The Uruguay Round and air pollution: estimating the composition,scale and technique effects of trade liberalization

This paper develops a methodology to estimate the environmental impact of the Uruguay Round trade agreement. The impact is estimated in terms of five air pollutants for both developed and developing countries/regions. The methodology estimates environmental Kuznets curves and uses these in conjunction with FranÇois et al.'s (1995) estimates of Uruguay Round income gains and sectoral production changes, together with sectoral pollution intensities from Hettige et al. (1994). In this manner, composition, scale and technique effects of the Uruguay Round on air pollution are estimated. The monetary cost/benefit associated with the pollution changes is also estimated. Results indicate that emissions of all five pollutants are predicted to increase in developing and transition regions as a result of the Uruguay Round, whilst in developed regions emissions of three pollutants decrease and two increase. The results also suggest that the environmental impact will be considerably greater if the Uruguay Round affects the rate of economic growth.     

Overseas Chinese Entrepreneurs: Second Force of Chinese Economy

Most of the foreign-funded enterprises in China are in fact funded by overseas Chinese. They have made indelible contributions to China‘s remarkable economic achievement. Their pioneering spirit has already been written into the glorious annals of China‘s economic development!……     

The environmental performance of firms: The role of foreign ownership, training, and experience

In this paper we extend the debate on the environmental implications of foreign direct investment in developing countries by examining a new mechanism through which foreign influence can affect the environmental performance of firms. We focus on the extent to which key workers who have had previous training or experience in a foreign owned firm transfer and utilise their knowledge gained to the benefit of the local environment. To this end we use detailed firm-level data on manufacturing firms in Ghana. Our econometric results suggest that the foreign training of a firm's decision maker does reduce fuel use, particularly so in foreign owned firms. Foreign ownership per se does not influence fuel use or total energy use but is found to increase electricity use, perhaps the cleanest form of energy used by Ghanaian firms.     

On the size and structure of group cooperation

When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how “much” cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group cooperation vary with the group's size and structure? This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in the class of symmetric, repeated games of collective action. These are games characterized by “free rider problems” in the level of cooperation achieved. The Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games is a special case.We characterize the level of maximal average cooperation (MAC), the highest average level of cooperation, over all stationary subgame perfect equilibrium paths, that the group can achieve. The MAC is shown to be increasing in monotone shifts, and decreasing in mean preserving spreads of the distribution of discount factors. The latter suggests that more heterogeneous groups are less cooperative on average. Finally, in a class of Prisoner's Dilemma games, we show under weak conditions that the MAC exhibits increasing returns to scale in a range of heterogeneous discount factors. That is, larger groups are more cooperative, on average, than smaller ones. By contrast, when the group has a common discount factor, the MAC is invariant to group size.     

Cross-Cultural Methodological Issues in Ethical Research

Despite the fundamental and administrative difficulties associated with cross-cultural research the rewards are significant and, given an increasing trend toward globalisation, the move away from singular location studies to more comparative research is to be encouraged. In order to facilitate this research process it is imperative, however, that considerable attention is given to the methodological issues that can beset cross-cultural research, specifically as these issues relate to the primary domain or discipline of investigation, which in this instance is research on business ethics. Utilising the experience of a four country comparative study of both Asian and Western cultures in the field of business ethics, the following presents a discussion of methodological concerns under the three broad areas of operationalising culture, operationalising business ethics, and data interpretation.     

Harvest and extinction in multi-species ecosystems

A potential cost of harvesting in multi-species ecosystems is the extinction of nonharvested species that are at the same trophic level as the harvested species. Existing analytical models are not well-suited for studying this harvest externality because they focus on species interactions across trophic levels instead of within them. We identify the conditions under which the harvesting of a single species causes at least one extinction of nonharvested species at the same trophic level. We compare two harvest regimes: uniform management, in which a privately optimal harvest rate is applied to the entire ecosystem; and specialized management, in which a portion of the ecosystem is intensively managed for the harvested species and the rest is left unharvested. Which regime is more likely to result in extinction depends on the discount rate and on the harvested species' competitive ability and colonization rate compared to those of the other species.