In this modern digital world, goods from the information and communications technology (ICT) sector are the engine of the global economy. While tariffs levied on ICT goods have been eliminated or significantly reduced since the conclusion in December 1996 of the Information Technology Agreement...

Eight multilateral rounds of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and international agreements under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have contributed significantly to the reduction of tariffs among WTO members. However, over the years legitimate reasons for the...

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to...

We study the driving forces behind the adoption of environmental innovations (EI) in the Italian industry over 2006-2008 through analyses of the new wave of Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data that covered for the first time environmental innovation adoptions. We investigate whether the first...

This report summarises the main ideas, proposals, scientific achievements, consensus and conflicting issues that emerged at the Second EFIEA Policy Workshop, held at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Palazzo delle Stelline, Corso Magenta 63, Milan, Italy, March 4th-6th, 1999. EFIEA, the European...

Starting from CO2 emissions data collected during both the production phase and during the lifetime of cars and trucks, we argue that impressive opportunities to reduce emissions can be found in the consumption phase. It is however obvious that energy taxes alone will not lead to a strong...

This paper examines the link between imported technologies and a country's export performance, as measured by product quality. The analysis is set in the background of the process of regional integration between the EU and its neighbouring developing countries. The underlying question is whether...

Over the last two decades privatization programs in different countries radically reduced the role of the State as a key player in the economic arena. We use agency theory to discuss the theoretical relationship between changes in the firm's principal-agent structure following privatization, and...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of privatization on the firms' R&D performance. We expect that, in the early period after privatization, path dependencies still negatively affect the efficiency of R&D operations. We test our hypothesis using a Tobin's q measure and estimating a hedonic...

This paper examines which firms from a heterogeneous pool are more likely to join together and form a research joint venture (RJV). It differs from previous contributions as it introduces a set of realistic hypotheses on the characteristics of research co-operation and information sharing....