Determinants of trade policy responses to the 2008 financial crisis

The collapse in trade and contraction of output that occurred during 2008-09 was comparable to, and in many countries more severe than, the Great Depression of 1930, but did not give rise to the rampant protectionism that followed the Great Crash. Theory suggests several hypotheses for why it was not in the interest of many firms to lobby for protection, including much greater macroeconomic"policy space"today, the rise of intra-industry trade (specialization in specific varieties), and the fragmentation of production across global value chains ("vertical"specialization and the associated growth of trade in intermediates). Institutions may also have played a role in limiting the extent of protectionist responses. World Trade Organization disciplines raise the cost of using trade policies for member countries and have proved to be a stable foundation for the open multilateral trading system that has been built over the last fifty years. This paper empirically examines the power of these and other theories to explain the observed pattern of trade policy responses to the 2008 crisis, using trade and protection data for seven large emerging market countries that have a history of active use of trade policy. Vertical specialization (global fragmentation) is found to be the most powerful economic factor determining trade policy responses.Free Trade,Trade Policy,Economic Theory&Research,International Trade and Trade Rules,Debt Markets

Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of a Novel Bio-Based Multilayer Panel for Construction Applications

The bioeconomy can be integral to transforming the current economic system into one with reduced environmental and social impacts of material consumption. This work describes a bio-based multi-layer panel that is based on residual coniferous bark. To ensure that the presented bio-based panel positively contributes to environmental protection while remaining competitive with conventional products and meeting high social standards, the development of the panel is accompanied by a life cycle sustainability assessment. This study performs a comparative LCA and LCC of the developed panel to conventional benchmark panels, as well as a qualitative social life cycle assessment. While the panel performs only economically marginally weaker than the benchmarks, the results are more heterogeneous for the environmental dimension with benefits of the bio-based panel in categories such as climate change, acidification, and ozone formation and detriments in categories including eutrophication. The S-LCA analysis shows that all of the involved companies apply social principles in direct proximity; however, social responsibility along the supply chain could be further promoted. All results need to be viewed with the caveat that the manufacturing processes for the new panel have been implemented, to date, on a pilot scale and further improvements need to be achieved in terms of upscaling and optimisation cycles.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement number 723670, with the title “Systemic approach to reduce energy demand and CO2 emissions of processes that transform agroforestry waste into high added value products (REHAP)”

DAPHNE: An Open and Extensible System Infrastructure for Integrated Data Analysis Pipelines

Integrated data analysis (IDA) pipelines—that combine data management (DM) and query processing, high-performance computing (HPC), and machine learning (ML) training and scoring—become increasingly common in practice. Interestingly, systems of these areas share many compilation and runtime techniques, and the used—increasingly heterogeneous—hardware infrastructure converges as well. Yet, the programming paradigms, cluster resource management, data formats and representations, as well as execution strategies differ substantially. DAPHNE is an open and extensible system infrastructure for such IDA pipelines, including language abstractions, compilation and runtime techniques, multi-level scheduling, hardware (HW) accelerators, and computational storage for increasing productivity and eliminating unnecessary overheads. In this paper, we make a case for IDA pipelines, describe the overall DAPHNE system architecture, its key components, and the design of a vectorized execution engine for computational storage, HW accelerators, as well as local and distributed operations. Preliminary experiments that compare DAPHNE with MonetDB, Pandas, DuckDB, and TensorFlow show promising results

FDI and the Consequences: Towards more complete capture of spillover effects

We analyze productivity spillovers of FDI on domestic companies, both within and across industries. In the identification of intraindustry spillovers, we separate out labor market effects from other effects. Interindustry spillovers are identified through upstream, downstream, and supply-backward linkage effects. Dynamic input output tables are used to construct the linkages. For a panel of Romanian firms, we find evidence that labor market effects differ from other intraindustry effects. Spillovers across industries dominate those within industries. The supply-backward effect behaves as predicted by theory. Firm-specific level of technology, firm size, and ownership structure are all found to affect spillovers.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64405/1/wp886.pd

Measuring competitiveness in Europe: resource allocation, granularity and trade. Bruegel Blueprint Series Volume XVIV, January 2016

One of the most important lessons learned during the 2008-09 financial crisis was that the informational toolbox on which policymakers base their decisions about competitiveness became outdated in terms of both data sources and data analysis. The toolbox is particularly outdated when it comes to tapping the potential of micro data for the analysis of competitiveness – a serious problem given that it is firms, rather than countries that compete on global markets

Assessing supply disruption impacts along the supply chain within life cycle sustainability assessment - a novel approach applied to the Swiss economy

The Swiss service-oriented economy is as many other Western economies almost exclusively dependent on the supply of materials and products from abroad and related supply chains often involve several actors around the world. The supply chains for technologies used in the Swiss mobility, energy provision and storage as well as ICT sectors, three key sectors with a high economic and strategic importance for the Swiss economy, are particularly complex. Due to their complexity, these supply chains may be affected by supply disruption events occurring anywhere around the world. Just recently, significant disruptions in the supply chains of these three sectors have for example been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brexit and the China-United States trade war. To build more resilient supply chains, it is key to anticipate and manage supply risks and to implement technologies associated with comparably low supply risks. A common way to identify such supply risks is the evaluation of supply disruption impacts with criticality assessment approaches. Some of these approaches have been integrated into the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) framework to, amongst other benefits, allow for assessing the socio-economic impacts of supply disruptions and environmental, economic and social impacts with the same approach and thus for avoiding burden-shifting between these two types of impacts. Key limitations of the existing approaches assessing criticality within LCSA are however that they do not allow for evaluating supply disruption impacts along the entire supply chain as well as for addressing different time horizons. This dissertation thus aims to address this research gap with the development of the SPOTTER approach. The objective of the SPOTTER approach is to provide a quantitative assessment of supply disruption impacts along the full supply chain in the short-term (i.e. the next 5 years) and medium-term (i.e. in 5 to 15 years) that allows for identifying the most relevant supply risks within global supply chains and over different time horizons. To this end, it analyzes supply disruption hotspots (i.e. relatively highest impacts along the supply chain) and determines overall supply disruption impacts (i.e. the total impact for the supply chain) over the two time horizons. The hotspots and overall impacts caused by global and country-specific supply disruption events are thereby assessed and aggregated into the two categories cost variability and limited availability. Considered events comprise six short-term events geopolitical instability, child labor restrictions, trade barriers, depletion of economic resources, price volatility and limited recyclability as well as four medium-term events demand growth, co-product dependency, primary raw material reliance and depletion of ultimate resources. Scores of the overall impacts and hotspots are calculated by multiplying amounts of inventory flows (i.e. material/product flows between different country-specific supply chain processes) with respective characterization factors (CFs) that define supply disruption impacts on the product system. These CFs are case-specific and are defined based on supply disruption probability and vulnerability indicators. This dissertation has provided an overview and has explained the rationale of the SPOTTER approach by illustrating the selection and use of the indicators defining the CFs and by presenting how the scores of overall impacts and hotspots are calculated. Given the challenges regarding data availability for assessments along the supply chain, a procedure for the practical application of the SPOTTER approach has additionally been presented. This procedure, here called the 'SPOTTER implementation procedure' involves guidelines for scope definition, inventory analysis, screening of inventory flow relevance and impact assessment. After the method development, the application of the SPOTTER approach has been demonstrated in a first case study, where the hotspots of supply disruptions in the short-term have been analyzed along the cobalt and aluminium supply chains of electric vehicles (EVs) used in Switzerland by following the 'SPOTTER implementation procedure'. Based on this case study, data sources suitable for an assessment with the SPOTTER approach have been identified as well as the quantification of the inventory flows along the supply chain, the calculation of impact scores and the interpretation of results from the hotspot analysis have been explained. The location of the identified hotspots have been presented on global maps and the magnitude of the hotspots in relation to the overall impacts have been illustrated with pie charts and stacked bar charts. The hotspots with the relatively highest magnitudes suggest, on the one hand, potential disruptions of cobalt ore supply from the Congo to Australia and Canada, EV supply from the USA to Switzerland, EV wiring supply from Mexico to the USA and Al wire supply from Bahrain to Morocco. On the other hand, these hotspots indicate potential supply disruptions in the global markets of traction batteries and EV components used in the USA, cobalt powder and battery components used in China and South Korea, cobalt ore used in Australia and EVs used in Switzerland. Furthermore, the results of the hotspot analysis have been compared with the results of existing studies. This comparison has shown that some results such as the indication of an unstable cobalt supply are in line with the outcomes of existing studies but also that our study provides new country-specific information about relevant supply risks along the full supply chain. To determine bottlenecks in the supply chains of infrastructure and fuels used in the Swiss mobility, energy and ICT sectors and to identify technologies associated with comparably low supply risks used in these three sectors, a second case study has been performed. In this case study, supply disruption hotspots have been analyzed and the impacts of different technologies have been compared. Considering the tremendous efforts regarding data acquisition and computation for such an assessment on a sectoral level, a screening procedure that allows for identifying the most influential inventory flows for an assessment with the SPOTTER approach has been introduced. This procedure is executed as an integral part of the goal and scope definition and inventory analysis within the SPOTTER approach. It has then been demonstrated how to apply the screening procedure in combination with the 'SPOTTER implementation procedure' for the hotspot analysis and impact comparisons performed in this case study. Results of the hotspot analysis regarding the supply of infrastructure have been presented for each sector individually and for the combination of the three sectors. These results suggest that supply disruptions may occur especially along supply chains of solar panels, nuclear power plant equipment, lithium-ion batteries and electronic devices, which describe key technologies for the Swiss economy. In particular, relatively high impacts have been identified related to the supply of cobalt, natural graphite, gallium, hafnium, battery cells, mobile phones, laptops and flat-screen monitors from African or Asian countries as well as related to the supply of solar panels, hafnium powder and natural graphite from the global market. The results of the hotspot analysis regarding the fuel supply, which have been presented for the combination of all three sectors, indicate high risks for the supply of natural gas, coal, uranium and petroleum oil from Russia, Niger and Nigeria as well as potential supply disruptions in the global market of coal, uranium and fuel wood. The results of the impact comparisons suggest that the utilization of some key technologies used within the different sectors is associated with a relatively lower supply risk. For example, lower overall impacts have been assessed for the implementation of wind turbines compared to solar panels and the supply of German laptops compared to Chinese laptops. With regard to the mobility sector, the comparison between battery electric cars and conventional cars indicates that the utilization of battery electric cars has higher risks for the supply of infrastructure but lower risks for the supply of fuels. Additionally, the results of the performed hotspot analysis and impact comparisons have been compared with the results of existing studies. This comparison has shown that our study provides besides some already presented results in the literature such as the hotspots of cobalt or the comparably higher impacts for the infrastructure used in battery electric vehicles also new and more comprehensive information about relevant supply risks within global supply chains for different sectors of an economy. The information on supply risks provided with the two case studies has finally been considered for suggesting suitable risk mitigation measures targeted toward policy-makers in Switzerland as well as Swiss companies and retailers. It has thus been demonstrated that our case studies with the SPOTTER approach provide so-far missing information that is relevant for the identification of pertinent risk mitigation measures

Subsistence agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe: how to break the vicious circle?

Subsistence agriculture is probably the least understood and the most neglected type of agriculture. In a globalised, market-driven world, it remains at the same time a myth and a marginal phenomenon. CONTENTS: Subsistence Agriculture in Development: Its Role in Processes of Structural Change; Franz Heidhues, Michael Brüntrup. Institutions and Technologies for Subsistence Agriculture: How to Increase Commercialization; Zvi Lerman. Policy Options to Overcome Subsistence Agriculture in the CEECs; Joachim von Braun, Daniela Lohlein. Decision Making Patterns of Subsistence Farmers in Bulgaria; Plamen Mishev, Philip Kostov. Commercialisation of Subsistence Agriculture in Transition Economies: On Imperfect Competition, Market Development and Support Policies; Ernst-August Nuppenau. Development Perspectives of Subsistence Farms in Southeastern Poland: Social Buffer Stock or Commercial Agriculture? Martin Petrick, Ewa Tyran. The Market Potential and Patterns of Contemporary Agriculture in Romania's Northwestern Plain; Csaba M. Kovács. Subsistence Farming in Bulgaria: Between Tradition and Market Requirements; Diana Kopeva, Nivelin Noev. The Significance of Subsistence Farming in Georgia as an Economic and Social Buffer; Hannah Kegel. Agrarian Reform and Subsistence Agriculture in Russia; Vladimir Yefimov. Economic Background and Development Opportunities of Individual Subsidiary Holdings in the Ukraine: Some Empirical Evidence; Andriy Nedoborovskyy. Modeling Subsistence Agriculture in Russia: Effects of Total Productivity Changes and Reduction of Marketing Margins; Peter Wehrheim, Peter Wobst --

FDI and the Consequences: Towards more complete capture of spillover effects

We analyze productivity spillovers of FDI on domestic companies, both within and across industries. In the identification of intraindustry spillovers, we separate out labor market effects from other effects. Interindustry spillovers are identified through upstream, downstream, and supply-backward linkage effects. Dynamic input output tables are used to construct the linkages. For a panel of Romanian firms, we find evidence that labor market effects differ from other intraindustry effects. Spillovers across industries dominate those within industries. The supply-backward effect behaves as predicted by theory. Firm-specific level of technology, firm size, and ownership structure are all found to affect spillovers.FDI, spillovers, absorptive capability, firm size, ownership structure