With a population of 82.5 million, the German market is the largest in the EU and therefore of specialinterest for the trade partners. Despite an unsatisfying economic development in the last years (lowestGDP growth in the EU and rising unemployment, see Table 9 in the annex) Germany is still a...

The EU protects EU growers of 15 kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables against internationalcompetition not only by the means of ad valorem tariffs of up to 20%, but also by the EUentry-price system (EPS), which is designed to restrict imports below the product-specific,politically designated...

China has become a major exporter of fresh fruits and vegetables in recent years. Between 2002and 2006, China’s fresh fruit and vegetable exports rose continuously, more than doubling in valueto reach nearly $5 billion US in 2006. The net trade position for fresh fruits and vegetables hasalso...

The objective of this paper is to examine the status of labor-saving mechanization in U.S. fruitand vegetable harvesting. Fruit and vegetable harvest mechanization has several potentialadvantages: reduced harvest costs, eliminate problems associated with finding good qualityharvest labor, permit...

This paper examines how the effort choices of workers within the same firm interact witheach other. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that workers can affect theproductivity of their co-workers based on income maximization considerations, rather thanrelying on behavioral...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units?If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is tocompute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and inputfor each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though, when...

Fahrstuhl, Aufzug oder Lift? - schon allein diese Frage lässt bei Aufzugstechnikernund Branchenexperten Emotionen hochkommen.1 Der Fahrstuhl inder Fachwelt ein verpönter Begriff - ist sowohl in der Alltagssprache als auchim Wirtschaftsteil der Tageszeitungen eine geläufige und unverdächtige...

Diese Arbeit analysiert die Verteilung von technischer Effizienz innerhalb von Branchen des Verarbeitenden Gewerbes. Die technische Effizienz wird als fir-menspezifischer fixer Effekt im Rahmen einer deterministischen Frontier-Pro-duktionsfunktion ermittelt. Als Grundlage hierfür dienen Angaben...

The purpose of this paper is to test the possible catalysing role of in-house R&D in fostering the complementarity of innovative inputs on a sample of 3045 manufacturing firms drawn from the third Italian Community Innovation Survey (1998-2000). The interactions between four different sources of...

This paper attempts to develop a spatial model of economic growth in which technology and externalities are assumed to be accountable for production in geographical space. Linking externalities to the extent of intensity of production across locations in continuous space, we introduce spatial...