Empirica
The role of antitrust in opening foreign markets to imports is a strong yet often unpredictable undercurrent in international trade disputes. The U.S. government may seek to protect its exporters who are denied access to a foreign market either by enforcing U.S. antitrust laws or by using trade law remedies against the importing country for not enforcing its antitrust laws. Both actions raise issues...
The article describes a number of remedies available to a private US company for private anti-competitive activity in its export market, including action in US courts or the courts of the foreign market, and World Trade Organization (“WTO”) dispute resolution. The article describes the problems which a would-be plaintiff might perceive. One interesting result is that no matter how good the case on...
As the 20th Century dawned, there were radical divergences in the policies individual nations pursued toward restraints of competition by cartels and monopolies. Since World War II there has been considerable convergence; many nations have adopted explicit pro-competition policies. This paper traces the reasons for the divergence and then convergence and asks what important steps remain to be taken,...
Foreign automobile manufacturers long have found it difficult to compete in the Japanese automobile market. For decades, governmentally imposed restraints prevented foreign manufacturers from gaining a foothold in the Japanese market. In recent decades, these governmental restrictions have been replaced by private restraints which create equally formidable barriers to entry. Many private restraints...
The absence of domestic competition laws in some nations, the weak enforcement of existing competition laws in other nations, and the inability of competition lawenforcement authorities to exchange confidential information, collectively permit the continued existence of private restraints which have the potential to seriously undermine the trade liberalization gains that have been achieved through...
Following a brief review of the economic analysis of vertical restraints, we discuss current policy standards in both Europe and the United States. Since 1981, U.S. policy towards these restraints has been lax, and no restraints were challenged during the 12-year period between January 1981 and January 1993. More recently, the pendulum has shifted back somewhat and there is renewed interest by enforcement...
This paper analyzes vertical restraints in relation to market access issues. In Section II we briefly review the recent three major trade conflicts between Japan and the USA in light of vertical restraints. In Section III we review the major policy lessons of the economics literature of vertical restraints, and analyze whether we need a special treatment for vertical restraints abroad for a market...
Technological cooperation has become more widespread in recent years. Percolation processes have been studied in physics as the outcome of four classes of forces termed as density, external pressure, connectivity and receptivity. In this paper the methodology of percolation processes has been adapted to interpret the dynamics of knowledge flows within innovation networks as communication systems and...
In 1994 the number of workers participating in active labour market programmes in Finland was 299,000. On average there where 125,000 workers in these programmes at any one time, the average length of participation in a programme being about 5 months. In relation to the 2.5 million-strong Finnish labour force, these figures are proportionally large. In 1994 the total expenditure on unemployment amounted...
The paper is concerned with the determination of wages, unemployment and labour productivity in the UK. The theoretical model suggests that in addition to economic factors, historical and ideological elements play an important role in the determination of wages, unemployment and productivity. Particular emphasis is put on the capital shortage hypothesis. It is argued that capital scrapping in response...
Following the predominance of macroeconomic stabilisation policies and passive income support schemes in the first phase of transition, active labour market policies (ALMPs) have now come to play a more important role in transition economies. This paper looks at the Polish experience and provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of ALMPs. We use the Polish Labour Force Survey of August 1994...
Most international monetary policy games are modelled as prisoners' dilemma games. Political scientists suggest however that other game-theoretic structures (chicken, stag-hunt and deadlock games) could be more appropriate to describe international monetary coordination. This paper provides some empirical evidence on this issue, by studying the case of European monetary coordination from 1979 to 1989...
This paper explores the claim that the setting of environmental standards needs to be centralized in order to avoid a competitive race to the bottom. Such a claim represents a fundamental challenge to the basic theory of fiscal federalism. But the theory of interjurisdictional competition, although diverse in approach and findings, does not provide a fully compelling basis for this proposition. Moreover,...
During recent years, using theoretical and simulation models there has been an extensive debate about the welfare and employment effects of ecological taxes. This paper is a comment on this ‘double dividend’ debate from a politico-economic perspective. First, a graphical representation of the main results of the theoretical models developed by Bovenberg et al. is given. After some remarks on the difference...
This paper examines whether there exists a close correspondence in the business cycles of the EU economies. We focus on the timing and magnitude of business cycles and propose criteria for defining close correspondence. We suggest that any correspondence that does exist is confined to the EU core and that, contrary to some of the existing literature, there exists a clear core-periphery distinction...
This paper investigates the employment and welfare effects of an environmental tax reform, i.e. raising environmental taxes and using the revenues to cut labor taxes. The analysis reveals that such a reform does not necessarily raise employment: it may replace explicit labor taxes by higher implicit taxes on labor. However, employment may rise if the reform succeeds in shifting the tax burden away...