The machine tool industry is tiny but crucial: it supplies the machines to cut, form, and shape metals upon which about half of the manufacturing industries are dependent. The state of the art of the machine tools themselves, their control systems and the organization surrounding them largely...

No abstract.

No abstract.

No abstract.

Market competition is central to innovative activity, the diffusion process and macro-economic productivity growth. Productivity growth at all levels comes about through institutional reconfiguration in response to the ongoing market process. Stable and sustained long-term growth in output...

No abstract.

This paper raises several issues concerning productivity analysis. An attempt is made to demonstrate the usefulness of a micro-based approach to productivity analysis which challenges some basic assumptions of conventional analyses based on aggregate production functions. With the help of a...

The modern manufacturing firm competes with product quality improvements rather than cost efficient production of simpler products. R&D spending, marketing, availability of spare parts and service facilities, customs designs, etc. embody the product quality enhancing process, requiring...

This paper uses a simple model to explore the effects of "increasing demand risk" on business fixed investment. We show that within a putty-clay framework an increase in demand uncertainty can be expected to have two countervailing effects. On the one hand increasing risk tends to induce a firm...