Firm ownership and internal labour practices in a transition economy

One feature common to many post‐socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state‐owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for the entire transition economy if a substantial portion of the labour force works in the state sector. We explore firm wage incentives and worker training, as well as other labour practices and outcomes, in a transition setting with matched firm and worker data collected in one of the largest provinces of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese state sector exhibits a compressed wage distribution in relation to privately owned firms with foreign ownership. State wage practices stress tenure over worker productivity and their wage policies result in flatter wage–experience profiles and lower returns to education. The state work force is in greater need of formal training, a need that is in part met through direct government financing. In spite of the opportunities for government financed training and at least partly due to inefficient worker incentives, state firms, by certain measures, exhibit lower levels of labour productivity. The private sector comparison group to state firms for all of these findings is foreign owned firms. The internal labour practices of foreign firms are more consistent with a view of profit‐maximizing firms operating with no political constraints. This is not the case for Vietnamese de novo private firms that exhibit much more idiosyncratic behaviour and whose labour practices are often indistinguishable from state firms. The exact reasons for this remain a topic of on‐going research yet we conjecture that various private sector constraints, including limited access to formal capital, play an important role.     

Moore's Law and the Semiconductor Industry: A Vintage Model*

In this paper we develop a vintage model to gain a better understanding of the semiconductor industry and its role in recent U.S. productivity gains. Unlike previous work, in our model the observed price declines of individual chips are driven by the introduction of better vintages rather than by learning economies. Dominated chips, nonetheless, continue to be produced, for a time, due to sunk investments in chip‐specific production equipment. The model lends partial support to Jorgenson's hypothesis that an exogenous increase in Moore's Law could have generated the more rapid price declines, and faster productivity growth, seen after 1995.     

文化是生产力发服的内在动力

随着人类社会的发展,社会的文明程度越来越高,人们对文化的认识也越来越深刻.特别是文化与生产力之间的关系引起了人们的广泛关注.文化对生产力发展起着巨大的推动作用.     

Estimating the Impact of Transgenic Bt Cotton on West and Central Africa: A General Equilibrium Approach

West and Central Africa (WCA)’s cotton sector is experiencing rising production costs and lower yields, reversing decades of growth. Declining input use, soil fertility and inefficient chemical pest controls are contributing factors. We evaluate the potential impact of Bt cotton on WCA using a multiregion general equilibrium model and multicountry estimates of Bt-induced productivity. We find that Bt cotton raises growers’ returns, land value and welfare. Released labor from cotton is shifted to food crops hence reducing labor shortage constraints. Overall, results indicate that potential gross benefits from Bt cotton are substantial for WCA cotton sector, and that the economic costs of nonadoption are equally significant.     

论建国以来中国共产党的农业生产力发展观

建国以来,党的农业生产力发展观经历了探索、调整和完善的过程。第一代领导集体的农业生产力发展观偏重于农业制度的改革,进行了以集体组织下改革农业技术的实践,因忽视农民积极性和生产力系统的协调性,其实践效果差。第二、三代领导集体改变了党对农业的领导方式,高度重视农民积极性和生产力系统的协同性,形成了包括发挥农民积极性、现代工程和生物技术与传统农业技术相结合、市场农业和尊重自然规律为内容的农业生产力发展观。这是中国当代农业生产力发展的成功经验,也是党对传统农业重视天地人协调经验的继承。     

The Impact of Cannabis Use on Health

Summary Chronic daily cannabis use has been shown to have long term harmful health effects, which in turn is expected to reduce labour market productivity. The evidence is less clear on the health impact of less frequent consumption, which is the more typical mode of use, and previous empirical studies fail to find robust evidence of an adverse impact of these modes of use on labour market productivity. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by directly estimating the impact of cannabis consumption in the past week and past year on health status using information on prime age individuals living in Australia. We find that cannabis use does reduce self-assessed health status, with the effect of weekly use being of a similar magnitude as smoking cigarettes daily. Moreover, we find evidence of a dose-response relationship in the health impact of cannabis use, with annual use having roughly half the impact of weekly use.Helpful comments on an earlier draft were received from Jan van Ours, Rosalie Pacula, two anonymous referees and participants at the 81st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International.     

Multilateral Comparison of Cost Structures in the Input–Output Tables of Japan,the US and West Germany

This paper presents a multilateral comparison of relative levels and structures of costs of production in Japan, the US and West Germany. The analysis is carried out by using harmonized input–output tables, which are converted at US prices by using adjusted sectoral purchasing power parities. A new accounting methodology is derived from recent developments of index number theory, whereas the chosen multilateral comparison procedure gives results that are invariant with respect to the order of the pairs of countries examined.     

Productivity and Welfare

Technical change is generally characterized by a rate and biases, both evaluated for given producer prices. This paper examines the potential discrepancy between this rate and the corresponding rate of consumer welfare change as measured by Allais distributable surplus. We postulate a general equilibrium context with various market failures (taxes, quotas, imperfect competition, and “poorly priced” commodities), and use comparative statics to express the rate of welfare change in terms of the rate and biases of the technical change. An elementary simulation model of a taxed economy suggests that the rate of welfare change may differ from the rate of technical change by as much as 50% under plausible circumstances.     

Carbon Taxes and Joint Implementation. An Applied General Equilibrium Analysis for Germany and India

Germany has committed itself toreducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent in2005 as compared to 1990 emission levels. Toachieve this goal, the government has recentlylaunched an environmental tax reform whichentails a continuous increase in energy taxesin conjunction with a revenue-neutral cut innon-wage labor costs. This policy is supposedto yield a double dividend, reducing both, theproblem of global warming and high unemploymentrates. In addition to domestic actions,international treaties on climate protectionallow for the supplementary use of flexibleinstruments to exploit cheaper emissionreduction possibilities elsewhere. One concreteoption for Germany would be to enter jointimplementation (JI) with developing countriessuch as India where Germany pays emissionreduction abroad rather than meeting itsreduction target solely by domestic action. Inthis paper, we investigate whether anenvironmental tax reform cum JI providesemployment and overall efficiency gains ascompared to an environmental tax reformstand-alone. We address this question in theframework of a large-scale general equilibriummodel for Germany and India where Germany mayundertake JI with the Indian electricitysector. Our main finding is that JI offsetslargely the adverse effects of carbon emissionconstraints on the German economy. JIsignificantly lowers the level of carbon taxesand thus reduces the total costs of abatementas well as negative effects on labor demand. Inaddition, JI triggers direct investment demandfor energy efficient power plants produced inGermany. This provides positive employmenteffects and additional income for Germany. ForIndia, joint implementation equips itselectricity industry with scarce capital goodsleading to a more efficient power productionwith lower electricity prices for the economyand substantial welfare gains.     

The Productivity of US States since 1880

This study uses state-level variation in labor productivity levels at twenty-year intervals between 1880 and 1980 to examine the relative importance of institutional and geographical influences in explaining observed and persistent differences in standards of living over time and across regions. Focusing on fundamental rather than proximate influences, we find that both institutional characteristics and some physical geography characteristics account for a high proportion of the differences in state productivity levels: states with navigable waterways, a large minerals endowment, and no slaves in 1860, on average, had higher labor productivity levels throughout the sample period. However, we find little support for two other influences that have previously received attention—climate and latitude.