Privatization and policy competition for FDI

In this paper, we provide an explanation of why privatization may attract foreign investors interested in entering a regional market. Privatization turns the formerly-public firm into a less aggressive competitor since profit- maximizing output is lower than the welfare-maximizing one. The drawback is that social welfare generally decreases. We also investigate tax/subsidy competition for FDI before and after privatization. We show that policy competition is irrelevant in the presence of a public firm serving just its domestic market. By contrast, following privatization, it endows the big country with an instrument which can be used either to reduce the negative impact on welfare of an FDI-attracting privatization or to protect the domestic industry from foreign competitors

A transputer Based Laser Scanning System

This paper presents a transputer-based laser scanner. This is to be integrated into an existing transputer-based mariufacturing environment to allow rapid construction of' 3-0 models. The approach allows Z-gradient informaticm to be obtained from a 2-D image by illuminating areas of interest with a form of structured light. An active scanning system is described. Simple algorithms are applied to the raw image data to extract concise information. This foveal analysis greatly reduces the data to be processed, allowing a simple and fast method for analysis. The system primarily consists of a video camera wlhich obliquely views a scene being scanned by a laser. The principle, the procedure, and methods of scanning are described. An overview of the principles of foveal analysis, the prototype experimental system and initial results are presented

Opportunities And Challenges for organic producers to access to finanacial services in Bolivia

The lack of access to finance for small organic producers is the cause for side-selling experiences from the organic chains into the conventional chain. This issue risks the organic agriculture movement in some have not countries. Organic producers in these contexts frequently suffer from entering into the international and national organic markets. This is also due to the lack of suitable loan services that should be provided by public and private actors. This study shows mainly the opportunities and limitations for small organic producers in Bolivia to access to loan services taking into account four study cases in this context

WIDER Working Paper No. 2013/055

The effectiveness of foreign aid for sustainable energy and climate mitigation H-Holger Rogner

Financial Innovation, Firm Size and Growth

Small …rm lending has historically been very costly because of the paucity of information. We study the disproportionate impact of …nancial development (measured as the current level of a …nancial system) and …nancial innovation (measured as its change) on small …rm sectors. We incorporate …nancial innovation and …nancial development into a Schumpeterian endogenous growth model. Entrepreneurial skill on a continuum of types is private information; thereby creating adverse selection problems. In the absence of …nancial innovation, an arrival of new technology frontier renders existing screening technology obsolete; thereby having largely negative impacts on small …rm sectors. Our model suggests that …nancial innovation is more pronounced in small-…rm sectors in more …nancially developed countries. The linkage between …nancial innovation and the disproportionate impact on small …rm-sectors is weak in less …nancially developed countries. At the European industry level, empirical evidence is more consistent with our model prediction

Merchant Transmission Investment

We examine the performance attributes of a merchant transmission investment framework that relies on �market driven� transmission investment to provide the infrastructure to support competitive wholesale markets for electricity. Under a stringent set of assumptions, the merchant investment model appears to solve the natural monopoly problem and the associated need for regulating transmission companies traditionally associated with electric transmission networks. We expand the model to incorporate imperfection in wholesale electricity markets, lumpiness in transmission investment opportunities, stochastic attributes of transmission networks and associated property rights definition issues, the effects of the behaviour system operators and transmission owners on transmission capacity and reliability, co-ordination and bargaining considerations, forward contract, commitment and asset specificity issues. This significantly undermines the attractive properties of the merchant investment model. Relying primarily on a market driven investment framework to govern investment is likely to lead to inefficient investment decisions and undermine the performance of competitive markets

Coordination with rational inattention

We study information acquisition in a coordination game with incomplete information. To capture the idea that players can exibly decide what information to acquire, we do not impose any physical restriction on the set of feasible information structures. Facing an informational cost measured by reduction of Shannon's entropy, players collect information most relevant to their welfare and are rationally inattentive to other aspects. When coordination is valuable and information is cheap, endogenous and exible information acquisition enables players to acquire information that makes ef cient coordination possible, but also gives rise to multiple equilibria. This contrasts with the global game literature, where information structure is less exible and cheap information leads to unique equilibrium with inef cient coordination. This distinction results from the difference between the exible information structure of our approach and the rigidity implicitly imposed on the information structure of global game models. We also provide a clear and intuitive condition for the emergence of multiplicity in terms of the relative magnitude of strategic complementarity and informational cost

Unbeatable Imitation

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of the rock-scissors-paper variety. Thus, in many interesting examples, like 2x2 games, Cournot duopoly, price competition, rent seeking, public goods games, common pool resource games, minimum effort coordination games, arms race, search, bargaining, etc., imitation cannot be beaten by much even by a very clever opponent

The ‘Puzzles’ methodology: en route to Indirect Inference?

We review the methods used in many papers to evaluate DSGE models by comparing their simulated moments with data moments. We compare these with the method of Indirect Inference to which they are closely related. We illustrate the comparison with contrasting assessments of a two-country model in two recent papers. We conclude that Indirect Inference is the proper end point of the puzzles methodology