Japan has now experienced over a decade of slow growth and deflation. This period has also been associated with protracted problems in the banking sector. A wide range of measures have been tried in to restore health in the banking sector including recapitalization, the extension of 100% guarantees to all deposits, and central bank purchases of shares held by banks. It has also argued that endi...

The Impact of International Outsourcing on the Skill Structure of Employment: Empirical Evidence from German Manufacturing Industries* In recent publications it has been argued that the change of the skill structure of industrial employment is caused by biased technical progress rather than by increasing international trade with low wage countries. However, in linking prices for final goods wit...

In this paper we address an optimisation problem arising from city logistics. The focus lies on a two-level transportation system to deliver goods to customers within densely populated areas. The optimisation problem called the Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem seeks to produce vehicle itineraries to deliver goods to customers with transit through intermediate facilities. A local-search metah...

A “less than truckload” (LTL) network organises the transport of small shipping volumes by truck between given depots. To be cost-efficient it is necessary to bundle and unbundle goods on their way, using depots as so-called hubs. Our aim is to develop a strategic plan which is cost-optimal for given average shipping volumes. We consider transshipment and transport costs; to give a realistic es...

Globalization has allowed goods and services to become increasingly available anywhere in the world. International transport is an essential part of globalization. This paper focuses on the evaluation of air emissions accompanying international transport of goods. The main method in performing the assessment of emissions is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). However, the case study will only deal...

Despite the intensifying debate over the taxation of Internet commerce, the relevant issues have not been given a systematic treatment in the context of the literature on optimal taxation. This article presents such an analysis and investigates separately the taxation of business purchases of intermediate goods, the taxation of consumer purchases of final goods and services, and the various iss...

This paper evaluates various channels through which foreign technology diffuses to the manufacturing sector of selected developing economies. These economies carry out very little (if any) own R&D so they rely on foreign technology to a much larger extent than developed economies. We investigate the direct effect of foreign R&D, as well as technology embodied in imports of intermediate and capi...

This paper examines the experience of 10 Asian countries with respect to growth, trade and FDI. It explores relationships between the nature of exports and imports and growth, as well as the relevance of FDI as a channel for these relationships. We find that FDI is often positively correlated with higher productivity levels in exports and imports. The effect for imports is particularly apparent...

Research in accounting traditionally regards transfer pricing as an intra-firm transaction problem. Within the context of a simple Cournot model, we demonstrate that firms can use transfer prices strategically as a collusive device. While firms are individually better off from a centralized organizational form with each internal division transferring intermediate goods at marginal cost, all fir...

Two dynamic sticky price models with monopolistic competition in the goods market are presented. In the first model, each intermediate goods producer faces quadratic costs of adjusting its nominal price as introduced by Rotemberg (1982); the second model incorporates staggered price setting as proposed by Taylor (1980) and recently discussed by Chari/Kehoe/McGrattan (2000). Using the approximat...