Political Obstacles to Globalization: the Daewoo-Thomson Affair

This paper examines some political contstraints which limit the process of globalization. While economic theory would predict that firms locate the various stages of production of their products in those countries demonstrating clear comparative advantages. and while intra-firm trade data shows that multinational firms do, by and large, try to globalize their production, there are occasional political obstacles to such strategies. Many Korean firms have expanded into Europe for economic reasons, but the case of Daewoo Electronics ill fated attempt to purchase Thomson shows that analysts must take political. as well as economic conditions into account before the process of globalization can be understood

Probabilistic forecasting using stochastic diffusion models, with applications to cohort processes of marriage and fertility

In this article, we show how stochastic diffusion models can be used to forecast demographic cohort processes using the Hernes, Gompertz, and logistic models. Such models have been used deterministically in the past, but both behavioral theory and forecast utility are improved by introducing randomness and uncertainty into the standard differential equations governing population processes. Our approach is to add time-series stochasticity to linearized versions of each process. We derive both Monte Carlo and analytic methods for estimating forecast uncertainty. We apply our methods to several examples of marriage and fertility, extending them to simultaneous forecasting of multiple cohorts and to processes restricted by factors such as declining fecundity