical education have seen an increase in interest in the last decade. However, despite the renewed interest some important shortcomings persist. Generally, rules, principles, values and virtues are presented in a fragmented fashion. In addition, only a few authors consider the role of the accountants character in presenting relevant and truthful information in financial reporting and the importance of practical reasoning in accounting. This article holds that rules, values and virtues are interconnected. This provides a sound approach to ethics in accounting, in which character and practical reasoning are crucial. Consequently, ethical education in accounting has to simultaneously include the knowledge of proper rules and principles and their correct application; values (understood as moral goods) and virtues, whose acquisition, in the view of the author, should be encouraged.     

Mix-Up: Models of Governance and Framing Opportunities in U.S. and EU Consumer Policy

Students of comparative politics have highlighted different styles of regulation in the U.S. and Europe. These differences also apply to consumer policy and its different models of governance. The paper holds that governance is a key variable but adds aspects of issue framing. Two examples of consumer policy are analysed: regulation of genetically modified organisms and tobacco control. The case studies show that features of governance such as adversarial legalism or the precautionary principle are not necessarily linked to distinctive styles of regulation. Instead they vary across policy fields. Only a mix of governance elements and framing opportunities for interest groups can explain output and new directions of consumer policy. Dilemmas of collective action appear to be shrinking for consumers because framing trumps mobilization of members.     

Distributed Decision Making: A Proposal of Support Through Cooperative Systems

In this paper we show that decision making processes evolve to be more and more distributed and asynchronous. In order to support decision-makers who are not at the same place at the same time we define cooperation processes and a set of models models able to support designers of Cooperative decision support framework. These models come from a more general architecture of a Cooperative Knowledge Based System and are based on the knowledge acquisition field. A definition of cooperative decision support framework is also given.     

Business Cycles and FDI: Evidence from German Sectoral Data

Globalization has affected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level data set on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign activities are affected by business cycle developments. We aggregate the data by the sector of the reporting firm, the sector of the foreign affiliate, and the host country. Data are annual and cover the period 1989–2002. We find that German outward FDI increases in response to positive cyclical developments abroad and in response to a real depreciation of the domestic currency. JEL no. E3, F23     

New reporting forms attempt to meet common needs

Easing the pain of reporting finances is one blessing non-profits would jump at. Now, a specially designed form has been developed by the National Information Bureau which abolishes scores of governmental report forms and makes the task of reporting much easier.     

Revitalization of traditional resorts

The process of revitalizing tranditional resorts is discussed, through examination of the redevelopment of Scheveningen — a leading seaside resort in the Netherlands. Location and organizational aspects of the redevelopment are identified as two key factors in this process. The market analysis, the development plan and investment sources, the role of public authorities and private enterprise and the redevelopment results are evaluated.     

Distribution,taxation and employment in an open economy

Summary If taxes on labour income are passed on in wages the balanced budget multiplier may be negative. The present paper analyses this problem from a theoretical point of view applying a linearized version of a model for the small open economy. The model is dynamic, because account is taken of capital accumulation. Short-run and long-run solutions are expressed in terms of fiscal policy variables, a wage push variable, the price level abroad and world demand. Numerical examples are supplemented to illustrate the analytical results. Acknowledgement is due for his helpful comment to S.K. Kuipers