新兴市场区位特定优势所带来的超额利润问题探析——服务业和分销业案例

地域优势带来的额外利润问题不仅限于制造业。近年来,跨国公司陆续将服务型和销售型子公司转移至相对低成本的新兴市场,产生了与制造业转移同样的转让定价反避税挑战。在不同的转让定价方法下,处理该类型公司的地域优势问题遇到的挑战有所不同。面对这些挑战,纳税人和税务当局都必须通过客观而严密的经济学分析进行探讨,方能得出一个各方满意的解决方案。     

Firm Size Distribution in Small Samples

Sutton (1998) has recently proposed a theoretical lower bound to firm size inequality when a market is made of several independent submarkets. His results are valid asymptotically, as the number of submarkets becomes arbitrarily large. We show that, in small samples, his results can be interpreted as a positive relationship between an index of firm size inequality and the number of submarkets. We also test this relationship in the Italian motor insurance market.     

Differential pricing, parallel trade, and the incentive to invest

I consider the case for imposing uniform pricing on a monopolist in a setting where markets can be segmented according to differences in marginal costs and/or consumer demand. I also analyze the ex ante impact on incentives to invest in R&D. I show how two opposite trade-offs arise. When differential pricing is demand-based, uniform pricing has good ex-post welfare properties but leads to lower investment ex ante. Conversely, when differential pricing is cost-based, uniform pricing has bad ex-post welfare properties but leads to higher investment ex ante.     

Municipal Solid Waste,Market Competition and the EU Policy

Two of the main pillars of the EU solid waste policy are the Proximity Principle and the Self-Sufficiency Principle. According to those, waste should be disposed as close as possible to where it has been produced. A likely effect of such provision is to prevent competition from neighbouring areas and increase the market power of local disposers, with possible undesirable consequences for other firms in the vertical chain. We show through a simple spatial model that one additional effect of the Proximity Principle and of the Self-Sufficiency Principle is to provide an incentive to collectors and waste producers to increase the amount of separated waste.     

Regional labour markets and job accessibility in City Network systems in Germany

Spatial labour markets are subjected to the forces of regional economic activity and competing network effects. Commuting is, therefore, an important equilibrating vehicle in a City Network constellation. Cities act as attractors of commuters, as most economic activity occurs in cities, thus providing a high share of attractive workplaces. Cities that are centrally connected in a network may act as both centripetal and centrifugal forces in the whole system. The present paper focuses on what is named the City Network (CN) approach. A central idea is the accessibility concept, which is interpreted here as the potential of opportunity for interaction, which has a positive impact on economic growth. In our paper, the accessibility concept and the CN concept are linked together by positioning accessibility in the CN system. Since accessibility measures give geographical insights into the distribution of economic activities and the related (dis)equilibrium of regional development patterns, the connection with the labour market is evident, and, therefore, a second focus of our analysis.In an applied setting, our paper aims to investigate spatial accessibility patterns in the main CN in Germany. The 17 districts which belong to the country’s CN were chosen from the 439 German labour market districts on the basis of three criteria: (a) their connection to the high speed railway network; (b) the most accessible districts according to previous results (2002); (c) relevant districts for the German economy. Our applied modelling research concerns home-to-work commuters travelling between the selected districts belonging to the German CN, for both 2003 and 2007. Here, a comparative analysis of the ranking of the most accessible districts - also for different intra-zonal travel times - is carried out in order to map out the changes in accessibility between 2003 and 2007, especially in the light of new high speed connections and commuting flow dynamics.     

Contractual networks: an organizational model to reduce the competitive disadvantage of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Europe’s less developed regions. A survey in southern Italy

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Limitations faced by southern Italy’s small enterprises due to their dimensions may be overcome by cooperation strategies and network...     

SEASONALITY,FORECAST EXTENSIONS AND BUSINESS CYCLE UNCERTAINTY

Abstract Seasonality is one of the most important features of economic time series. The possibility to abstract from seasonality for the assessment of economic conditions is a widely debated issue. In this paper we propose a strategy for assessing the role of seasonal adjustment (SA) on business cycle measurement. In particular, we provide a method for quantifying the contribution to the unreliability of the estimated cycles extracted by popular filters, such as Baxter and King and Hodrick–Prescott (HP). The main conclusion is that the contribution is larger around the turning points of the series and at the extremes of the sample period; moreover, it much more sizeable for highpass filters, like the HP filter, which retain to a great extent the high‐frequency fluctuations in a time series, the latter being the ones that are more affected by SA. If a bandpass component is considered, the effect has reduced size. Finally, we discuss the role of forecast extensions and the prediction of the cycle. For the time series of industrial production considered in the illustration, it is not possible to provide a reliable estimate of the cycle at the end of the sample.