Cambridge Economics

The aim of this paper is to evidence the benefits of a coordinated and symmetrical policy approach in the reduction of macroeconomic imbalances among Eurozone countries by analysing the exploitation of the trade potential with emerging economies as an instrument to reduce such imbalances. To this end we estimate potential trade flows with the group of BRICs and calculate the effect on both trade and current account balances. The results indicate that for the main economies, such as France, Italy and Spain, a coordinated and symmetrical policy intervention in order to increase competitiveness and exploit the trade potential with BRICs will cause substantial improvements in their trade balances. In addition, by means of panel estimates we find a direct effect of net trade increases on public debt reductions in Italy and France. Hence, we conclude that coordinated and symmetrical measures to improve the competitiveness of deficit countries can be a substitute for austerity policies to reduce the debt to GDP ratio in Southern Europe.

The aim of this paper is to evidence the benefits of a coordinated and symmetrical policy approach in the reduction of macroeconomic imbalances among Eurozone countries by analysing the exploitation of the trade potential with emerging economies as an instrument to reduce such imbalances. To this end we estimate potential trade flows with the group of BRICs and calculate the effect on both trade and current account balances. The results indicate that for the main economies, such as France, Italy and Spain, a coordinated and symmetrical policy intervention in order to increase competitiveness and exploit the trade potential with BRICs will cause substantial improvements in their trade balances. In addition, by means of panel estimates we find a direct effect of net trade increases on public debt reductions in Italy and France. Hence, we conclude that coordinated and symmetrical measures to improve the competitiveness of deficit countries can be a substitute for austerity policies to reduce the debt to GDP ratio in Southern Europe.

This study assess the impact of NIRSAL microfinance Bank Covid-19 loan in promoting growth and sustainability of SMEs in Nigeria from critical review of literatures in this area. The paper relied chiefly on secondary and partly on primary sources of data. The methodology employed for the study is the desk research approach. From the vivid analysis it is well-known that awareness was insufficient disfranchising many, accessibility to the portal for registration was a challenge there by disfranchising many intended applicants. This findings is consistent with the earlier researches conducted by other people. The study thus concluded that even though the objectives of the loan facility were undermined the loan facility has greatly impacted on the socioeconomic well being of those who got it and that of their family members hence cushioning the adverse effects of Corona virus pandemic on small and medium scale enterprises. The study recommended; increase awareness, credibility in the disbursement process use of agent banking for effective and efficient disbursement and repayment and improved network for easy access to the online portal for application.

This study has a twofold objective: 1) to examine the effects of the "growth-utilization rate" (the rate of growth over the rate of profit) on inflation, and 2) to investigate the empirical performance of the Phillips curve on the same subject. The estimations refer to Greece for the period 1961-2022. The relationship between the "growth-utilization rate" and inflation is examined by applying the statistical method of "transfer entropy" and an ardl model. We also employ linear regression and multiple econometric specifications to examine the stability and structural changes in the relationship between inflation and unemployment. The empirical analysis reveals significant effects of past inflation and the growth-utilization rate on current inflation, both in terms of short-term effects and longterm coefficients. In contrast, there is considerable variation in the Phillips curve across different economic periods, with substantial evidence of regime-dependent parameters. In short, the Phillips curve

The world feels itself to be in transition, but to what is unclear. Will the liberal market model retain its normative primacy once some semblance of normality is restored, or will other varieties of capitalism, with a bigger role of the state, acquire more legitimacy? The answer depends partly on one's explanation for the current crisis. This essay argues, first, that global imbalances had too important a role to ignore, in contrast to a mainstream view that focuses on mistakes in monetary policy and financial regulation. It argues, second, that in light of global dynamics, the crisis is likely to become worse by early 2010-which, on the face of it, makes significant reorganisations of capitalism more likely. The third section lays out what should be done to reconfigure capitalism at national and international levels. The final section discusses the political economy of policy reforms in terms of the difficult translation from what should be done to what can be done. The broad conclusion is that in five years from now the liberal market model will have been restored to normative primacy and 'we must have more globalization' will again be the elite rallying cry; but the crisis will have left behind sufficient doubts about factual propositions and value priorities that political parties and economists advocating alternatives will have more scope than they have had for the past three decades.

Krishna Bharadwaj, following upon the work and insights of Sraffa, made substantial contributions to our understanding of what is implied in the neoclassical notion of change and its related notion of choice; in this respect she appears closer to the spirit of Sraffa's critique of neoclassical theory than many others. She also supplemented important elements in building an alternative approach, based on classical political economy, which is free from the need to employ marginal magnitudes and does not require hypothetical or potential changes to determine the resting positions of economic variables. Moreover, the notion of choice is rescued from the parable of 'preferences' and given more meaningful contents, allowing for consideration of habits, customs and power relationships.

Standard postulates concerning the aggregate production function are about marginal productivities and the associated demands for labour and capital. These demands are supposed to be negatively related to the factor prices, namely the wage rate and the profit rate. The theoretical cases in which these neoclassical properties fail to hold are regarded as anomalies. We compute the aggregate values for production, capital, and labour and find that the neoclassical postulates do not hold for the detailed dataset that we consider. The obvious implication of this result is that the models and analysis based on the aggregate neoclassical production functions are ill-founded as they are based on something that does not exist.

Copies of this article can be made free of charge and without securing permission, for purposes of teaching, research, or library reserve. Consent to other kinds of copying, such as that for creating new works, or for resale, must be obtained from both the journal editor(s) and the author(s). M@n@gement is a double-blind refereed journal where articles are published in their original language as soon as they have been accepted.

In an assessment of Lawson's social ontological analysis of the modern corporation, we consider what is marginalized: the significance of the status and the effects of the separate legal entity (SLE). The SLE is conceived as a specific type of construct that is ascribed particular properties through its stabilization within and between different (legal and economic) discourses. By showing how the SLE, as a reified construct, is rendered meaningful, real and/or consequential, we illustrate how the 'social ontology' of the modern corporation is radically contingent and inescapably contested. Given that the social ontology of the corporation defies definitive specification, we regard the prospect of the completeness of its disclosure (e.g. by foregrounding a specific referent) as problematic. Indeed, any account of social ontology that foregrounds a specific referent is seen to obscure a political process in which the stabilization of the SLE rests on the contingent foregrounding of particular priorities. This leads us to reflect on the power-inflected social organization of knowledge generation. Key to the explication of social ontology, and with specific reference to the corporation, is not, as Lawson contends, the concept of 'community' but the inescapability of contestation within relations of power that translate ontological openness into specific but precarious forms of ontic closure.

The market of domestic services in China has grown rapidly since the country embarked on market transition in the late 1970s. Domestic workers for eldercare are in especially high demand as a result of the aging population and the changing family structure. This paper examines the relative pay of domestic workers for eldercare and its underlying determinants. The estimates show that holding constant the observable individual characteristics, domestic workers for eldercare earn 24 percent less than do other types of workers in the service sector in Shanghai. The analysis attributes the low wage of eldercare workers to the fact that domestic work is culturally devaluated, that eldercare is performed by workers from the most marginalised segment of the labour force in the cities, and that the users of eldercare are relatively poor among the users of paid domestic services.

Calls for more pluralistic and critical forms of economics education have gathered momentum in recent years, often as part of broader initiatives towards 'rethinking' economics. In this article, I reflect on these calls from a foundation year perspective. Inquiring into the meaning and implications of a pluralisation agenda at this level of study, I seek to clarify the critiques its proponents advance against mainstream economics education, the direction of change they propose, and the terms on which this is justified. I also consider the pedagogical and practical challenges associated with pursuing pluralism in a foundation year context. Arguing that pragmatism and creativity are needed if these challenges are to be successfully negotiated, I present an example of what this might mean in practice. This is drawn from three years of work to embed pluralism in an international foundation programme (IFP) economics module at a UK university. While far from perfect, this serves to indicate the possibilities that exist for enhancing pluralism at this level, and what the rewards for doing so might be.

We investigate the mechanisms that shape the gender wage gap in Portugal and provide a clear measure of the impact of the allocation of workers to firms and to jobs. We find that one fifth of the gender gap results from segregation of workers across firms and another fifth from job segregation. We also conclude that the "glass ceiling effect" operates mainly through worker allocation to firms rather than occupations. Our results are based on the application of Gelbach's decomposition method to the conditional wage gap obtained from a wage equation with high-dimensional fixed effects. This approach may prove to be equally useful in applications to other problems in economics.

We tackle the issue of the possible instability of the Kaleckian distribution and growth model and the consequences for the endogeneity of the equilibrium rate of capacity utilization and for the paradox of thrift and the paradox of costs. Distinguishing between Keynesian and Harrodian instability, we review various mechanisms that have been proposed to tame Harrodian instability while bringing back the rate of utilization to its normal rate. We find that the mechanisms that have been suggested are far from being convincing. We thus review some approaches arguing that the adjustment towards a predetermined normal rate should not be expected at all, either because the normal rate reacts to the actual rate, or because of other constraints on the behaviour of entrepreneurs. We conclude that Kaleckian models are more flexible than their Harrodian and Marxian critics suppose when attacking the simple textbook version.

's economy is navigating troubled waters. From small retailers to legacy giants like Hudson's Bay, closures are no longer isolated events-they're symptoms of a larger, systemic issue. At the root is a steep drop in purchasing power caused by inflation, stagnant wages, and high living costs. This has triggered a vicious cycle: weakened consumer spending leads to business failures, job losses, and further reductions in demand-feeding an economic spiral that's difficult to escape.

Despite the recent massive reduction in communication costs, and the talk of virtual organisations, the empirical evidence shows that geographically clustered companies are more innovative. This paper highlights the possible reasons for this by focusing on the knowledge sharing problems that reside within the networks between companies. It draws on the evolutionary economics perspective of innovation, which includes an understanding of the learning process that occurs in the industrial milieu or atmosphere between companies and how they share tacit core competencies. This milieu enables tacit to tacit knowledge sharing to operate in that wicked problem domain that arises when a specific product development or process improvement problem has not even been defined. It is an important topic, and one that needs some management, not only because this milieu appears to be the main source of innovation, but also because it underlines some of the complexities of tacit knowledge management.

This paper examines the regional aspects of industrialising the backward region, while suggesting industrial planning strategies. It analyses region-wise industry structure and development prospects among the categorised regions. It further examines the fast-growing industries, basic and service industries and regional industrial concentration. Industrial diversification policy is examined in the context of building a case for industrial dispersal. The paper at the end analyses the extent and spread of industrial linkages across the categorised regions of the State to quicken the process of industrial dispersal.

Pacts for employment and competitiveness (PECs) in Germany reflect a process of organised decentralisation, delegating additional rights and responsibilities for industrial relations agreements to the plant level. PECs are now used by both struggling and prosperous firms. An analysis of the content of recent agreements shows that the economic situation of the firm has a significant impact on changes agreed at the firm level. Changes in working time are associated with the demand for the products and services of a firm while financial concessions by employees are more common in firms with weak profits.

The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 was not an act of collaborative global progress. It was the quiet coronation of a global financial oligarchy, in which 44 appointed delegatesnone of whom were elected by the people of the world-constructed a neo-colonial world order under the guise of economic cooperation.

The debate about corporate purpose is a recurring one that has re-emerged today. What should be the guiding principles of business: the pursuit of profit or a contribution to public well-being? We trace key elements in this debate in the UK and the US from the interwar years, when John Maynard Keynes and Adolf Berle made important contributions, to the present. Both the earlier and the current debates are centred around whether we see business institutions as strictly private entities, transacting with their suppliers, workers and customers on terms agreed with or imposed upon these groups, or as part of society at large and therefore expected to contribute to what society deems to be its interests. Whether current developments will ultimately produce a shift in corporate purpose akin to the one that followed the Second World War remains to be seen. But the parallels to the interwar debates, and the uncertain economic, political and social environment in which they took place, are striking. Our objective is to see what might be learned from the past to inform the current direction of thought concerning capitalism and corporate purpose.

L'Europe est en crise et des doutes se font jour sur la capacite de l'Union europeenne (UE) a y faire face. Cette crise et ces doutes ont de nombreux points communs. Ils sont profonds, multidimensionnels et sans doute durables. Pour les comprendre et proposer, modestement, quelques solutions, il est necessaire d'emprunter une demarche d'ensemble integrant les trois principales facettes de l'UE : un marche fonde sur l'echange et la solidarite, un ensemble de normes de droit adossees a un systeme de protection juridictionnelle et un espace politique en construction caracterise par la tension entre un centre fragile et de solides systemes nationaux.

We undertake a comprehensive descriptive and comparative ontology of capital in the history of economic thought post-1870. Beginning with the pioneering contributions of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Clark and Knight, we reassess the familiar dualistic ontology of capital that contrasts ‘materialist’ and ‘fundist’ approaches. Advancing beyond this dualism, we find that the ontology of capital is an evolving mosaic presenting many nuances and overlapping with other ontologies concerning notions of time and atomism. There is no substitute for examining the diverse theories, causal explanations and conceptual systems in which capital is embedded. In episodic capital controversies, economists have employed distinctive metaphors of capital revealing hidden presuppositions that imply specific functional and dispositional properties of capital. Ontological comparison can uncover implicit ideas about capital, as evidenced in the metaphors used by Böhm-Bawerk, Hayek and Robinson. The benefits of a de...

This chapter discusses Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to human development from the standpoint of the concept of happiness. It locates Sen's work against the background of the recent capabilities versus happiness debate. Sen's version of the capabilities approach is commonly regarded as a critique of the happiness approach to development ethics. It is sometimes assumed that he attaches no importance at all to the value of happiness. I argue that this view misrepresents what Sen has to say about the value of happiness in his writings. A distinctive feature of Sen's views on this subject is that he agrees with the view that happiness is nothing more than subjective mental state and rejects the idea of objective happiness. This distinguishes his version of the capabilities approach from the ethical eudaimonism of both Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Sen could and should have taken this idea more seriously than he does.

The purpose of this article is to show that the 'great recession' of 2007 in the USA is of the classical type with basic features the rising value composition of capital which more than fully offset the rising rate of surplus value giving rise to a falling rate of profit. The tendential fall of the latter, from a point onwards, led to a stagnant mass of real net profits, thereby decreased net investment and eventually impacted on employment. The evolution of capital intensity and the consequences of unproductive activities remain key issues in the discussions of capital accumulation and its periodic ruptures.

This paper extends the empirical analysis of the labor theory of value using input-output data from the Korean Economy for the years 1995 and 2000. The results of the analysis suggest that the Korean economy displays similarities with a number of other economies a s regards to the proximity of labor values, Sraffian prices and prices of production to actual market prices. Furthermore, our findings of the wage-profit rates frontiers for the Korean Economy for the years 1995 and 2000 preclude the case of reswitching of techniques. This result lends additional support to the labor theory of value a s an analykal tool for the understanding of the laws of motion of modem economies.

This article presents a socio-economic analysis of the evolution of construction of inflation in France. Analysis of the various open or more muted controversies that underlie the history of the index throughout the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century shows that the various challenges to the index have always been and continue to be linked, albeit to varying extents, to issues around economic distribution and representations of wealth. However, the actors engaged in these controversies and the principles around which they are organised have changed: politics, which brought into play the various social relations between government, statistical agencies and trade unions, has gradually given way to more scientific considerations, which has meant that the more recent controversies have been more technical in nature. And by giving experts a greater role to play, these controversies have also tended to play out at an even greater distance from the traditional actors. It is also shown that these controversies are embedded in a real world which, because of its increasing complexity and singularity and its (justifiable) concern with quality, is not fully captured by the available tools, despite their sophistication.

Although entering a currency union involves both costs and benefits, an increasing body of research is finding that the benefits -in terms of international trade creation -are remarkably large. For example, Rose (2000) suggests that countries can up to triple their trade by joining a currency union. If true the impact on trade, income and welfare should Iceland join EMU could be enormous. However, by focussing simply on EMU rather than the broad range of currency unions studied by Rose, we find that the trade impact of EMU is smaller -but still statistically significant and economically important. Our findings suggest that the Iceland's trade with other EMU countries could increase by about 60% and that the trade-to-GDP ratio could rise by 12 percentage points should Iceland join the EU and EMU. This trade boost could consequently raise GDP per capita by roughly 4%. These effects would be even larger if the three current EMU outs (Denmark, Sweden and the UK) were also to enter EMU.

This article draws on Marshall's conceptualisation of external economies as expression of collective efficiency within the realms of industrial organisation and development. Marshall found them clearly expressed in the industrial districts (IDs) of his age, being an alternative to the growing importance of corporate efficiency driven by large firms. An extended literature, pivoting around the re-emergence of IDs and other forms of local productive systems since the 1980s, has acknowledged again the role of an evolved generation of external economies of development (EED), to which we refer as Marshallian EED. The article aims, first, to provide an integrated and comparative view of the sources and types of such EED; and, secondly, to propose an extension to tendencies in contemporary industrial spaces, including but not limited to thriving IDs. We see last ones' sources as featured by cross-sectoral, cross-societal, cross-governance, and cross-territorial processes that help manage continuous transformation in the face of contemporary disruptive challenges. We introduce here the concept of Marshallian external economies of transformation. Incessant change does not prevent the relevance of variations rooted in Marshall's heritage.

Chapter 12 of the General Theory is one of the best essays to explain the current predicament in the mechanics of the financial markets. As the global economic turmoil that began in August 2007 continues to send shock waves across the world, the Keynesian message on the state of long-term expectation is more relevant than ever. The goal of this paper is to look at the message of Chapter 12 in the General Theory from the author’s personal perspective as an analyst in the financial services sector in Switzerland and observe how relevant it is to understanding the functioning of the financial markets.

While the colonial powers had access to lands and related resources in other countries for their initial phases of industrialisation, this choice is mostly unavailable to postcolonial countries. In this paper its consequence for the model of accumulation with land acquisition as the central variable in a post-colonial democracy is analysed through a government enabled corporate led industrialisation strategy. We develop a model of land acquisition in Section 2 with its implication for land use patterns taking into account the impacts of demand constraints due to a limited domestic and foreign market. The analysis brings out the net effect of land utilization pattern on employment and output in various situations, and shows its links with the growth of the informal labour markets as a necessary adjunct of the corporate land acquisition model. In section 3 the impact on the informal economy is considered in some details. It shows how a general scheme of cost and regulation arbitrage employed by the corporate sector captures to some extent its impact on the informal sector. The intertwined development of the organized with a vast unorganized sector requires political legitimization to be sustainable. The concluding section 4 deals with the typical legitimization strategies that are adopted to define a spectrum, and the emergence of varieties of corporate capitalist democracies with different role of the state. The paper attempts to identify some elements that partly account for success and failure of the state in ushering in development in post colonial democracies. ☆ This article is part of a special issue entitled: 'Decolonising Economic Development' published in World Development. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1kzgL,6yxDWH88

This paper examines the recent saving performance of the Chilean economy in the light of its long-run trends. The first conclusion that can be derived from the data is that most of the increase in private saving since the mid-1980s is due to business saving. Household saving turns out to be a stationary variable with zero mean. Since business saving has a unit root, households do not seem to take the saving of firms into account when making their own saving decisions. Within the theoretical framework of a model of business investment with liquidity constraints, we estimate a VAR for business saving, private investment, public saving and foreign saving (the current account deficit). We are able to determine that business saving is unaffected by public saving, but that, in the long run, foreign saving and business saving are perfect substitutes. Private investment, business saving and foreign saving are jointly determined. The policy conclusions are that policies that stimulate investment are likely to lead to an increase in private saving, that policies aimed at raising household saving will be ineffective, and that increases in public saving are very powerful for increasing domestic saving in the long run.

The diversity in the eurozone has costs and advantages, respectively, for countries whether they are confronted with an overvalued or undervalued euro. Rough estimations of these costs and benefits help to assess the adjustments that could lead to a sustainable eurozone. A purely financial type of federalism, set up under the pressure of financial markets, risks falling short of the objective. A budgetary federalism, if it is based on long-term investment programmes with an enlarged political support, is more likely to meet the objective. A scheme of multispeed Europe could constitute a fallback solution if the political support for a budgetary federalism is not attained.

This paper examines the Indian reception of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) by focusing on book reviews published in prominent Indian journals. While Krishna Bharadwaj’s review in The Economic Weekly (1963) has received significant scholarly attention, this has not been the fate of Sukhamoy Chakravarty’s review in Arthaniti (1961) and J. K. Mehta’s review in the Indian Journal of Economics (1962). In Bellino’s (2008) book chapter focused solely on book reviews of PCMC, there is only a brief engagement with Bharadwaj’s review and the book reviews of Chakravarty and Mehta are only mentioned. From my study of the Indian book reviews, the following key themes emerge: a restatement of key propositions of classical political economy, a critique of marginalism, the relationship between economic theory and policy, and similarities with input-output analysis—thus placing these reviews, especially that of Bharadwaj, as some of the best ones that were published.

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Cambridge Journal of Economics following peer review. The version of record Mustafa Caglayan, Firat Demir, Exchange rate movements, export sophistication and direction of trade: the development channel and North-South trade flows, Cambridge

We undertake a comprehensive descriptive and comparative ontology of capital in the history of economic thought post-1870. Beginning with the pioneering contributions of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Clark and Knight, we reassess the familiar dualistic ontology of capital that contrasts 'materialist' and 'fundist' approaches. Advancing beyond this dualism, we find that the ontology of capital is an evolving mosaic presenting many nuances and overlapping with other ontologies concerning notions of time and atomism. There is no substitute for examining the diverse theories, causal explanations and conceptual systems in which capital is embedded. In episodic capital controversies, economists have employed distinctive metaphors of capital revealing hidden presuppositions that imply specific functional and dispositional properties of capital. Ontological comparison can uncover implicit ideas about capital, as evidenced in the metaphors used by Böhm-Bawerk, Hayek and Robinson. The benefits of a descriptive and comparative approach are further illustrated in our critical appraisal of the modern monetary ontology of capital associated with Piketty, business finance and growth accounting. Differentiated by their specific ontologies, each explanation of capital in market economies should be regarded as at best a very partial account, though our assessment shows that some explanations are relatively more fragmentary and impoverished than others.

The dominance of the 'growth fetish' ideology has much contributed to lure societies into believing that people's value judgements are unnecessary for a better life and social justice. The theme 'human values' became the central research topic for the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report team in Brazil after the promotion of a nationwide consultation to choose the focus of its 2009/10 report. A new index, named the Human Values Index (HVI), was created to tackle the issue of human values as part of development strategies. The main objective of this paper is to introduce this index, showing its features and properties. The HVI is built on an understanding that development is not a value-neutral concept and that from a human development perspective, welfare indicators should be qualitatively closer to human values focusing on statistics that can be useful to ordinary citizens, with the hope that in their hands the HVI might become a useful tool in promoting public reasoning and social justice.

The paper connects the concepts of well-being and social cohesion. By using Sen's capability approach to well-being, and analysing the socio-psychological literature on cohesiveness in groups and communities, we explain when social cohesion has positive effects on the development of social capabilities and human well-being. Furthermore, we discuss cases and conditions in which stronger social cohesion may delay the achievement of the kind of goals Sen has in mind. Finally, we suggest a multidimensional idea of social cohesion, which is well-suited to the well-being perspective here endorsed.

The paper connects the concepts of well-being and social cohesion. By using Sen's capability approach to well-being, and analysing the socio-psychological literature on cohesiveness in groups and communities, we explain when social cohesion has positive effects on the development of social capabilities and human well-being. Furthermore, we discuss cases and conditions in which stronger social cohesion may delay the achievement of the kind of goals Sen has in mind. Finally, we suggest a multidimensional idea of social cohesion, which is well-suited to the well-being perspective here endorsed.

The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection presents research in progress by Levy Institute scholars and conference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service. Through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the United States and abroad.

This paper reviews the results of several decades of research in the history of economic thought based on the implementation of big-data quantitative analysis. To this end, the computerization of important first editions of the oeuvres of Smith, Malthus, J.S. Mill, Marx and Marshall, as well as the complete files of the first economics journal, has made possible a growing range of more reliable and detailed evolutionist-statistical studies on national representations, cognitive distances and patterns of continuity and change in the classical and neoclassical literature over the past two-hundred years.

High-technology industries make special contributions to a nation's long-term economic performance, and competition among the most advanced countries for high-technology production has increased strongly over the past two decades. The present paper, using an original data base and taxonomy for trade flows in high-technology products, demonstrates that in the period from 1970 to 1990 there were significant changes in the competitive positions of the United States, Japan and the former EC (now EU) countries. Japan undoubtedly achieved the highest gains, whereas US competitiveness has experienced a process of relative decline, and EU industry has suffered sharp losses in domestic and international markets, particularly in electronics. This general evolution, however, has been sharply differentiated with respect to the various product groups included in the high-technology category. The evidence of the paper seems to suggest that these changes constitute long-term competitive trends and may be attributed to structural factors as well as to macroeconomic and exchange rate flucruaoons.

This article applies the distinction of production/nonproduction activities in an input-output framework and examines the impact of this distinction on economic growth. More specifically, it employs Miyazawa's method and decomposes the standard input-output (IO) matrix of technological coefficients of the United States for the period 1995-2018 into two submatrices. The first submatrix includes the matrix of technological coefficients of production sectors while the other of the nonproduction ones. In so doing, the article estimates the effect that each type of sectors exerts on the other and on economic growth. The findings suggest that the distinction is meaningful to account for economic growth and, moreover, the production sectors are the ones that support nonproduction activities and growth in general.

The had come to this attractive French city south of Lake Geneva to discuss the problem of business cycles and their effect on the world economy. Little agreement was reached over the three days during which these leading economists met. But there was a single consensus among the attendees. One of the other participants at the conference, Gottfried Haberler, had set an example and standard for how research on the subject of business cycles should be undertaken. According to the official summary of the conference: There was throughout the whole conference one matter which secured the wholehearted support of all those present, namely the new technique in research which has been followed during the last two years in the study of the theory of the business cycle by Dr. Haberler. It will be recalled that he was appointed to a special post on the staff of the Economic and Financial Section of the League [of Nations]. ... He was charged with the duty of examining the present state of knowledge in the theory of the business cycle and was to draw up a report on this subject. . . . [T]here can be no doubt that everyone present was greatly impressed by the very valuable results that had been achieved by the procedure followed in the case of Dr. Haberler´s ______ * Cortesía de Ideas on Liberty, July 20; The Foundation for Economic Education Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. 10533. ** Richard Ebeling is Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics and chairman of the economics department at Hillsdale College.

This paper is concerned with conflict and the operation of local networks of civic engagement in the Nigerian market place. African markets are commonly significant meeting points-associational sites -for diverse ethnic and social groups: the economic and social exchange which takes place there in the 'everyday' is the epitome of social engagement and cooperation. But at times of tension the market place is a frequent flashpoint where conflict becomes tangible and conflagration a regular outcome. We examine the role of a range of internal and external institutions and actors in market and trader dispute regulation. Our case study analysis shows the remarkable role which is regularly played by local actors and networks of civic engagement within and in the vicinity of the Nigerian market space to diffuse tension and, where disputes emerge, to reinstate order. These components are a reflection of the value placed on traditional market trading spaces in Nigerian society: they remain essential to the livelihood and wellbeing of millions of people, rich and poor.