A disaggregated analysis of the export performance of some industrial and emerging countries

The paper describes the evolution of export shares and quantifies the contribution of geographical and sectoral specialization as well as that of “competitiveness” of some industrial and emerging market economies between 1985 and 2003. While the strong growth of emerging countries as world competitors has lowered the market shares of all industrial countries, the results of a constant-market-share analysis indicate that the latter have benefited from positive specialization effects. Specifically, industrial countries gained from being specialized in fast-growing sectors (high-tech) or destinations (Asia). The magnitude of these effects, however, has been quite diversified across the main countries. Among the emerging economies, the striking export growth of China was determined by a strong rise in competitiveness that allowed the country to gain market shares across all sectors and destinations.     

Great Recession and Macroeconomic Theory: A Useless Crisis?

ABSTRACT

The global financial crisis of 2007–08 and the subsequent Great Recession have pushed many economists to acknowledge a fundamental limit in the theoretical models elaborated after the monetarist counter-revolution: these models disregard the financial system. The years following the Great Recession have thus been marked by the development of what can be called the ‘Financial Frictions Approach’, a theoretical approach based on the addition of the financial system to the New Keynesian DSGE model. The results of this line of research are beginning to appear also in macroeconomics textbooks. Significant examples are the publication of the seventh edition of Blanchard’s textbook, and the publication of the third edition of the textbook co-authored by Blanchard, Amighini and Giavazzi. The objective of this work is twofold: (i) to show that the new model presented by Blanchard, Amighini and Giavazzi, which reflects the results of the ‘Financial Frictions Approach’, does not allow to elaborate a coherent explanation of the Great Recession and (ii) to present the pillars of an alternative theoretical model based on the lessons of Keynes, Schumpeter and Minsky.     

A Market and Spatial Perspective of Health Tourism Destinations: The Hungarian Experience

Since health tourism is one of the most popular and most dynamically developing products of modern tourism, this paper aims at studying the characteristic features of health tourism destinations from a regional and spatial perspective. Accordingly, the authors would like to introduce a new approach of spatial and product analysis of tourism where the market and spatial relations and relevance of health tourism were analysed through the example of Hungary. Although the classic medical tourism centres were established on natural medical water basis, by today, due to product diversification, continuous innovation and the involvement of medical services into health tourism, the geographical embeddedness seems to disappear, thus basically restructuring the market. The methodological novelty of the research is that exceeding the classic supply–demand algorithm, we compiled a complex viewpoint system adequate to the specialities of the given product characteristics. In our study, the authors intend to survey the special characteristics of health tourism focusing on medical destinations through Hungarian examples since the country's leading position in the global market is well recognized, including medical services. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing for the omission of relevant variables and regime-switching misspecification

Empirical Economics - This article shows that the interpretation of statistical evidence of regime-switching is not unambiguous. The usual interpretation is that some parameters switch according to...     

Recruitment and selection services: Efficiency and competitive reasons in the outsourcing of HR practices

While human resource (HR) activities have traditionally been performed internally, the outsourcing of HR practices is a rapidly increasing phenomenon. The accelerated rate of HR outsourcing also corresponds to a sweeping change in which non-transactional activities, such as recruitment, selection and training, are among the most outsourced HR practices. This article investigates the outsourcing decisions of recruiting and selection (R&S). It develops a predictive model based on efficiency drivers, rooted in transaction cost economy (TCE), and competitive motivations, derived from the resource-based view. The model has been tested in a sample of 276 medium and large enterprises in two specific contexts: the outsourcing of administrative R&S practices (job advertisement and pre-screening) and that of the more strategic R&S practices (colloquia and selection). Findings confirm the relevance of both categories of predictors, but they reveal how efficiency motivations are more important for the decisions to outsource administrative R&S practices while competitive issues matter more for the strategic side of R&S activity. Theoretical and managerial implications are offered on the basis of such evidence.     

Creating positive habits in water conservation: the case of the Queensland Water Commission and the Target 140 campaign

This case study reports the activities of the Queensland Water Commission (QWC) in securing the water supply for Brisbane and surrounding South East Queensland (SEQ) in response to the worst drought on record. The case focuses on residential water use and examines a three year period from 2006 to 2009. The focus of the study is the interventions of 2007, which centres on the Target 140 campaign. In 2007, the QWC faced with critically low dam levels identified household consumption as responsible for 70% of water use. The eight month Target 140 campaign targeted household users, aiming to change the water use habits of SEQ residents. The campaign achieved not only immediate reductions in water use but also contributed to long term behavioural and attitudinal change. The aim of the campaign was to reduce water consumption from 180 litres (l) /person/day to a target of 140 l /person/day by the end of 2007. This was achieved with water consumption dropping to an average of 129 l/person/day during the campaign and saving over 20 billon litres of water. In 2009, despite the drought broken for over a year and the water consumption target lifted to 200 l /person/day residents were continuing to consume water, on average, less than 140 l /person/day. The outcome was a capstone result for the QWC, and the Target 140 campaign went on to achieve international industry recognition. This case study demonstrates how attitudinal change, goal setting and feedback were key components of the change strategy and outlines the tactics used during the campaign. Furthermore, the case study discusses these mechanisms for change in terms of a theoretical understanding. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting the diffusion of photovoltaic systems in southern Europe : A learning curve approach

Most analysts disagree upon whether photovoltaic systems (PV) will be able to play an important role in the energy scenarios of the future. A few scholars also question the appropriateness of policies that envisage the use of public subsidies to stimulate the growth of this industry and to accelerate market penetration. This paper contributes to this debate by examining whether carefully designed policies may initiate a process of large-scale diffusion of grid-connected PV, even without the deployment of external subsidies. Building upon a disaggregated characterization of the electricity market, it takes endogenously into account the learning curve phenomenon and simulates the diffusion of PV building-integrated systems in five European countries. The analysis is restricted to crystalline silicon systems and is repeated under four different macroeconomic scenarios corresponding to four different energy policies. The results suggest that already today there are opportunities for PV diffusion in many islands of the Mediterranean region, which may trigger sufficient scale economies to render the technology competitive in larger markets. They also show that the diffusion process could be accelerated through the implementation of carbon-tax policies that support initial penetration. The environmental benefits (net avoided CO₂ emissions over the system life cycle) associated with the forecasted penetration are also evaluated.     

Bivariate income distributions for assessing inequality and poverty under dependent samples

As indicators of social welfare, the incidence of inequality and poverty is of ongoing concern to policy makers and researchers alike. Of particular interest are the changes in inequality and poverty over time, which are typically assessed through the estimation of income distributions. From this, income inequality and poverty measures, along with their differences and standard errors, can be derived and compared. With panel data becoming more frequently used to make such comparisons, traditional methods which treat income distributions from different years independently and estimate them on a univariate basis, fail to capture the dependence inherent in a sample taken from a panel study. Consequently, parameter estimates are likely to be less efficient, and the standard errors for between-year differences in various inequality and poverty measures will be incorrect. This paper addresses the issue of sample dependence by suggesting a number of bivariate distributions, with Singh–Maddala or Dagum marginals, for a partially dependent sample of household income for two years. Specifically, the distributions considered are the bivariate Singh–Maddala distribution, proposed by Takahasi (1965), and bivariate distributions belonging to the copula class of multivariate distributions, which are an increasingly popular approach to modelling joint distributions. Each bivariate income distribution is estimated via full information maximum likelihood using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey for 2001 and 2005. Parameter estimates for each bivariate income distribution are used to obtain values for mean income and modal income, the Gini inequality coefficient and the headcount ratio poverty measure, along with their differences, enabling the assessment of changes in such measures over time. In addition, the standard errors of each summary measure and their differences, which are of particular interest in this analysis, are calculated using the delta method.     

TALKING,SEARCHING, AND PRICING*

I study the implications of interpersonal communication for incentives for consumers to acquire information and firms’ pricing behavior. Firms market a homogeneous product and choose its price; consumers acquire price information at some cost to themselves. Also, each consumer accesses the information acquired by a sample of other consumers—interpersonal communication. An exogenous increase in the level of interpersonal communication decreases the information that consumers acquire, and, when search costs are low, firms price less aggressively. In an extension, consumers may choose to invest in interpersonal communication at some cost. A decrease in the costs of interpersonal communication decreases firms’ competition.