Demystifying Fair Trade in France: The History of an Ambiguous Project

In France, Fair Trade arrived on the scene in the late twentieth century, and since then has passed through several experimental phases before becoming an enduring “realistic” economic alternative. To understand the transformation, this article defines Fair Trade as a social construct issues and tensions of which change depending on the point of entry. By conducting a secondary analysis of several data sets from varied sources, including documentary material, interviews, and observations, the authors trace the history of Fair Trade in France, define its introduction as a system, describe its institutionalization, and contribute to a greater understanding of how its ideals have changed and become more professional over time. The analyses reveal that the term “Fair Trade” has become ambiguous, spanning divergent and conflicting ideas and projects, including opening and closing conventional market systems and alter-globalization and anti-globalization.     

Food availability, food entitlements, and radicalism during the Chinese great leap forward famine: an econometric panel data analysis

The purpose of this article is to investigate the socio-economic as well as the political, institutional, and ideological causes of the Chinese famine of 1959–1961. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the radical policies implemented as part of the Great Leap Forward resulted in agricultural output decline (i.e., availability issues), and in the implementation of an ineffective food distribution policy affecting rural populations (i.e., accessibility issues). An econometric analysis, based on provincial panel data from the 1954–1966 period, stresses the effect of ill-advised economic policies in handling the famine. This analysis also confirms that the increase in mortality rates during the famine was caused by the simultaneous collapse in food availability and food accessibility in rural areas.     

Is international entrepreneurship a field? A bibliometric analysis of the literature (1989–2015)

The abundant academic literature on international entrepreneurship has attracted the attention of many researchers in various fields (international business, entrepreneurship, management, marketing, to mention a few). A debate has been opened on whether international entrepreneurship is indeed a field. In this article, we seek to contribute to this debate. We applied a bibliometric analysis to 567 articles on international entrepreneurship published during the 1989–February 2015 period. The main indices that this is an emerging field are as follows: a concentration of publications on central contributors and universities, key dates of social events, the creation of a journal dedicated to the topic and a strong identity of keywords. A co-citation analysis shows that the international entrepreneurship field is structured on a stable body of references, organised into five key clusters, distinct from its mother disciplines: international business and entrepreneurship. Our work helps to identify the paradigmatic approaches that structure international entrepreneurship.     

Trade Performances, Product Quality Perceptions, and the Estimation of Trade Price Elasticities

Traditional trade models ignoring the dimension of product quality generally lead to excessively low trade price elasticities. This paper estimates import market share equations including a quality image proxy derived from survey data. The estimation results, based on panel data for the four main EU member states, confirm the part played by product quality perceptions in the estimation of trade price elasticities, at least for highly differentiated products. Introducing the quality image proxy into the models leads to a significant increase in the price elasticities, which thus become superior to unity, in conformity with theoretical elasticities of substitution.     

Financial Openness and Growth: Short‐run Gain,Long‐run Pain?*

No empirical evidence has yet emerged for the existence of a robust positive relationship between financial openness and economic growth. This paper argues that a key reason for the elusive evidence is the presence of a time‐varying relationship between openness and growth: countries tend to gain in the short term, immediately following capital account liberalization, but may not grow faster or even experience temporary growth reversals in the medium to long term. The paper finds substantial empirical evidence for the existence of such an intertemporal tradeoff for 45 industrialized and emerging market economies. The acceleration of growth immediately after liberalization is found to be often driven by an investment boom and a surge in portfolio and debt inflows. By contrast, the quality of domestic institutions, the size of FDI inflows and the sequencing of the liberalization process are found to be important driving forces for growth in the medium to longer term.     

Project Mechanisms and Technology Diffusion in Climate Policy

The paper deals with the diffusion of GHG mitigation technologies in developing countries. We develop a model where an abatement technology is progressively adopted by firms and we use it to compare the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) with a standard Cap and Trade scheme (C&T). In the presence of learning spillovers, we show that the CDM yields a higher social welfare than C&T if the first adopter receives CDM credits whereas the followers do not. The analysis leads us to suggest two CDM design improvements: relaxing the additionality constraint for projects which generate significant learning externalities, and allowing collective CDM projects which could internalize learning externalities.     

What Drives the International Transfer of Climate Change Mitigation Technologies? Empirical Evidence from Patent Data

Technology transfer plays a key role in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we characterize the factors that promote or hinder the international diffusion of climate-friendly technologies using detailed patent data from 96 countries for the period 1995–2007. The data provide strong evidence that lax Intellectual Property regimes have a strong and negative impact on the international diffusion of patented knowledge. Restrictions on international trade and foreign direct investment also hinder the diffusion of climate-friendly technologies. Surprisingly, local technological capabilities tend to discourage transfers. While broad indicators of technology capabilities are expected to facilitate transfers, this latter result stems from our technology-specific definition of local capabilities, which makes it possible to capture a substitution effect between local and foreign inventions.     

The setting of voluntary agreements between industry and government: Bargaining and efficiency

This paper aims at providing a preliminary economic analysis of the efficiency of an emerging environmental policy instrument: the so-called voluntary agreement. The use of a data base we have built containing 75 existing agreements in 12 OECD countries allows us to stylise these empirical objects. They are mutually agreed contracts signed between a national administration and a coalition of firms. They include a set of physical pollution reduction objectives to be reached by the firms. According to classical economic categories, they are similar to a traditional policy instrument, i.e. direct regulation, but one which has been devised after an intense negotiation process. As regards efficiency, the key question lies in the impact of such negotiations. In our analytical framework, we distinguish two subjects of negotiation: the collective environmental objective, i.e. the physical amount of pollution to be globally suppressed via the completion of the contract, and the means required to reach the collective objective, i.e. the allocation rule of private pollution reduction objectives. According to these categories a major asymmetry arises in the negotiation structure. When the dominant dimension of the negotiations concerns the environmental objective, firms are clearly opposed to the administration because of their eagerness to obtain as low an objective as possible. In that case, voluntary agreements do not seem to be an original policy approach. They can be compared with classical consultation processes of interested parties when designing new regulations and raise similar questions: the efficiency of information collection and the dangers of regulatory capture. But when the subject being bargained concerns the means to reach environmental objectives which have already been fixed, individual firms become rivals. The logic of such negotiations lies in inter-firm bargaining arbitrated by the administration. Voluntary agreements tend to be an original negotiation-based policy instrument. Decentralised bargaining improves the allocative efficiency.     

The Incentives for North-South Transfer of Climate-Mitigation Technologies with Trade in Polluting Goods

The need to transfer climate mitigation technologies towards the developing world has been acknowledged since the beginning of climate negotiations. Little progress has however been made, as shown by Article 10 of the Paris Agreement. One reason is that these technologies could become vital assets to compete on global markets. This paper presents a partial equilibrium model with two regions, the North and the South, and imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market, to analyze the North’s incentives to accept technology transfer. Results crucially depend on the existence of environmental cooperation. When both northern and southern governments set emission quotas non-cooperatively, inducing fewer global emissions is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the North to accept the transfer. In contrast, when governments set quotas cooperatively, the North has no incentive to share its technology either before or after the agreement. Technology transfer commitments may be included in the agreement, but with no effect on global emissions and global surplus. The only impacts are distributional, technology transfers and side payments may be substitute instruments.