Making networks and (re)making trade union bureaucracy: a European‐wide case study of trade union engagement with the Internet and networking

The Internet increasingly forms part of formal trade union responses to changing economic and political challenges but in quite complex ways, due to the manner in which different constituents harness and mediate its development. The paper shows how networking is the object of competing meanings and interventions, and the subject of a range of issues in terms of organisational hierarchies, competing communities of practice and competing understandings and traditions of the Internet itself.     

Exchange controls, international capital flows and saving-investment correlations in the UK: An empirical investigation

Exchange Controls, International Capital Flows and Saving-Investment Correlations in the UK: An Empirical Investigation. - This paper reexamines the Feldstein-Horioka approach to measure the degree of international capital mobility, focusing on the difference between the short-run and the long-run saving-investment correlation coefficient. The authors also investigate the effectiveness of the abolition of exchange control which, in October 1979, ended a long period of restrictions on capital flows between the UK and the international economy. Their results suggest that the short-run saving-investment correlation is significantly higher than the long-run one. Unlike most of the relevant literature, the empirical evidence suggests that the UK is financially highly integrated with the world economy after 1979.     

Industrial and knowledge relocation strategies under the challenges of globalization and digitalization: the move of small and medium enterprises among territorial systems

Owing to globalization and digitalization, small and medium firms adopt relocation strategies to transfer their activities (and implicitly also knowledge) among territorial systems, inducing transformations into both source and destination areas. Cognitive proximity and knowledge creation/transfer play a crucial role, especially critical when concerning tacit knowledge, which can be transferred only by moving people. In each industrial cluster or industrial district it is possible to identify a kernel of critical activities, which requests complex competencies and has high added value, and a kernel of tacit knowledge, which is based on repeated face-to-face interactions. The former resists globalization and the latter prevents digitalization, which impacts heavily on territorial systems lacking trust, cooperative attitude, and other socio-cognitive factors. Relocation strategies are divided into selective and replicative alternatives, depending on the ability to preserve large kernels. When replicative strategies are followed by many firms, the socio-cognitive integrity and the economic competitiveness of the territorial system are severely damaged. Thus, in order to prevent the ruinous consequences of massive replicative relocation, local and regional governments should steer territorial systems towards selective relocation strategies supporting innovation and improving human capital, paying attention and developing socio-cognitive factors too. In the final part of the paper, case studies of industrial and knowledge relocation at intra-European level are discussed, and a general model is proposed.     

Foreign Aid,Wage Inequality,and Welfare for a Small Open Economy with Tourism

While the welfare effect of foreign aid has been extensively analyzed, the impact on the distribution of income has received less attention. At the same time, there has been recent work on tourism where it is complementary to aid in improving welfare. By combining these two strands, this paper concentrates on wage inequality in developing countries. We find that an increase in aid in the form of tied aid can lower the relative price of nontraded goods. The rent extracted from tourists declines, reducing welfare of domestic residents. In addition, the fall in the nontradable price can widen the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. Thus, increased foreign aid may have detrimental effects on national welfare and the distribution of income. Rising wage inequality is confirmed by numerical simulations.     

The evolution of mobile communications in Europe: The transition from the second to the third generation

This paper analyses the evolution of the mobile communications industry in the European Union. The research focuses its interest on the different roles played by the regulator in Europe and in other regions of the world (mainly the US). The diffusion of GSM was extraordinarily fast in Europe, mainly due to the adoption of a unified standard from inception. This rapid diffusion has resulted in an important competitive advantage for European operators. Interestingly, while the regulator acted similarly in the case of UMTS, the development of the latter has faced many problems and, presently, its diffusion is still low (about 5% in the EU). The paper also offers basic information on market structure that may be useful for extracting some preliminary conclusions about the degree of rivalry within the industry and the differences that can be observed between European countries.     

Growth factors in medium-sized enterprises: the case of an Italian region

Due to the polarisation of the Italian production system into small and large enterprises, the role of medium-sized enterprises has been largely neglected. As a consequence, studies analysing the factors that affect economic development in Italy have mainly focused on the role of small businesses or on aggregates of small and medium-sized enterprises. This study contributes to the literature by focusing on medium-sized enterprises, and the study has a two-fold aim. First, our study aimed to identify the growth factors specific to medium-sized enterprises in comparison with small enterprises. Second, of the factors that determine the growth of medium-size enterprises, we aimed to identify factors with entrepreneurial characteristics. To investigate these two aims, we surveyed and analysed medium-sized enterprises operating in the Italian region of Bergamo. Our findings highlight some of the factors that significantly determine the growth of medium-sized enterprises, including proactivity, risk taking posture and investment aimed at growth.     

What's Unique About the Federal Funds Rate? Evidence from a Spectral Perspective*

This paper compares the behaviour of the effective federal funds rate to 10 US interest rates with maturities ranging from overnight to 10 years. Using spectral estimation methods, we identified idiosyncratic shocks to the funds rate and provided evidence on their impact on other rates at various frequencies. Our results suggest that, while all of the interest rates examined have common shocks at low frequencies, the federal funds rate contains some unique information at high frequency, although this information appears to be relevant only at the short end of the term structure. In turn, these results are open to various alternative interpretations.     

Speculative Bubbles in U.K. House Prices: Some New Evidence

In this article, we test the view, widely held among both academics and practitioners, that speculative bubbles have characterized the time series behavior of U.K. house prices in recent times. We motivate our empirical analysis using a stylized overlapping-generations model which generates a housing demand function of the form assumed by a large literature, illustrating how rational bubbles may arise as a solution to the house price determination equation. Employing two recently developed econometric techniques specifically designed to test for rational bubbles, we then provide empirical evidence for the existence of bubbles in U.K. house prices over the sample period 1983-2002.