Review of The British Commonwealth and Victory in the Second World War by Iain E. Johnston-White

Review of The British Commonwealth and Victory in the Second World War by Iain E. Johnston-White

The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War Revised Edition (Book Review) by Jacques R. Pauwels

Review of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War Revised Edition by Jacques R. Pauwel

Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day (Book Review) by Marc Milner

Review of Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day by Marc Milne

Review of The Endless Battle: The Fall of Hong Kong and Canadian POWs in Imperial Japan by Andy Flanagan

Review of The Endless Battle: The Fall of Hong Kong and Canadian POWs in Imperial Japan by Andy Flanagan

Decomposing and Analyzing Korea’s Declining GDP Growth: Some Cautions and Suggestions

Chin Hee Hahn and Sukha Shin (2007) have developed new decompositions of Korean economic growth from 1990 to 2004. They find that Korea’s declining GDP growth has been accompanied by a sharp decline in capital deepening and an increase in total factor productivity. By contrast, Jorgenson and Vu’s (2007) decompositions of Korea’s GDP growth find that total factor productivity decreased over this period. This paper compares the two decompositions; evaluates Hahn and Shin’s hypothesis that competition from Chinese imports may be driving the decline in GDP growth; and briefly presents four other candidates (decline in Korean savings, business cycle effects, weak IT investment, and regulatory and wealth redistribution initiatives) that could be partially responsible for the slowdown in Korean GDP growth.GDP, TFP, China, Korea, capital, labor, decomposition, productivity.

Globalization and SMEs: A Comment on Three Asian Experiences

This paper briefly discusses three case studies (Choi and Tcha 2005; Lin 2005; Motohashi 2005) of responses by small and medium-size manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to the rising tide of imports from China in their product markets. They find vastly different responses in each country, with some firms relocating plants to mainland China; others exiting affected product markets; and some maintaining home country production by moving up the product ladder and using new production technologies. This paper conjectures that outmoded production technologies may underpin the exit of Japanese SMEs from these product markets; considers the impact that potential impact of Chinese imports on Korea’s attachment to a market economy; and finds that Taiwan’s SME investments in mainland China have substantial political as well as economic roots. The long-run response by Northeast Asian SMEs to Chinese competition will, in all three countries, be closely tied to SME development (via in-house or cooperative R&D) or acquisition of rights to new products and technologies. I conclude that a better understanding of the public and private institutions structuring SME contracting vis-a-vis R&D projects and technology acquisition is vital to each country’s development of effective policy responses to the meteoric rise of China.Globalization, SMEs, creative destruction, exports, imports, entry, exit

The Singular Values of the GOE

As a unifying framework for examining several properties that nominally involve eigenvalues, we present a particular structure of the singular values of the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE): the even-location singular values are distributed as the positive eigenvalues of a Gaussian ensemble with chiral unitary symmetry (anti-GUE), while the odd-location singular values, conditioned on the even-location ones, can be algebraically transformed into a set of independent $\chi$-distributed random variables. We discuss three applications of this structure: first, there is a pair of bidiagonal square matrices, whose singular values are jointly distributed as the even- and odd-location ones of the GOE; second, the magnitude of the determinant of the GOE is distributed as a product of simple independent random variables; third, on symmetric intervals, the gap probabilities of the GOE can be expressed in terms of the Laguerre unitary ensemble (LUE). We work specifically with matrices of finite order, but by passing to a large matrix limit, we also obtain new insight into asymptotic properties such as the central limit theorem of the determinant or the gap probabilities in the bulk-scaling limit. The analysis in this paper avoids much of the technical machinery (e.g. Pfaffians, skew-orthogonal polynomials, martingales, Meijer $G$-function, etc.) that was previously used to analyze some of the applications.Comment: Introduction extended, typos corrected, reference added. 31 pages, 1 figur