Renewed interest in economic growth has encouraged studies of how different sectors have contributed to convergence trends. Comparing productivity levels across countries is notoriously tricky, but one attractive approach has been to deflate sector value added by the PPP exchange rate for GDP....

This paper analyses market valuations of UK companies using a new data set of their R&Dand IP activities (1989-1999). In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at thesectoral level, where the sectors are based on the technological classification in Pavitt (1984).The first main...

This paper extends and modifies the Keynesian critique of inflation targetingwith reference to stabilisation policy in emerging market economies. The IMF‘basic monetary programming framework’ for developing countries usesgovernment borrowing and the exchange rate as policy instruments in...

By assuming Cobb-Douglas production technology, many well-known imperfectlycompetitive macroeconomic models of the labour market (e.g. Layard, Nickell andJackman, 1991) imply that equilibrium unemployment is independent of the capitalstock. This paper introduces a new notion of capacity into the...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employedto encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbontax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology,yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce the...

This paper provides a critical view of the cross country literature on the impact of labour market institutions and policies on the evolving pattern of unemployment in OECD countries. Such widely used indicators as the generosity of unemployment insurance or the strength of trade unions are...

Proposals are often made to tax goods which are environmentally damaging. Manysuch goods are consumed both directly by households and industry at large: for example,carbon-intensive fuel, waste water or congested road space. This paper adopts a tax-reformsetting to evaluate such a policy. The...

The trend towards Internet self-regulation is driven both by gov-ernments that feel reluctant to invest in direct regulation (because offreedom of speech concerns or high cots of monitoring and enforce-ment) and by the industry that is under the threat of rising publicconcerns over content...

Social capital is thought to play an economic role in the labour market. It may beparticularly pertinent in one that is in transition from an administered to a market-orientedsystem. One factor that may determine success in the underdeveloped Chinese labourmarket is thus guanxi, the Chinese...

The paper shows how commodity taxes can provide insurance to consumers when the producer price is volatile. Specific and ad valorem taxes have differing roles. The optimal specific tax is positive when demand has some elasticity. The optimal ad valorem rate is zero when demand is unit-elastic,...