Global economy gathering strength

Encouraged by a highly expansionary economic policy, the global economy is enjoying a rapid upturn. Utilisation of capacity is high in many sectors, particularly in the growth centres of the USA and East Asia, where China leads the field. With inflationary risks on the increase, most countries are now shifting the focus of economic policy. Fiscal policy in particular can be expected to provide little in the way of further stimulus. In addition, there has been a turnaround in interest rates in many countries. Yet how quickly can the monetary reins be tightened without jeopardising growth or endangering price stability?     

New ways of achieving debt sustainability beyond the enhanced HIPC Initiative

In 1996 the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative was launched by the Bretton Woods institutions to reduce the external debt burden of low-income countries (LICs) to sustainable levels in a reasonably short period of time because debt constitutes an obstacle to sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. In some HIPCs, however, debt sustainability has been in danger despite debt relief under the HIPC Initiative. Debt relief is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for development. It can do no more than play a catalytic role. The question, then, is how to achieve debt sustainability beyond the HIPC Initiative.     

Management Information System – A Tool for Corporate Sustainability

This paper represents the attempt to define a methodology that can evaluate the degree to which companies' information systems correspond to needs determined by the objectives of sustainability the firm imposes on itself. The result is the creation of a general model which define the correct approach to evaluating information systems – a model which should be adapted to the specificity of each single company which intends to adopt it. In the chart indicated, we obviously have not considered activities connected to the implementation of the survey system, which are particular to each company's situation. The first part of the paper consists of an overall introduction to the approach that has been used to assess the (MIS) of Granarolo, one of the Italian companies involved. The case study contains a profile of the company, the analysis of its MIS referred to the three dimensions of sustainability, and an evaluation of the strong points and issues to be developed. This approach to evaluate the gap between desired requirements of an information system for sustainability and current data available in a firm, has proved its consistency and usefulness. It helps to understand where data are, which dimensions, spheres, stakeholders account for and what is the level of integration between different information systems existing in the firm.     

Dynamic supernetworks for the integration of social networks and supply chains with electronic commerce: modeling and analysis of buyer–seller relationships with computations

In this paper, we develop a dynamic supernetwork framework for the modeling and analysis of supply chains with electronic commerce that also includes the role that relationships play. Manufacturers are assumed to produce a homogeneous product and to sell it either through physical or electronic links to retailers and/or directly to consumers through electronic links. Retailers, in turn, can sell the product through physical links to consumers. Increasing relationship levels in our framework are assumed to reduce transaction costs as well as risk and to have some additional value for both sellers and buyers. Establishing those relationship levels incurs some costs that have to be borne by the decision-makers in the supernetwork, which is multilevel in structure and consists of the supply chain and the social network. The decision-makers, who are located at distinct tiers in the supernetwork, try to optimize their objective functions and are faced with multiple criteria including relationship-related ones and weight them according to their preferences. We establish the optimality conditions for the manufacturers, retailers, and consumers, derive the equilibrium conditions, and provide the variational inequality formulation. We then present the projected dynamical system, which describes the disequilibrium dynamics of the product transactions, relationship levels, and prices on the supernetwork, and whose set of stationary points coincides with the set of solutions of the variational inequality problem. We also illustrate the dynamic supernetwork model through several numerical examples, for which the explicit equilibrium patterns are computed.     

Exports versus FDI: do firms use FDI as a mechanism to smooth demand volatility?

In this paper, we first develop a simple two-period model of oligopoly to show that, under demand uncertainty, whether a firm chooses to serve foreign markets by exports or via foreign direct investment (FDI) may depend on demand volatility along with other well-known determinants such as size of market demand and trade costs. Although fast transport such as air shipment is an option for exporting firms to smooth volatile demand in foreign markets, market volatility may systematically trigger the firms to undertake FDI. We then use a rich panel of US firms’ sales to 56 countries between 1999 and 2004 to confront this theoretical prediction and show strong evidence in support of the prediction     

Vertical Intra-Industry Trade and Foreign Direct Investment between Japan and European Countries

In this paper, we provide an overview of the development of vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT) between Japan and various European countries, including both old and new EU members, as well as emerging Central and Eastern European countries. VIIT indices constructed in this paper cover a much wider range of margins of unit price ratio than existing studies. Our empirical model attempts to explain the distributional characteristics of VIIT through foreign direct investments (FDI), in addition to traditional determinants of IIT, such as differences in GDP per capita, average GDP, and smaller and larger GDPs. Our sample covers the period from 1988 to 2004 for bilateral trade between Japan and 31 European countries. Our econometric methodology for these panel data uses fixed-effect model estimation with a variable transformation determined by a Box-Cox approach. We find that intra-industry trade between European countries and Japan increases with their corresponding Japanese FDIs, especially for new EU member countries. Our results also indicate that it is important to measure a wider range of quality based on relative prices rather than the traditional ratio used in the literature.     

Explaining The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Hump</Emphasis> In Life Cycle Consumption profiles

Summary  This paper documents life cycle (or age) profiles of (log) household income, durable and non-durable consumption for Dutch households after explicitly controlling for time (or business cycle) effects and birth cohort effects. We find that both measures of consumption as well as income is clearly hump shaped over the life cycle. Hence, real consumption per household seems to track income over the life cycle. This empirical regularity is hard to reconcile with basic specifications of the life cycle model. We further document life cycle profiles of demographic and labor supply variables. We argue that part, but not all, of the hump in consumption may be explained by household composition variables. Durable consumption per adult equivalent stays approximately flat until age 60 after which it drops dramatically. This phenomenon may be partly explained by a decrease in work related durable expenditures after retirement. Non-durable consumption per equivalent adult increases steadily until age 55 and stays approximately flat after that.      

On Indexed Bonds and Aggregate Demand Elasticity

Bonds indexed to the price level or inflation have become popular and more common in the industrialized world. This paper examines the impact of indexed bonds on the price level elasticity of aggregate demand. With a model of aggregate demand based on the standard IS-LM framework and expanded to differentiate between bonds which are indexed to the price level and bonds which are not so indexed, we find that the existence of indexed bonds decreases the elasticity of aggregate demand with respect to the general price level.

Should I stay or should I go? Foreign direct investment,employment protection and domestic anchorage

This paper examines theoretically and empirically how employment protection legislation affects location decisions of multinationals. We depart from the “conventional wisdom” by examining not only the effect of protection on inward foreign direct investment (FDI), but also a country’s ability to “anchor” potential outward investment. Based on our simple theoretical framework, we estimate an empirical model, using data on bilateral FDI and employment protection indices for OECD countries, and controlling for other labour market institutions and investment costs. We find that, while an “unfavourable” employment protection differential between a domestic and a foreign location is inimical to FDI, a high domestic level of employment protection tends to discourage outward FDI. The results are in line with our conjecture that strict employment protection in the firm’s home country makes firms reluctant to relocate abroad and keeps them “anchored” at home.