Introduction tourism and re-created ethnicity

This collection of papers by sociologists and anthropologists focuses on the effect of tourism on the maintenance, transformation, and re-creation of ethnic boundaries. Tourism is seen as a special form of ethnic relations, particularly that form of tourism in which the cultural exoticism of the host population is the principal attraction for the tourist. This type of tourism leads to the formation of three main roles: tourist, touree, and middleman. The authors address different aspects of the marketing of ethnicity, such as the role of the state in the development of ethnic tourism; the modification and recreation of ethnic attributes and consciousness as the result of tourism; the transformation of art forms through the tourist trade; the role of the tourist agent; and the formation of ethnic stereotypes in tourist interactions.     

Innovation novelty and (commercial) performance in the service sector: A Canadian firm-level analysis

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether innovation novelty has an impact on the firms' performance in selected service industries. The principal interest in this paper lies in incorporating two different dimensions of innovation radicalness – market-entry and originality of the innovation – to assess firms' commercialization performance. The results show that to derive more sales from innovation, service firms need to enter the market early (world-first and to some extent, Canada-first) or to introduce new products with high level of novelty. Importance of early-entry (world-first) or novel content in commercialization performance differs by industries.     

Love thy children or money

This paper presents a simple OLG model which is consistent with observed consumer behavior, capital accumulation and wealth distribution, and yields some new conclusions about fiscal policy. By considering a society in which individuals are distinguished according to two characteristics, altruism and wealth preference, we show that those who in the long run hold the bulk of private capital are not so much motivated by dynastic altruism as by preference for wealth. In this setting, estate taxation is a questionable instrument of redistribution: it penalizes the wealthy, but favors the top wealthy. On the other hand, even though Ricardian equivalence holds, both public debt and PAYG pensions lead to a transfer of resources from the top wealthy to the other individuals.     

CHALLENGES OF MIXED‐ECONOMY SOLUTIONS IN HEALTHCARE: THE EXAMPLES OF SWITZERLAND AND SINGAPORE

In the search for improved healthcare systems able to cope with rising costs, policy‐makers are likely to turn to mixed‐economy solutions. The lure of integrating ‘the best of both worlds’ generally leads to a blend of public and private providers, high regulation density as well as legal constraints on consumers based on top‐down political prerogatives. The Swiss and Singaporean healthcare systems perfectly exemplify this strategy. Both combine market features and government planning. They differ significantly, however, when it comes to the specific policies being implemented and the scope of private sector involvement in each country. This article discusses the Swiss and Singaporean healthcare systems and highlights the dissimilarities between the two countries.     

Did the Invisible Hand Need a Regulatory Glove to Develop a Green Thumb? Some Historical Perspective on Market Incentives,Win-Win Innovations and the Porter Hypothesis

The idea that properly designed environmental regulations can improve a firm’s competitiveness while simultaneously contributing to a cleaner environment through the development of so-called ‘win-win’ innovations (i.e., that reduce environmental damage while simultaneously increasing profits) is usually credited to Porter (1991). Numerous studies have since attempted to assess the validity of the concept, with mixed results. This paper contributes to this debate by surveying a nearly forgotten body of literature written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that discussed the impact of market incentives on the development of valuable by-products out of industrial waste. Based on the opinions held by several industrial chemists, engineers, technical journalists and economists, the development of ‘win-win’ manufacturing practices seems to have been primarily the result of the profit motive, although actual or potential legal actions based on private property rights and/or government regulations occasionally triggered this process. After reviewing some important historical writings on the latter issue, a suggestion is made that perhaps the best way to craft ‘well-designed’ environmental regulations is to return to a private property rights approach to mitigating pollution problems whenever possible.      

Cognition,Redundancy, And Learning In Organizations

What exactly does it mean for something to be an ‘organization’? How do we know when something is organized? What exactly is organizational learning? We attempt to attack some of these questions by turning to cybernetics and the mathematical theory of information In the work of Atlan and von Foerster we find provocative attempts to describe the processes of self-organization in terms of such variables as redundancy and information content. Using the running example of a monastery library we attempt to explicate these approaches and connect them to economic concerns.     

The next Silicon Valley? On the relationship between geographical clustering and public policy

Inspired by the success of geographical clustering in California, many governments pursue cluster policy in the hope to build the next Silicon Valley. In this paper we critically assess the relationship between geographical clustering and public policy. With the help of a range of theoretical insights and case study examples we show that cluster policy in fact is a risky\ venture, especially when it is tried to copy the success of regional ‘best practices’. Therefore, we advice policy makers to move away from the Silicon Valley model and to modestly start from a place-specific approach of ‘Regional Realism’.     

Firms agglomeration and unions

Economic geography models predict the agglomeration of manufacturing activies only if the workforce is mobile. Still, as the E.U.'s experience shows, core-periphery patterns exist even though the workforce is rather immobile. The paper provides a theoretical explanation for such core-periphery patterns through the effect that unions have on firms’ incentive to agglomerate in a region. The paper offers fully analytical results about location equilibria and some interesting welfare properties.     

Interconnected games and international environmental problems

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of interconnected games and to show its relevance for modeling international environmental problems. It is argued that an interconnected game approach to international environmental problems may enhance cooperation and provide an alternative to the use of financial side payments to induce countries to cooperate. Two types of interconnected games are distinguished in this paper, i.e. direct sum games and tensor games. In the former all the constituting isolated games are games in strategic form and in the latter they are repeated games. In both cases the interconnected game can be interpreted as a multiple objective game, but only the setting where a trade-off is made for the vector-payoffs is considered. In addition to the formal definition of these types of interconnected games, some elementary results concerning Nash equilibria of such games are derived.Folmer and v. Mouche: Landbouwuniversiteit Wageningen, Postbus 8130, 6700 EW Wageningen, The Netherlands; Ragland: University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0256, U.S.A. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the EAERE conference in Stockholm, June 1991. The authors appreciate comments made by conference participants and journal referees.