The post-World War II world trading system is now more than fifty years old, and not surprisingly, it has evolved through a number of different stages of development and survived a series of perils. Recently, however, the perils seem even greater than before. The failure of the Seattle...

The research in this paper has two objectives. Beginning with an examination of the historical development of how financial reporting standards are set in the United States and around the world, the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board will be...

Several interesting developments indicate that world attention is increasingly focusing on a "novel" category of trade barriers: non-tariff and non-border barriers. Following the Uruguay Round (the eighth round of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, "GATT"), scholars...

Seminal papers of Solow (1957) and Swan (1956) stimulated debate among economists on the role of technical change in productivity improvements and for that matter economic growth. The consensus is that technological change accounts for a significant proportion of gross national product (GNP)...

The current study was motivated by statements made by the Economic Strategies Committee that Singapore’s recent productivity levels in services were well below countries such as the US, Japan and Hong Kong. Massive employment of foreign workers was cited as the reason for poor productivity...

There is a continuing debate on whether or not ownership changes accompanying privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) lead to performance improvements of such firms. Since profitability measures alone are possibly inappropriate for SOEs, we address this very significant current question...

Fortunes in the agricultural sectors of four of the largest South Pacific countries are traced in recent decades by estimating the single factoral terms of trade index. The single factoral terms of trade are measured for agriculture in four Melanesian countries-Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon...

Studies of total factor productivity in livestock production are rare, but when available provide useful information especially in the context of developing countries such as China where livestock is becoming more important in the domestic agricultural economy. We estimate total factor...

Diese Dissertation umfasst sowohl einen theoretisches als auch einen empirischen Beitrag zur Analyse der Messung der gesamten Faktorproduktivität (TFP). Das erste Kapitel inspiziert die bestehende Literatur über die häufigsten Techniken der TFP Messung und gibt einen Überblick über deren...

Utilizing the firm-level dataset, this study aims to explore differences in firm-level productivity and growth between Japan, Korea, and China, while at the same time illuminating the mechanism that has driven the narrowing in the productivity gap that can be observed. We pursue two strategies....