of the Conference Program: Rapidly emerging economies such as China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa are taking center stage in antitrust enforcement. Multinational firms must have regard to the competition systems of these and other developing nations when engaging in merger activity, collaborating with competitors, and pricing, distributing, and licensing their products. Competition au...

This study builds a multi-sectoral balance-of-payments-constrained growth model that incorporates structural heterogeneity between sectors and countries, such as differences in labor productivity, price competition, shares of exports and imports, and the quality of commodities. The model in the current paper generates more comprehensive results than those presented by Thirlwall (1979), Blecker ...

1 Introduction This study reviews competition policy in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. The general finding is that progress has been made in the course of accession negotiations with the European Union (EU). The countries under review follow the EU model of legislation, which itself is based on the German tradition of competition policy. Specific circumstances of transition from communi...

Abstract: Krugman’s verdict that competitiveness of countries is a largely meaningless concept is a serious misjudgement of the economics profession. Countries compete for the mobile factors of production, most importantly for capital and technology. The exit-option of these factors and of firms changes the calculus of national governments. This paper sets out the main elements of the concept o...

We collect original data on the degree of decentralization in several thousand firms located in the US, Europe and Asia. Specifically, we focus on the autonomy of local plant managers from their Corporate Headquarters in their decisions over hiring, investment, production and sales. We find that American and Northern European firms are much more decentralized than those from Southern Europe and...

Undoubtedly, during the post-Cold War era, the fields of political competition changed and with the change in the political geography of the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus and Central Asia, as the Soviet Union collapsed and new countries emerged, the field of competition for a change in power balance not only expanded but took on a new form. Economic benefits, diversification of fossil fuels and new...

The dual income tax combines a progressive tax on labor income and a lower flat rate tax on income from capital. Denmark, Finland, $orway, and Sweden adopted dual income taxes to address a set of tax challenges that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although developing countries face much different economic, political, and tax environments from the $ordic countries, the dual income tax m...

For a hundred of years electricity and its delivery were thought to be inseparable. Since the late-1980s and early-1990s things began to change. Due to diverse reasons [13] both developed and developing countries began to abandon the idea of an electricity industry vertically integrated to adopt a new model that allows competition and choice in electricity. The idea of commercial separation of ...

External finance is critical for less established entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection can hinder competition. We model how lobbying for weaker investor protection reduces access to finance and decreases competition in countries where politicians are less accountable to voters. Weaker accountability thus produces a smaller economic elite. As empirical support for this result, in a broad p...

Abstract: The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) will usher in a markedly stronger global system of defining and protecting intellectual property rights (IPRs). This paper analyses TRIPS as a global regulatory device. It first discusses the concept of intellectual property and the need for its protection and regulation. It presents evidence on the wide variation...