Profiting from innovation in the digital economy: Enabling technologies, standards, and licensing models in the wireless world

textabstractIn Dutch: Naar een Nieuwe Wereldeconomie: voorstellen voor een internationaal economisch beleid, Rotterdam University Press, Rotterdam, 1965, XV + 335 p.\nIn Spanish: Hacia Una Economia Mundial: sugerencias para una politica economica internacional, Series Biblioteca de Economia No.7, Orbis, Barcelona, 1985, 242 p.

Shaping the World Economy. Suggestions for an International Economic Policy. By Jan Tinbergen. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1962. pp. xvii, 330. Index. 4.00, cloth.

This chapter surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multiregion model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation infrastructure improvements within and between locations for wages, population, trade, and industry composition. Guided by the predictions of this model, we review the empirical literature on the effects of transportation infrastructure improvements on economic development, paying particular attention to the use of exogenous sources of variation in the construction of transportation infrastructure. We examine evidence from different spatial scales, between and within cities. We outline a variety of areas for further research, including distinguishing reallocation from growth and dynamics.

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Transportation Costs and the Spatial Organization of Economic Activity

With increasing sophistication, economists have been estimating gravity equations for five decades. Robust evidence shows that borders and distance impede trade by much more than tariffs or transports costs can explain. We therefore advocate investigation of other sources of resistance, despite the greater difficult involved in measuring and modelling them. From our selective review of recent findings, a unifying explanation emerges. A legacy of historical isolation and conflict forged a world economy in which neither tastes nor information are homogeneously distributed. Cultural difference and inadequate information manifest themselves most strongly at national borders and over distance.

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What separates us? Sources of resistance to globalization

This report provides a synthesis of main findings from the OECD Port-Cities Programme, created in 2010 in order to assess the impact of ports on their cities and provide policy recommendations to increase the positive impacts of ports on their cities.

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The Competitiveness of Global Port-Cities: Synthesis Report

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/70271/1/73766603X.pdf

Estimating the effects of the container revolution on world trade

The introduction of containerization triggered complementary technological and organizational changes that revolutionized global freight transport. Despite numerous claims about the importance of containerization in stimulating international trade, econometric estimates on the effects of containerization on trade appear to be missing. Our paper fills this gap in the literature. Our key idea is to exploit time and cross-sectional variation in countries’ adoption of port or railway container facilities to construct a time-varying bilateral technology variable and estimate its effect on explaining variations in bilateral product level trade flows in a large panel for the period 1962-1990. Our estimates suggest that containerization did not only stimulate trade in containerizable products (like auto parts) but also had complementary effects on non-containerizables (like automobiles). As expected, we find larger effects on North-North trade than on North-South or South-South trade and much smaller effects when ignoring railway containerization. Regarding North-North trade, the cumulative average treatment effects of containerization over a 20 year time period amount to about 700%, can be interpreted as causal, and are much larger than the effects of free trade agreements or the GATT. In a nutshell, we provide the first econometric evidence for containerization to be a driver of 20th century economic globalization.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2228625_code459177.pdf?abstractid=2228625&mirid=1

Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade

We investigate how individual workers and local labour markets adjust over a long time period to a discrete and plausibly exogenous technological shock, namely the introduction of containerisation in the UK port industry. This technology, which was introduced rapidly between the mid-1960s and the late-1970s, had dramatic consequences for specific occupations within the port industry. Using longitudinal micro-census data we follow dock-workers over a 40 year period and examine the long-run consequences of containerisation for patterns of employment, migration and mortality. The results show that the job guarantees negotiated by the unions protected dock-workers' employment until the guarantees were removed in 1989. A matched comparison of workers in comparable unskilled occupations reveals that, even after job guarantees were removed, dock-workers did not fare worse than the comparison group in terms of their labour market outcomes. Our results suggest that job guarantees provided a safety net which reduced the cost to workers of sudden technological change.

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Off the Waterfront: The long-run impact of technological change on dock workers

Using Swedish firm-level data on all firms and their affiliates abroad, we investigate what observable firm and country characteristics affect the size of an affiliate in a particular destination. We employ the richness of the data to investigate the importance of destination country factors in explaining firm outward FDI activities and distinguish between the factors that affect such activities in manufacturing versus services firms as well as vertical versus horizontal investments. Our results lend support to existing theories of multinational activity of manufacturing but not services firms. We also find observable differences between vertical and horizontal manufacturing firms that are not always explained by theory.

/pdf/exploring-outward-fdi-and-the-choice-of-destination-evidence-22zwj93kuw.pdf

Exploring outward FDI and the choice of destination: Evidence from Swedish firm-level data

While it is established that tourism benefits growth through increased employment and investments, it is not well understood whether tourism has an effect on exports This paper explores exports as an additional channel through which tourism affects domestic economic activity Using bilateral tourist and trade flows, I explore the causal effect of tourist flows on exports To deal with endogeneity, I construct two instruments that I use on two different sets of exporters The evidence points in the same direction I find that tourism affects mainly the exports of differentiated products Specifically, I find that tourism benefits the exports from non-OECD exporters of processed food products and this effect is only estimated for South-North trade with an elasticity close to 1 For European countries, the findings point in the same direction; tourism affects differentiated consumer products and processed food with elasticity close to 1, which adds plausibility to the earlier results I also find a lagged effect for tourism mainly on the export of consumer goods (for the two samples) and processed food products (for European countries) The results suggest that exports is an additional channel through which tourism can stimulate domestic economic activity in the tourist destination

/pdf/the-role-of-inbound-tourist-flows-in-promoting-exports-579aanebfo.pdf

Zouheir El-Sahli

Papers

Estimating the effects of the container revolution on world trade

Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade

Off the Waterfront: The long-run impact of technological change on dock workers

Exploring outward FDI and the choice of destination: Evidence from Swedish firm-level data

The role of inbound tourist flows in promoting exports