Factor proportions, technology and West German industry's international trade patterns: Worldwide and regional

Among the hypotheses which have been advanced to explain a country's international trade patterns the neo-factor proportions hypothesis and, more recently, the neo-technology hypothesis have exerted particular appeal both in theory and in empirical testing. The former introduces intercountry differences in human capital endowment and interindutry differences in human capital requirements as decisive determinants of international specialization into the framework of a Heckscher-Ohlin world; the latter stresses intercountry differences in the capability to innovate and interindustry differences in susceptibility to innovations as the major force governing structure and change of a country's comparative advantage. Although formulated as two separate hypotheses, the difference between them is not immediately obvious. The main difficulty in differentiating stems from the comprehensive character of the human capital concept, as such surely encompassing innovativeness, the key variable of the neo-technology hypotheses. Yet this very comprehensiveness means that characteristics other than innovativeness can also account for human capital. Put differently, human capital is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for innovativeness, both across countries and across industries. Further, innovativeness differs from other possible components of human capital in that in leads to intercountry differences in production technology - a determinant of trade flows explicitely ruled out by the neo-factor proportions hypothesis.

Perspectives for the international location of the steel industry

Lasting steel crises in Western European and North American countries and increasing efforts of developing countries in establishing national steel industries are contrasting features of today's international steel scene. Has comparative advantage in steel production shifted from the former to the latter countries? Developing countries seem to think so. Their discontent with the structural changes in the world economy which have emerged in the aftermath of World War II have led to demands for a New International Economic Order whose core targets encompass the introduction of an integrated raw material program and the enlargement of the developing countries' share in world industrial production to 25 p.c. in 2000. To achieve the industrialization target, priority sectors, among which is the steel industry, have been selected. In the present analysis an attempt is made to identify the determinants and to trace the probable shifts of this industry's international location which are to be expected from an economic point of view.

The Impact of manufactured imports from developing countries in the Federal Republic of Germany

Significant changes in the structure of production and employment are one of the salient features of West Germany's economic history. However, it was not until the mid-1970s that such changes were accompanied by sizeable friction. After 1973, the hitherto last year of full employment, the German economy has been characterized by disequilibria on the labour market and a fairly poor investment and economic growth performance as measured by prior standards. Obviously, since a couple of years the demand for adjustment in Germany, as in most other western industrialized countries, has outpaced the economy's adjustment capacity. Whether or to what extent the adjustment difficulties are due to an increase in demand for structural change or to a decrease of the economy's flexibility cannot be precisely assessed. (I) In the course of the 1970s, various shocks have added to necessary adjustment to shifts in relative prices that are considered normal in the course of economic growth. (II) At the same time, observed increases in price and wage rigidities (Soltwedel, Spinanger, 1976; Fels, Weiss, 1978; Glismann et al., 1973) seem to have weakened the allocative efficiency of the market mechanism in the 1970s as compared to the 1960s. Among the factors mentioned to exert pressure for structural change in Germany, the present paper aims at investigating the adjustment in response to an increasing division of labour with developing countries. The focus of the paper is on manufacturing in which adjustment pressure has become particularly strong. The years 1965, 1969, 1973 and 1977, i.e. periods of relatively high capacity utilization, serve as benchmarks.

Machinery in the United States, Sweden and Germany: An assessment of changes in comparative advantage

Since the early sixties traditional machinery suppliers, almost exclusively located in highly advanced economies, have been subject to considerable adjustment pressures. Among the most important causes, firstly, was the increasing international penetration of markets among traditional machinery suppliers % secondly, Japan emerged as a vigourous competitor; and thirdly, a number of semiindustrialized countries established mechanical engineering industries of their own which in certain activities even proved capable of successfully competing on the world market. As these events have affected and still affect the international division of labour in the machinery industry, the future role of machinery in highly advanced economies may become somewhat uncertain, particularly as the establishment of machinery industries in developing countries continues. In order to obtain an understanding of implications for the high-income countries, we shall focus on the recent development of machinery in the United States, Sweden, and the Federal Republic of Germany. These countries have been selected for investigation because they belong to the most advanced economies in the world but differ in the size of their domestic market and in their structure of production. Analyzing these countries, the purpose of this paper is firstly, to specify determinants of location for the machinery industry as a whole, and secondly to identify individual branches of machinery, if any, in which these highest-income countries are tending to lose their competitiveness. In part I a multi-country cross-section analysis is undertaken to determine a normal pattern of development for the machinery industry. For the United States, Sweden, and Germany deviations from this normal pattern are used to diagnosticize country-specific idiosyncracies. Besides this, the normal pattern itself has useful prognostic properties. Part II discusses some determinats of location. Changes in relative factor absorption,. as well as economies of scale and national idiosyncracies are examined for their implications on the high-income countries as advantageous locations for the machinery industry. Part III applies the concept of revealed comparative advantage to 36 sub-industries of machinery.

Undecidability of the unification and admissibility problems for modal and description logics

We show that the unification problem `is there a substitution instance of a given formula that is provable in a given logic?' is undecidable for basic modal logics K and K4 extended with the universal modality. It follows that the admissibility problem for inference rules is undecidable for these logics as well. These are the first examples of standard decidable modal logics for which the unification and admissibility problems are undecidable. We also prove undecidability of the unification and admissibility problems for K and K4 with at least two modal operators and nominals (instead of the universal modality), thereby showing that these problems are undecidable for basic hybrid logics. Recently, unification has been introduced as an important reasoning service for description logics. The undecidability proof for K with nominals can be used to show the undecidability of unification for boolean description logics with nominals (such as ALCO and SHIQO). The undecidability proof for K with the universal modality can be used to show that the unification problem relative to role boxes is undecidable for Boolean description logic with transitive roles, inverse roles, and role hierarchies (such as SHI and SHIQ)

Foundations for Uniform Interpolation and Forgetting in Expressive Description Logics

We study uniform interpolation and forgetting in the description logic ALC. Our main results are model-theoretic characterizations of uniform inter- polants and their existence in terms of bisimula- tions, tight complexity bounds for deciding the existence of uniform interpolants, an approach to computing interpolants when they exist, and tight bounds on their size. We use a mix of model- theoretic and automata-theoretic methods that, as a by-product, also provides characterizations of and decision procedures for conservative extensions

On the recent slowdown in productivity growth in advanced economies

After two and a half decades of prosperous postwar development, western industrialised countries recently experienced a slowdown of economic growth and productivity advance together with an increase in the rates of inflation and unemployment. The deep recession of 1974/75 has uncovered fundamental structural weaknesses; since then, the advanced economies have not regained the momentum of the 1960s. In this paper, we shall attempt to contribute to a better understanding of this malaise. But as our comparative advantage is not in growth-accounting and as we do not believe that we can single out one or two specific causes, we shall merely aim at forming an idea (perhaps only a rather vague one) which might be further developed into a paradigm or research programme (in Lakatos? sense).

Ontology-Based Data Access and Constraint Satisfaction

We present first results on the relationship between ontology-based data access using description logics and constraint satisfaction problems

Fusions of Modal Logics Revisited

The fusion Ll ? Lr of two normal modal logics formulated in languages with disjoint sets of modal operators is the smallest normal modal logic containing Ll [ Lr. This paper proves that decidability, interpolation, uniform interpolation, and Halld?encompleteness are preserved under forming fusions of normal polyadic polymodal logics. Those problems remained open in [Fine & Schurz [3]] and [Kracht & Wolter [10]]. The paper defines the fusion `l ? `r of two classical modal consequence relations and proves that decidability transfers also in this case. Finally, these results are used to prove a general decidability result for modal logics based on superintuitionistic logics