Foreign direct investment: a tool or a target for industrial policy in Eastern Countries?

Is there any linkage between industrial policy and the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment in Eastern European countries? This is the core question which is analysed and discussed in this paper. The transition process of Central and Eastern Europe to a market economy has raised a lot of challenging questions both to Applied Economics and to Management Science. Enterprise adjustment remains one of the most interesting and complex as it is closely related to a wide range of economic, policy and management issues. Foreign Direct Investment, privatisation and industrial policy and their sort of linkage, remain some of the most interesting factors in the transition process. It seems that no sharp distinction can be presented between FDI as a target and FDI as a tool for industrial policy, but national differences remain significant as well as enterprises adjustment capacity

DOES UNBUNDLING REALLY MATTER? THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND ELECTRICITY CASES

In this paper we discuss the European regulation policy regarding vertical separation in communications and electricity industries. In the electricity sector the discussion concerns ownership unbundling while in communications the regulatory debate is about functional separation. We conclude that for electricity, ownership unbundling seems to be the best option to achieve competition in wholesale markets although there is still some risks concerning investment. Instead, for the communication sector the regulatory options are deeply dependent on the intensity of network competition between operators that combine different technological platforms. Technology also seems to be a key driver for diverse regulatory approaches concerning the unbundling requirement.unbundling, communications, electricity, next generation networks

Application of a structural model to a wholesale electricity market: The Spanish market from January 1999 to June 2007

The aim of this work is to analyse the agents’ behaviour in highly concentrated and strongly regulated electricity wholesale markets with rigid demand. In order to accomplish this aim, the analysis was based on the former Spanish electricity generation market, between January 1999 and June 2007, before the MIBEL (Iberian Electricity Market) has started. The analysis is carried out in the theoretical framework of the structural models. The result of the structural model supports the apparently competitive nature of the market analysed for the period 1999 to 2003, despite than fact that the Lerner index average was high during this period. It will therefore be important in future work to analyse whether the high average mark-up verified accords with the CTCs (stranded costs compensation which have the characteristics of contracts for difference) which frame the activities of the electricity producers.electricity market, rigid demand, structural model, market power

Natural resources, economic growth and institutions – a panel approach

This study re-evaluates the impact of natural resources on growth using panel data and a factor-efficiency accounting framework. The resource-curse thesis is dismissed as capital efficiency is improved by geographically-concentrated natural resources, which hinder institutional quality in recent cross-section studies. This consensus does not hold in our case even when we use unadjusted resource proxies and the standard institutional approach, as both concentrated and diffuse resources show negative effects in low institutional-quality countries. Adequate fiscal policy seems to prevent the curse in that case, but reduces the positive effect of concentrated resources found with our adjusted proxy.Natural resources, Economic growth, Institutions, Country Studies, Panel data

Uniform Price Market and Behaviour Pattern: What Does the Iberian Electricity Market Point Out?

The electricity spot markets can be considered as capacity constrained markets (Kreps and Scheinkman, 1983), where market price definition depends on the quantity strategies. In this theoretical framework, the main target of the present paper is to show to what extent a spot market organized like a Uniform Price Auction (UPA) is naturally inclined to develop anti-competitive practices, in particular through quantity strategies. To achieve this objective, multivariable models are defined for each daily demand period of the Iberian electricity market. Each model correlates the hourly market price change and the bid quantities of the two main Iberian producers (Endesa and Iberdrola), for every summer between 2001 and 2004. To apply those models one has to solve the endogeneity problem. This exercise is also useful to highlight any anti-competitive behaviour. Quantities produced by the producers with infra marginal bids should not be endogenous when there is no risk that they will not be dispatched, unless producers have some expectations about the system marginal price. In addition, this kind of endogeneity reinforces the model’s theoretical assumption that change in the system marginal price stems from quantity strategies. The models present some expectable but interesting results. Those results show that even base load units’ bids may depend on expectations about the system marginal price evolution. Those expectations can reflect market strategies. Therefore, in a market where the main companies own base load and peak load units, like the Iberian wholesale electricity market, the UPA is an open window to anti-competitive practices based on quantity strategies, such as the raising of the system marginal price through the capacity withdrawal from base load units.oligopoly, electricity, endogeneity, uniform-price market

Economic Growth, Ecological Technology and Public Intervention

Seminal works on growth theory had mainly focused on exogenous technological change, where a certain given path of technological change was considered. At the end of the 1980s, a new growth theory emerged allowing for the endogeneity of technological change, where economic agents can affect the pace of technological change and where technology is essentially interpreted as “knowledge”. The present paper aims to develop a simple endogenous growth model to study the effects of taxation on dirty intensive resources and the effects of subsidies on clean/ecological intensive resources. It also intends to analyse how exogenous environmental quality can affect the development of better quality (environmentally cleaner) inputs to production. For that, a dynamic general equilibrium growth model is considered based on the endogenous skill-biased technological change literature. It is shown that final-good sector bias is caused by the technological-knowledge bias, which is promoted by government intervention.economic growth, technological change, environment

The impact of renewable energy sources on economic growth and CO2 emissions - a SVAR approach

Over the last years renewable energy sources (RES) have increased their share on electricity generation of most developed economies due to environmental and security of supply concerns. The aim of this paper was to analyze how an increasing share of RES on electricity generation (RES-E) affects Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Several methodologies could be used for this purpose. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) methodology considers the interactions among all variables in the model and is well suited to predict the effects of specific policy actions or important changes in the economy. Therefore, we chose to implement this methodology. We used a 3 variable SVAR model for a sample of four countries along the period 1960-2004. The existence of unit roots was tested to infer the stationarity of the variables. The countries chosen have rather different levels of economic development and social and economic structures but a common effort of investment in RES in the last decades. Through the impulse response functions (IRF), the SVAR estimation showed that, for all countries in the sample, except for the USA, the increasing RES-E share had economic costs in terms of GDP per capita. As expected, there was also an evident decrease of CO2 emissions per capita. The variance decomposition showed that a significant part of the forecast error variance of GDP per capita and a relatively smaller part of the forecast error variance of CO2 per capita were explained by the share of RES-E.Renewables, economic growth, CO2 emissions, SVAR

Measuring market power in the Iberian electricity wholesale market through the residual demand curve

The existence of market power in the electricity market is a recurrent issue. Measuring and understanding market power practices in the Iberian electricity market turn out to be interesting: though a liberalized market, two integrated firms control 80% of total demand and there is a strong - often direct - intervention of government in the market. For various reasons, among which the difficulty in obtaining reliable, extensive data stands out, market power in the Iberian electricity market has rarely been measured. This work aims to contribute to a better knowledge of the way market power occurs. We calculate the elasticity of residual demand to evaluate the two dominant firm’s market power, using hourly bides in the Spanish spot market for the period July-August 2004 to 2006. Although our approach was highlighted by Frank Wolak work on the electricity sector, we extend it and discuss its constraints. We discuss the results obtained in the light of the evolution of the electricity sector during that period.Market power, wholesale market, residual demand curve elasticity, government intervention

A Vision of Empire: Irish Home Rule, the Scramble for Africa, and Portuguese Literary Journalism

Irish Home Rule, a measure of Irish self-rule, was a heated political and humanitarian issue throughout the nineteenth century. If, historically, Ireland was one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, pro–Irish Victorian perspectives and twenty-first century hindsight show it was administered as a colony. In the late 1800s, the British Parliament conceded to discuss Home Rule for Ireland. This happened at a time when the British Empire, (in)famously styled as the empire on which the sun never set, for expansionist purposes was encroaching on Portugal’s African possessions and thus stressing Anglo-Portuguese diplomatic relations. In this scenario, two Portuguese consuls, who also served as press correspondents from Britain, used their journalistic voices to bring to light, for audiences on both sides of the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic, what they considered the truth behind British imperialism. Through the late nineteenth-century “new” journalism, a pioneering form of literary journalism, these diplomats-turned-unconventional-journalists were among the first critics of formal imperialism. As pieces of literary journalism, their articles on the question of Irish Home Rule are documents of historical meaning, revealing an underlying intention of creating public awareness of the dangers of the British will to imperial dominance, for which Ireland provided an example of territorial occupation and autocratic administration. Their reading of the Irish Question gives evidence that, even at its earliest stages, literary journalism is a journalism of concern about the Other and their plight.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Marginalized narratives

This issue of CITAR (Journal of Arts Science and Technology) is especially devoted to what we designated as Marginalized Narratives. It is a special issue that collects studies published upon the 5th Colloquium on Narrative, Medium and Cognition, held at the University of Algarve in November 2018, and which was focused on that topic. In line with what the colloquium proposed, the works now published share a broad understanding of the concept of narrative.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio