Market access and the other determinants of North–South manufacturing location choice: An application to the Euro-Mediterranean area

This paper examines the impact of market and supply accessibility on the geographic distribution of manufacturing sectors in the Euro-Mediterranean area. The evolution of market and supplier access in the area is first investigated. Then, market and supplier access, production cost and regional integration are focused on as the main determinants of industrial location. A deeper regional integration agreements can act as an important dispersion force, driving the location of manufacturing in new member states and Mediterranean countries.     

Productivity growth and biased technical change in French higher education

This paper analyses the nature of technical change in the French labour market. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is adopted to investigate productivity change in a sample of higher education leavers over the period 1999 and 2004. In a first step, the Luenberger Productivity Indicator (LPI) is used to estimate and to decompose productivity change. Following LPI, a better productivity is found for the workers in Paris and the well-qualified occupations in France. In analysing the nature of the technical change by the concept of parallel neutrality, technical progress seems to have influenced all professions. In particular, biased inputs of human capital component benefit more for the well qualified professions with an upper increase of the efficiency scores for executives and teachers. Furthermore, some evidences show the key role of “learning by doing” in the worker's adaptation to technical change. Policy implications are then derived from our results.     

A “New Approach” to Standards and Consumer Protection

As consumer use of information and communication technology (ICT) products grows, the importance of ICT standards in consumer markets also grows. While standards for manufactured products were once developed at the national level in formal standards bodies, standards for ICT products today are more likely to be developed by informal standards bodies that target global markets, creating new challenges for national consumer protection laws. As part of the process of creating a single market, the EU developed an innovative and successful form of “coregulation” known as the “New Approach” that coordinated the work of legislators and standards developers to reduce technical barriers to trade in the internal market. In order to protect consumer interests in markets for ICT products effectively, another “New Approach” is needed to coordinate the work of global ICT standard-developing organizations with the goals of national and regional consumer protection laws, but the institutional challenges facing such a strategy are daunting. The French DADVSI legislation represents progress in this direction; further progress may be possible by adopting “better regulation” strategies.

Home birth: Consumer choice and restriction of physician autonomy

It is frequently argued that home birth is morally irresponsible because it involves the taking of risks on behalf of the fetus. Against this position, I argue three things. First, the fact that home birth involves risks does not necessarily entail that choosing or attending one is morally unacceptable, irresponsible or wrong. Second, parents have a prima facia prerogative to decide on behalf of their fetuses and children whether risks should be taken. While this prima facia prerogative can be overridden, reasonable and widely accepted criteria for doing so are not met in the case of home birth. Third, since the current attitudes and behaviours of physicians with regard to home birth constitute a de facto morally and socially unjustifiable overriding of an informed parental decision, physician autonomy should be restricted so as to preserve the autonomy of the medical consumer.Paul Thompson is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the University of Toronto. He has numerous publications in philosophy of science and in applied ethics and currently is finishing a book on theory structure in biology.Previous versions of this paper were read at the University of Waterloo and York University. I am grateful for constructive comments on both occasions and especially those of Jan Narveson and Donald McNiven. I also am grateful to physicians John McCulloch and Maarten Bokhout for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Actors-in-Time: A Proposed Real Time,Decisional Model for Evaluating the Ethical Content of Decisions in the Financial Services Industry

A number of theoretical approaches to ethicaldecision making in the business context arecriticized as being too complex and cumbersometo be useful in day to day decision making. Byway of a potential solution, the authorspresent a universalistic, real-time model forassessing and resolving ethical decisions. Utilizing this model requires students andpractitioners to evaluate their decisionsaccording to two dimensions. In the firstdimension, stakeholders are identified aseither ``insiders' or ``outsiders' relating tothe differential advantages and/ordisadvantages a decision has on these twogroups. With the second dimension, consequences for the short term and long termfor these two stakeholder groups are assessed. The paper concludes with an illustration fromreal financial services business decisions asviewed through the model. These examplesprovide readers a sense of the model'spotential for consulting and pedagogicalpurposes.     

Assessing the economic costs of high school noncompletion

Disparities in educational attainment exist across states. There are costs, both to the individual and society, associated with low levels of educational attainment. This research estimates the costs of high school noncompletion in terms of income loss for each state. The results suggest that: 1) there are substantial economic costs associated with high school noncompletion ($727 billion in lost income nationally); 2) costs vary widely across states; and 3) in general, states with relatively low levels of per capita expenditures on education incur the greatest losses in income from high school noncompletion.     

Seniority,experience, and wages in the UK

This paper uses BHPS data to investigate the relative importance of seniority and experience in determining male wages in the UK labor market. Using both the Altonji and Shakotko instrumental variable and the Topel two-step estimation approaches, I find that for all male workers, tenure plays a modest role, increasing wages by about 1% each year over the first 10 years on the job. General labor market experience has a larger role, so that after 30 years wages have increased by about 60%. Individual and job match heterogeneity are important, and should be carefully modeled when estimating wage equations for the British labor market. These results are remarkably similar to the most recent evidence about these relationships in the US labor market. After extending the standard model to include industry and occupation experience, the estimated impact of job seniority becomes negligible for nonunion workers. Instead, the wages of nonunion workers rise because of the accumulation of general and sector-specific experience. The wages of union workers are still found to increase with job seniority over the first ten years with their employer, suggesting that if seniority matters for wages it is only for union workers.     

Correlated risks and the value of information

A decision maker faces two correlated risks and can obtain information on only one of them. Intuition suggests that the existence of a high correlation (in absolute value) between the risks should increase total information value. Indeed in such a case information about one risk induces a relevant information on the other one. Using a simple example, we show that this intuition is often correct, but that it can also be mitigated by other factors.