West Africa’s Evolving Competitive Exposure in U.S. Import Markets

This study utilizes a recently developed measure of one nation’s competitive exposure to other nations on its export sales to analyze the competitive exposure facing West Africa nations on sales to the United States from 1996 to 2006. The methodology extends previous research by accounting both for similarity in export profiles across nations and for the absolute size of export sales by each nation. We identify changes over time in the importance of different world regions as competitors to West Africa nations, and we highlight the product groups most responsible for West Africa’s competitive exposure to other world regions on sales in the United States.     

Understanding wage determination in a multi-level bargaining system: a panel data analysis

This article presents an estimation of the elasticity of actual wages to industry-level collective bargaining thereby quantifying empirically the role of industry-level bargaining on wage determination. For this purpose, we use a unique employer–employee panel dataset covering the entire Belgian employment population over 9 years (1998–2006). Like several other European countries, e.g. Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, Belgium has a relatively centralised wage bargaining system, with the industry level playing the most important role. Regression results confirm that wage increases collectively decided at the industry level are, on average, fully passed on to individual wages. In addition to industry-level bargaining, we are interested in the supplementary wage increases granted at the firm level, referred to as wage drift or wage cushion in the literature. Our estimates show that wage drift is affected by company size, by the economic performance of the industry and to a much lesser extent by labour market tensions as measured by the local unemployment rate. Interestingly, our results show that industry-level bargaining also takes most of these features into account.     

Cigarette Consumption in Different U.S. States, 1955–1998: An Empirical Analysis of the Potential Use of Excise Taxation to Reduce Smoking

The use of excise taxation as a tool for financing part of Medicaid and national health care costs as well as for discouraging smoking behavior was a major political issue in the 1980s and early 1990s. It failed to gain Congressional support despite a significant increase in both federal and most state tax rates over the past twenty years. Annual data and OLS techniques are used to analyze the demand for cigarettes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia over the period from 1955 to 1998. Results show the demand for cigarettes to be relatively price inelastic. However, the estimates indicate more elasticity for high tax states than for low tax states. The price inelastic coefficient of the aggregate demand suggests that the main impact of taxation is likely to result in increased revenues to states rather than in directly reducing tobacco usage. The ultimate impact on smoking usage depends on how these increased revenues are spent and whether they become directed at smoking reduction. Cigarette demand is also found to be income inelastic, which implies that the tobacco industry has been growing less rapidly or even declining relative to the rising trend of the per capita disposable personal income in many states.