Search results for "Public economics"
showing 4 items of 304 documents
Need for speed? Exploring the relative importance of patents and utility models among German firms
2017
Despite the wide use of two-tiered patent systems (patents and utility models (UMs)), there is little empirical evidence about how often UMs are actually used, what kind of firms use them to protect their intellectual property, and how firms rank them relative to patents. We offer such an analysis using data from Germany. We find that larger firms are more likely to use both protection methods. Moreover, a short life cycle of products and services is associated with an increased likelihood to use UMs. The features and functioning of the German UM system are of broader interest because it has been a benchmark for several second tier patent protection systems around the world. peerReviewed
Poverty Reduction: The Paradox of the Endogenous Poverty Line
2007
When evaluating poverty, the relative poverty line may be considered as a percentage of the median income or it may be a percentage of the average income. It is proved that, with a poverty line relative to the median income, reducing poverty may become less costly in proportion to the total income as poverty increases (measured by the Sen, the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon or the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indexes) by passing from a Lorenz concentration curve to another curve associated with more poverty. This is obviously a paradox, although a largely overlooked one. However, it is shown that the paradox vanishes if the poverty line is relative to the average income. The demonstration is both exp…
Manufacturing export performance and public capital: an analysis by country technology position
2021
The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between public capital and manufacturing export performance. It also aims at investigating whether this relationship depends on the proximity of a country's technology frontier. To achieve this, we adopted a methodology that estimates the elasticities of public capital as a non-rival factor in a model that considers factor intensity as a mechanism of industrial development. We use an interaction model with panel data from 1999 to 2014 across 35 advanced and less advanced countries. Our results show that in countries far from the technology frontier, public capital accumulation is an element of industrial development as opposed to co…
Government policy failure in public support for research and development
2014
peer-reviewed Promoting Research and Development (R&D) and innovative activity is a key element of the EU Lisbon Agenda and is seen as playing a central part in stimulating economic development. In this paper we argue that, even allowing for benevolent policy-makers, informational asymmetries can lead to a misallocation of public support for R&D, hence government policy failure, with the potential to exacerbate preexisting market failures. Initially, we explore alternative allocation mechanisms for public support, which can help to minimize the scale of these government policy failures. Of these mechanisms (grants, tax credits, or allocation rules based on past performance), our results sug…