Integrating circular business models and development tools in the circular economy transition process: A firm‐level framework

Along with the concept of circular economy growing worldwide, circular business models (CBMs) have been receiving ever greater attention in both the business sector and academia. However, the existing literature on the CBM is scattered and fragmented; this study offers an integrated firm‐level framework to link CBM typologies, the circular economy transition process, and relevant tools for CBM development and clarifies the positioning and roles of those tools in the process. In response to the fragmentation issue, results of this study are presented in three subtopics: (a) CBM typologies and archetypes, (b) transition guidelines, and (c) major analytical tools for CBM research. The roles and functions of CBM typologies and tools were integrated in different stages of the transition process, and the challenges and shortfalls for CBM research in the various stages were identified. This work lays the foundation for future operational studies.     

Linking organisational critical activities with business typology

This research aims to discover the connection between strategic typologies and organisational critical activities, and focuses on the organisational critical activities in three functional areas in high-tech organisations: ‘research and development’, ‘marketing’ and ‘manufacturing’. Research methods used include semi-structured interviews with 11 firms and 15 interviewees. And 34 participants were surveyed with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) questionnaires in Taiwan. The results show that organisations adopt different typologies tend to perform organisational critical activities differently to achieve success. Prospectors place more emphasis on ‘research and development’ related activities, Defenders focus on activities of ‘manufacturing and production related fields’, and Analysers care more about activities in ‘marketing related fields’. Defenders tend to pay more attention to activities relating to the manufacturing domain than Prospectors and Analysers. This research establishes a linkage between organisational critical activities and corporate strategy, and it could be useful for high-tech organisations to better manage their strategies.     

Improving innovation efficiency of emerging economies: The role of manufacturing

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the role of manufacturing in improving innovation efficiency of emerging economies. Emerging economies are developing innovations to promote their industries toward high-technology sectors to facilitate global competitiveness. Nevertheless, the role of manufacturing is often neglected, which can result in low efficiency in the innovation process. This study constructed a three-stage innovation model that consists of human capital cultivation, manufacturing development, and innovation production to stress and verify the importance of manufacturing. The experimental results suggest that manufacturing development was a key factor affecting innovation efficiency. A performance improvement strategy map was provided to improve each country's innovation efficiency.     

Is ‘oil and gas’ industry of ASEAN5 countries integrated with the US counterpart?

ABSTRACT

This paper employs the VARMA-MGARCH-ABEKK model and Granger causality on 15 years’ daily time series data to examine investment opportunities in the oil and gas industries for ASEAN5 countries relative to the US counterpart. It shows that the latter leads the former in decomposing integration into cross-country effects on returns and conditional return volatilities. The empirical results show that investors can gain an international intra-industry diversification benefit in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam by holding US oil and gas assets in their portfolios whereas Asian oil and gas assets may result in negative shocks due to the increase in return volatilities for Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. However, Thailand are insensitive to the cross-country intra-industry diversification. While making trading decisions, investors should be aware of the impulse responses of ASEAN oil and gas markets from the shocks in the US and the Asian markets and their asymmetric spill over effects.     

Economic policy uncertainty and firm tax avoidance

We find strong evidence that firms reduce cash effective tax rate when economic policy uncertainty heightens. Firms also engage in more aggressive forms of tax avoidance including long-term tax planning or shelters. Cash holdings attenuate the negative effect of policy uncertainty on cash effective tax rate, especially for financially constrained firms. The cash tax savings are retained for reinvestments rather than dividend payouts. Our findings suggest that policy uncertainty exacerbates external financing frictions, which in turn induces precautionary motives of tax avoidance.     

Progressive Tax and Inequality in a Unionized Economy*

In this paper, we develop a heterogeneous-agent, endogenous growth model of a unionized economy with distinct progressive tax schedules on labor and capital income. With time preference heterogeneity, the effective labor force, balanced growth, and income inequality are endogenously determined, and these interact with each other. A reduction in the degree of progressive labor tax yields a “double-dividend” in terms of reducing income inequality and boosting economic growth, while capital income progressivity displays the usual growth–inequality trade-off. Particularly, the double-dividend effect becomes more pronounced when unionization is declined or trade unions become more wage-oriented, leading to the so-called “Cheshire cat” phenomenon.     

Corporate decision making in the presence of political uncertainty: The case of corporate cash holdings

Using a quarterly panel of U.S. corporations over the period 1985–2014, we show that corporate managers respond to political uncertainty and economic policy uncertainty shocks in different ways. We proxy for political uncertainty using the Partisan Conflict Index and employ a prevalent empirical macroeconomic methodology to construct structural shocks that are orthogonal to shocks captured by the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. Following a political uncertainty shock, corporations increase cash but do not adjust investment. Alternatively, following an economic policy uncertainty shock, firms appear to draw on cash and reduce capital spending to increase research and development spending.     

Government Expenditures and Economic Growth: The Supply and Demand Sides*

This paper uses a new approach to estimate how government expenditures affect the growth rate of real GDP. They affect the growth rate through three channels ‐ total factor productivity, investment and aggregate demand. We find that apart from government investment, all government expenditures have negative marginal effects on productivity and GDP growth. In particular, a 1 percentage point increase in the share of government consumption in GDP reduces the equilibrium GDP growth rate by 0.216 percentage points, while the same increase in government investment raises the growth rate by 0.167 percentage points. This suggests that a reallocation of 1 percentage point of government consumption to government investment can raise the growth rate by 0.38 percentage points.     

INDUSTRIAL CLUSTER,NETWORK AND PRODUCTION VALUE CHAIN: A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT BASED ON SPECIALIZATION AND DIVISION OF LABOUR

This paper develops a general equilibrium model with endogenous clusters and an endogenous network of division of labour to formalize and explore the interrelationship and rules of industrial clusters, the network of division of labour, and the economies of specialization and agglomeration in the new era of globalization and regionalization. The model suggests that institutional efficiency and competition among countries and industries will facilitate important circular effects, propelling and shaping the arrangement and allocation of industrial clusters, establishing their position in the value chain, and, consequently, determining the status of economic growth. In particular, the improvements in institutional efficiency of economic and technology systems will expand the demand for transactions and network size, which, in turn, will determine the development of cluster and network scope, as well as the position in the production value chain.