Pursuing a biotechnology system of innovation in Lithuania: a conceptual framework for effective policy intervention

The focus of this paper is on Lithuania, whose government released an ambitious innovation strategy to become an innovative services hub for Northern Europe by 2015, and an innovation hub by 2020. Biotechnology has been identified as a strategic sector, and whether Lithuania will be able to achieve its ambition of a fully functioning biotechnology sectoral system of innovation will be explored. With the Lithuanian government declaring that they will intervene to achieve their innovation goals, this paper argues that sound policy intervention is possible and can be done in a way that avoids the limitations of past systemic approaches. The policy approach presented is based on a modified extended industry life cycle, and the movement of system structures through three phases – background, pre-emergence and emergence – and explains how each phase lays the groundwork for transition to the next phase.     

Trade Unions and Consumerism

Public pension systems have long been a focus of special attention by neoclassical economics. In a context of intense aging processes, mainstream economists argue that the replacement of the pay-as-you-go pensions systems by unfunded individual savings accounts will have a positive impact, at a microeconomic and at a macroeconomic level, and will protect pension systems of the negative consequences of aging. However, these conclusions depend dramatically on the assumptions of rational expectations and perfect information. When we accept the existence of uncertainty, the presumed positive consequences of these reforms disappear, showing the advantages of pay-as-you-go over funded pension systems.     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

Corporate Control and the Decapitalization of Subsidiary Corporations: The Looting of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is examined from the perspective of experimental methods in economics and complex adaptive systems simulations. This paper first discusses the justice principle selection process in Rawls's representation of it as a hypothetical experiment. This hypothetical experiment fails to satisfy reasonable experimental controls, particularly as reflects the conception of the individual it employs. The second section of the paper discusses the differences between Rawls's two conceptions of rational persons associated with his distinction between thin and full theories of the good. The third section uses his fuller conception of rational persons, life plans, and psychological laws in the third part of the book to offer an alternative view of the selection process understood as a complex adaptive system. The fourth section turns to a topic raised by this complex system approach, the status of normative reasoning in political-economic systems. The fifth section summarizes.     

Fuller Employment with Uptrending Prices: The 1968 Economic Report

When used in those spheres of life where attaching a price tag or making an economic calculus is impossible or loses any meaning, markets usually under perform and disappoint. In addition to empirical shortcomings of markets, the unrealistic theoretical assumption and poor predictive and explanatory value of neoclassical equilibrium theory provides fertile ground for critics of the institution of markets. Complexity theory provides a theoretical framework that enables us to analyze the role of markets from a radically different perspective than that offered by neoclassical equilibrium theory and, therefore, to reach very different conclusions about the role of markets in industrialized economies.     

A cause for policy concern: the expansion of household credit in middle-income economies

This article discusses the significance of the recent growth in household credit across a range of middle-income economies. This growth is understood primarily as a result of policy, including the promotion of individual borrowing as a means to fund access to housing, education and health. A formal model of credit extension and allocation is developed, establishing that consumption lending makes a comparatively stronger contribution to aggregate profitability as well as financial fragility than production lending. Consumption lending may be understood to create distinctive endogenous tendencies to credit-market instability. The findings point to the need for a critical reconsideration of reliance on this lending for social and macroeconomic policy.     

Counting outputs,capital inputs and caring labor: Estimating gross household product

The estimation of Gross Household Product, the economic value added by the unpaid work and own capital of households outside the boundary of the System of National Accounts, should be addressed through household input-output satellite accounts which count household outputs, value them at market prices, and include an allowance for capital as a factor of production. This paper uses internationally comparable survey data to estimate the relative magnitudes of the gender division of the millions of hours of paid, unpaid and total work in twelve OECD countries, puts a dollar value on Gross Household Product in Australia, looks more closely at who provides care and nurture in households and suggests some urgent issues for attention.     

The Political Economy of Addressing the Climate Crisis in the Earth System: Undermining Perverse Resilience

The Earth system is a complex adaptive system, characterised by non-linear change and with significant capacity for surprise. In times of systemic crisis, such as dangerous anthropogenic climate change, perverse resilience (for example the structural power of fossil fuel interests in the global economy) can threaten overall Earth system stability. Critical political economic analysis recognises climate change as a threat with significant political economic characteristics and implications. However, key dimensions of climate change as a globally coherent phenomenon, including the important implications of Earth system dynamism and non-linear change, can remain unrecognised, mischaracterised or underestimated. In contrast, resilience approaches describe social-ecological systems but neglect the significance of norms and power relations in human societies. This article builds theory by linking key concepts – hegemony and resilience – from neo-Gramscian political economic analysis and resilience approaches to social-ecological systems. Our objective is to generate a new conceptual framework to improve understanding of the role of politics in social-ecological systems. We use climate change and its mitigation to demonstrate the new framework's potential.     

The Place of Biotechnology in Modern Civilization: A Veblenian Analysis of Public Misgiving Toward Embryology in the United States

Embryonic stem cell research and cloning are among the most controversial and ethically-loaded scientific advances of the past few decades. This paper argues that, in the context of recent theoretical developments in anthropology and cognitive psychology, Thorstein Veblen's work on the place of science in modern societies can provide a theoretical framework to study public misgiving toward embryology in the United States. It is argued that combining insights regarding human cognitive predisposition toward ritualization offered by Veblen with evolutionary theory on hazard-precaution systems and religious cognition may shed some light on the "peculiarity" of the initial public responses to embryology. Ultimately, this paper contends that understanding that initial reactions to embryology may follow a cognitive path of least resistance signifies that assessing the legitimacy of embryology will necessitate a deliberate effort toward instrumental thinking that may go against human cognitive predispositions.     

Does the Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme Foster Innovation in European Firms?

This paper studies whether environmental management systems can spur eco‐innovation, analyzing EMAS (Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme) adoption and patented innovations (at the European Patent Office) at firm level. It uses an original panel database of 30 439 European firms belonging to all sectors from 2003 to 2012. An original instrumental variable is implemented to control for potential endogeneity. The analysis reveals that EMAS adoption is conducive to more innovation at the firm level. The results vary across countries and sectors. In particular, EMAS is positively related to green patents for medium and low technology manufacturing. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment