Product competitiveness evaluation— quantitative analysis for development strategy

Product competitiveness is the most important concern for industry and is decided by the interaction of engineering activity with the market environment. This paper describes the characteristics of technological product competitiveness in the market, by use of an ordinal scaling method based on rivalry comparison. The analysis was made for actual data extracted from data on consumer electrical products evaluated over a long period of time. Four methods were examined to quantify ordinal data for competitive evaluation elements. The maximum correlation ratio method was proved to be most reasonable for extracting detailed characteristics regarding product competitiveness in the market. It was also confirmed how the highest and lowest rankings in some element influence total competitiveness. The most competitive product in the electrical consumer market gets the highest ranking in performance evaluation, first or second ranking in timing, and above average ranking in cost, with no major setback in reliability.     

Sources of inefficiency in representative democracy: Evidence on public investments across nations

Besley and Coate (1997 and 1998) exposit a formal model of dynamic fiscal policy that highlights the problem associated with the temporal mismatch between the incidence of benefits and costs. Their analysis focuses in part on the conditions that may result in inefficient public investment decisions in a representative democracy. This paper employs cross-national data to investigate implications of the Besley-Coate model. The findings indicate that several political institutions significantly affect public investments, including term lengths, staggered term expiration dates, and the separation of power between the executive and legislative branches. The findings also suggest that fiscal arrangements for redistributive payments may increase public investments. Received: March 2000 / Accepted: May 2000     

Consumer acceptance,valuation of and attitudes towards genetically modified food: Review and implications for food policy

An increasing set of evidence has been reported on how consumers could potentially react to the introduction of genetically modified food. Studies typically contain some empirical evidence and some theoretical explanations of the data, however, to date limited effort has been posed on systematically reviewing the existing evidence and its implications for policy. This paper contributes to the literature by bringing together the published evidence on the behavioural frameworks and evidence on the process leading to the public acceptance of genetically modified (GM) food and organisms (GMOs). In doing so, we employ a set of clearly defined search tools and a limited number of comprehensive key words. The study attempts to gather an understanding of the published findings on the determinants of the valuation of GM food – both in terms of willingness to accept and the willing-to-pay a premium for non-GM food, trust with information sources on the safety and public health and ultimate attitudes underpinning such evidence. Furthermore, in the light of such evidence, we formulate some policy strategies to deal with public uncertainly regarding to GMOs and, especially GM food.     

Observing bailout expectations during a total eclipse of the sun

The literature has not reached a consensus yet regarding the existence of sovereign creditor moral hazard. Exploiting an exceptional historical example, this paper proposes an original method to address this issue. As the corona which is observable only during a total eclipse of the sun, market-specific prices of repudiated bonds are observable only when extreme conditions segment the markets. Such very rare events allow for isolating pure country-specific bailout expectations. The paper shows that bailouts do create creditor moral hazard. Based on an impulse response analysis, the econometric results further emphasize the influence of bailout expectations in sovereign bonds valuation.     

Cross-sectional tests of the CAPM and Fama–French three-factor model

Grouping does not produce a wide range of betas. Consequently, cross-sectional tests of the CAPM are bound to lack power. This paper provides a simple way to alleviate the problem by repackaging the data with zero-weight portfolios. When the CAPM is true and the data are repackaged, simulation shows that the average values of the intercept and slope converge to their true values more rapidly and there are striking increases in R² and the power of the tests. Empirical results are dramatically different in datasets with and without the zero-weight portfolios.     

Religion and Female Educational Attainment

The paper reviews the literature on the education, gender, and religion nexuses and identifies plausible hypotheses that religion adversely affects female education. The link between major religions and female educational attainment is examined using the Barro-Lee data set for a sample of 97 countries. The estimates include control variables for colonial heritage, urbanization, labor force participation, and young adult mortality. The estimates show powerful negative links between female educational attainment and the proportion of ethnoreligions, Hindu, and Muslim adherents in a country, with similar results for the gender gap. The paper offers some interpretative thoughts and research agendas.     

Measures of per Capita Hours and Their Implications for the Technology-Hours Debate

Structural vector autoregressions give conflicting results on the effects of technology shocks on hours. The results depend crucially on the assumed data generating process for hours per capita. We show that the standard measure of hours per capita and productivity have significant low-frequency movements that are the source of the conflicting results. Hodrick–Prescott (HP)-filtered hours per capita produce results consistent with those obtained when hours are assumed to have a unit root. We show that important sources of the low-frequency movements in the standard measure are sectoral shifts in hours and the changing age composition of the working-age population. When we control for these low-frequency components to determine the effect of technology shocks on hours using long-run restrictions we get one consistent answer: hours decline in the short run in response to a positive technology shock. We further extend the analysis by examining the effects of demographic controls on the impulse responses to investment-specific technology shocks. Our results are less conclusive.     

The quality of a firm's exports: Where you export to matters

What drives export quality? Using Portuguese firm-level data on exports by product and destination market, we find that f.o.b. unit values increase systematically with distance, and tend to be higher in shipments to richer nations. These relationships reflect not only the sorting of firms across markets, but also the within-firm variation of unit values across destinations. Within product categories, higher-productivity firms tend to ship greater quantities at higher prices to a given market, consistent with higher quality. In addition, firm productivity tends to magnify the positive effect of distance on within-product unit values, suggesting that high-productivity, high-quality firms are more able to serve difficult markets.     

Climate and agricultural risk: measuring the effect of ENSO on U.S. crop insurance

Predictive models of climatic phenomena can aid in insurance program design and decision making. Extreme weather outcomes have been linked to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which globally impacts agricultural production. This study demonstrates that extreme ENSO events alter cotton yield distributions in the Southeastern United States. These impacts translate into economically meaningful effects on crop insurance premium rates. Commercial insurers can use publicly available information to determine if government‐set premium rates are mispriced, and in turn extract economic rents via the federally mandated Standard Reinsurance Agreement. By ceding underpriced policies in El Niño and La Niña years, we find that private insurance companies can reduce paid indemnities by 10–15% on average.     

Evaluating the long‐term impacts of promoting “green” agriculture in the Amazon

Frontier development in the Brazilian Amazon has created vast areas of largely deforested landscapes. Conservation efforts in these post‐frontier zones seek to protect the remaining forest fragments and promote sustainable agricultural practices that absorb labor, meet market demand, and generate ecosystem services. Assessments of these efforts often find that rates of sustained uptake are disappointingly low and that impacts are difficult to discern, but this could be due to the short‐time frames of both the efforts themselves and their evaluation. We investigate the impacts of participation in an internationally sponsored farmer association that for 15 years promoted sustainable agricultural practices in the heavily deforested state of Rondônia, Brazil. Using data from a georeferenced four‐period panel survey of farmers in combination with remote sensing data on land use spanning the life of the association, we apply matching methods to estimate the impacts of participation. We find that membership resulted in more diversified production systems, including more land allocated to agroforestry. Members also deforested less of their farms, but this difference is not statistically significant after we control for selection bias in membership.