Total factor productivity is a method of measuring overall productivity of businesses, industries or economies. It is an approach which is recently becoming popular among government regulatory agencies when applying the so-called performance-based regulation. This principle induces regulated...

This paper tests the external spillover effects of the transportation on China’s economic growth from the theoretical and the empirical perspectives. Based on a logarithm production model, this study first proves the existence of the positive externality in the transportation. After that, the...

This paper examines the issue of measuring logistics costs from an applied trade policy research perspective, as well as identifying logistics-intensive sectors. It focuses on currently available data at the macro- and firm-levels. Data sources considered include national accounts, national...

We construct a political economy model to analyze the political acceptability of road pricing policies. We use a citizen-candidate framework with a population composed by three groups differing for their income level. We show that road pricing policies are never applied when there is no...

Altai is the only region of Russia, bordering China, which does not have direct highway between adjacent states. Building of the straight transit highway, connecting China and Russia, in the Altai region has important strategic meaning. Chinese-Russian Altai frontier region is mostly mountainous...

India’s share of the global textile industry is expected to grow from 4% to 7% by 2011-12 and the share of apparel in the export basket is expected to increase from 48% to 60%. A Vision 2010 for textiles formulated by the government after exhaustive interaction with the industry and Export...

The purpose of this paper is threfold: first, to empirically investigate the cost-structure of railway systems in the ten European Countries of the European Union. second to provide measures of economies (diseconomies) of scale and fully investigate the manner by which economies of scale have...

We investigate how contract specificities affect the performance of municipal infrastructure projects in transportation, district heating, water, waste water and solid waste. Using data from projects financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), we look at the effect...

Urban performance currently depends not only on the city’s endowment of hard infrastructure (‘physical capital’), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (‘human and social capital’). The latter form of capital...

Since the mid 1900’s, economist have come to recognize the role of innovative activity in firms productivity growth, particularly in the competitive market economies. However, the most conducive market environment for innovative activity has also become a subject of interest. Thus, a major...