Twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter stood conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business on its head by declaring that well designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of...

This document seeks to lay the groundwork for a government policy on free and open source software. We briefly characterize the extent of the open source software phenomenon. We analyse its pros and cons for the government, in its role as both an engine of economic development and a large user...

Ce texte vise à circonscrire les fondements d'une politique gouvernementale à l'égard du logiciel libre et ouvert (open source software). Nous caractérisons brièvement l'ampleur du phénomène du logiciel libre et nous en analysons les avantages et inconvénients pour le gouvernement tant...

This paper explores the aggregation problem and illustrates its relevance using data for the Netherlands from the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS3), and production and financial statistics. It compares the results of an innovation output equation that was estimated using data on...

This paper addresses the paradox between an increasing share of employment and a lower productivity growth of Canadian services vis-à-vis the rest of the economy in the period spanning the three decades from 1961 to 1992. It attempts to reconcile this apparent contradiction with the so-called...

The first part of this report presents the main debates concerning a proposal for establishing an Integrated Product Policy (IPP) in Europe. It shows the importance of applying a systemic approach in order to minimize the negative environmental impacts of products throughout their life cycle and...

Jaffe and Palmer (1997) present three distinct variants of the so-called Porter Hypothesis. The weak version of the hypothesis posits that environmental regulation will stimulate certain kinds of environmental innovations. The narrow version of the hypothesis asserts that flexible environmental...

This paper proposes a framework to account for innovation similar to the usual accounting framework in production analysis and a measure of innovativity comparable to that of total factor productivity. This innovation accounting framework is illustrated using micro-aggregated firm data from the...

This paper studies the persistence of innovation and the dynamics of innovation output in Dutch manufacturing using firm data from three waves of the Community Innovation Surveys (CIS), pertaining to the periods 1994-1996, 1996-1998, and 1998-2000. We estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic...

The Porter Hypothesis says that well-designed environmental regulation should trigger innovations and enhance the competitiveness of firms. This paper, which follows the invitation to participate at a recent workshop financed by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, summarizes...