This paper presents the results of an empirical study on the relationship between internal structural change and performance, in a sample of 138 large U.K. companies, 1959-1976. The paper considers the introduction of the multidivisional form (M-form) within the sample and addresses itself to three principal questions:

Firstly, whether re-organization to an M-form structure followed a significant decline in the performance of the firm?

Secondly, whether M-form adoption was followed by a significant improvement in performance?

Finally, was the performance impact, if any, of re-organization related in a systematic way to firm characteristics — e.g. size, diversification etc. — in a manner consistent with the M-form hypothesis?

This paper shows how a monopolist can be induced to produce at the optimal output level and price, by utilizing a strategic middleman to represent to the monopolist a synthetic demand curve such that perceived marginal revenue equals true (inverse) demand. Conditions are derived for insuring the financial viability of such a middleman, and the inability of an unregulated market to enforce these conditions is discussed.

Government interference in private markets for exhaustible resources is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Each level of government — federal, state or provincial, and even local — has its own tax policy. Tax-policy instruments include royalties, depletion allowances, severance taxes, price controls and supports, environmental regulations, freight subsidies, profit taxes, and property taxes, to name only a few.

These taxes may be levied at every stage of production. For example, property and some ad valorem taxes are levied on ores in the ground, severance taxes are paid when the ore leaves the ground, royalties and depletion allowances may be collected at the first sale (after some degree of processing), and price controls may be placed on finished products.

Not only does the government intervene in private resource markets with great regularity but the size of tax effects is not small. For example, depletion allowances in the United States have been as large as thirty three and one third percent of revenues. And price controls in some periods have kept petroleum prices at less than half world prices.

La crise qui frappe les économies occidentales depuis une bonne dizaine d’années a, dès le départ, présenté un certain nombre de caractères inédits qui ont tout d’abord plongé dans la perplexité les économistes professionnels et les responsables de la politique économique.

Jusqu’au début des années 70, le schéma de pensée dominant était le modèle Keynésien qui semblait pleinement opérationnel pour l’analyse des questions de politique économique: dans ce schéma, le chômage résultait d’une insuffisance de la demande globale et inversement l’inflation provenait d’un excès de la demande sur les capacités de production. En cas de récession, il suffisait donc de relancer la demande finale pour résorber le chômage.

During the period from 1949 to 1974 exchange rates were almost fixed in the OECD area. Since then some major rates have been moving, but even now most rates remain fixed relatively to each other and it is possible that we are returning to more fixed rates. Therefore it is of some relevance to try to summarize the experience of the few exchange rate changes that took place during the fixed rate period. Section II goes through the currency history of 20 main OECD-countries and identifies the 12 devaluations and 3 revaluations which occured in that period.

We have for each of these 15 cases tried to make a comparable story following the time-path of the same 16 main economic indicators - listed in Table 1 - in the last 3 years before the exchange rate change and in the first 3 years after the change. The changes have different sizes (and signs), happened in 9 different countries and are parts of rather different economic policies, but we shall show below that there are, nevertheless, a few main features that appear to generalize.

A great deal of evidence for the U.S. economy suggests that after changes in aggregate nominal demand (1) prices move «sluggishly» toward their eventual long-term values, that (2) output responds directly to these changes in demand, and (3) these output effects linger «peristently» over time. Most econometric evidence suggests that something of the order of four to six years must pass before the ultimate effects on prices and output will be reached. As commonly interpreted, this lag has profoundly disturbing implications about the functioning of markets and about the rate of agents’ expectations in macroeconomics.

The conventional interpretation of the output-price adjustment lag -- to borrow the label suggested recently by R.J. Gordon (1982) -- comes unders the « Natural Rate Hypothesis and Gradual Adjustment of Prices » (NRH-GAP) approach. After a change in nominal demand, according to NRH-GAP, some combination of forecast inefficiency and institutional constraints on price setting prevents agents for a time from choosing the set of prices that would clear output markets at the « natural » level. In the meantime and because of this price stickiness aggregate output exhibits persistent deviations from its natural path.

Il existe peu d’études qui prennent explicitement en compte une fonction d’investissement dans les modèles macroéconomiques avec rationnement. La plupart des articles où des présentations dynamiques de tels modèles sont élaborées ne font intervenir qu’une fonction d’investissement vaguement définie (voir Fourgeaud, Lenclud et Michel (1981) et Ito (1982)), car ces auteurs s’intéressent plus à la croissance économique qu’au niveau de l’investissement.

Plusieurs voies peuvent néanmoins être suivies pour introduire l’accumulation du capital dans ces modèles : on peut, premièrement, reprendre la logique des modèles macroéconomiques avec rationnement à deux biens (bien de consommation et travail) en y ajoutant un marché supplémentaire, celui du capital productif, et alors spécifier les offres et les demandes sur ce marché. La deuxième méthode part d’une maximisation du profit par les firmes sous les diverses contraintes de rationnements sur les autres marches. Elle vise à déterminer la demande d’investissement d’une entreprise qui se trouve dans ce régime. Enfin la troisième approche se base sur le fait que l’entreprise ne connaît pas précisément le régime futur de l’économie. Elle voudrait investir parce qu’il y a de possibles opportunités de débouchés rentables dans l’avenir, mais il lui faut minimiser le risque de se trouver avec des capacités de production inutilisées. Elle comparera alors ce risque avec la profitabilité de son investissement.

In this paper we consider the problem of evaluating the performance of production units in terms of their technical efficiency. Several attempts have been made to solve this problem and a number of different measures appear in the economic literature : the technical efficiency, here used, is defined to be the ability of a productive organization to operate close to, or on the boundary of its production set; the problem will be analyzed only in terms of physical input and output quantities, without any references to prices or costs structures. This concept of technical efficiency is inspired from the work by Koopmans (1951); it received a first empirical application in Farrel (1957). An interesting survey on this topic may be formed in Førsund, Lovell and Schmidt (1980). Measuring efficiency of this kind for any data set requires first to determine what the boundary of the unknown production set can be; and then, to measure the distance between any observed point and this boundary. In this paper, we concentrate on the Farrel method of estimating technical efficiencies. There the production set is typically a convex polyhedron generated from the observed data with small modifications in view of the assumptions on disposabilities of input and/or on disposibilities of outputs. The distances from the efficient frontier are then measured in a radial sense, i.e. with fixed technology.

It is always a risky enterprise to attempt to project « stylized facts » on to any complex actual economic situation; just when one feels that a recognisable pattern has clearly emerged the situation will change and invalidate ones hoped for empirical regularity. Yet, having said this, it appears that it is possible over the period since the second world war to broadly distinguish between groups of nations on the basis of their balance of payments behaviour. First, there are what have been called the strong currency countries like Germany and Switzerland. These countries tend to run habitual balance of trade surpluses, their economic policies are never constrained by the necessity of avoiding trade account deficits and their most characteristic trading problem has been the existence of occasionally massive capital inflows. Second, there are a larger group of what might be called normal countries like Belgium and Sweden. In the recent difficult times the performance of these countries has deteriorated slightly, but broadly, over the past thirty-five years they have managed to achieve rough long-run trade balance equilibrium without suffering excessive unemployment or unduly restricting the growth rate of their economies.

Some 20 years ago, J. Drèze (1962) opened a new prospect for the statistical treatment of the « simultaneous equation model » in econometrics (SEM). Indeed, he advocated the use of Bayesian methods for the analysis of such models. In particular, he pointed out the flexibility of this approach as it allows to take account not only of the a priori information provided by economic theory or observation, but more fundamentally, of the imprecise nature of this kind of information.

Ever since, it has been clear that the Bayesian approach of the SEM would be rather difficult to implement. The main problems one can identify are

1. the representation of a priori information by a prior density function which should be easily interpretable and at the same time flexible enough;

2. the numerical treatment (i.e. integration) of the posterior density so as to obtain moments and marginal densities of parameters, whether they be parameters of the structural form, of the reduced form, or functions thereof.

All the econometric studies on world food prospects lead to the picture of an increasing food trade deficit in the Third World. We discuss here this topic using a more global approach based on a general equilibrium framework covering the whole World Economy and involving disagregated rural and urban sectors. With this model, we analyses the impacts of Third World demography and debt, oil price, rural productivity and developed region growth. The model finds that the food trade in 1960 to 1995 is highly sensitive to these variables. The oil shocks and the resulting economic stagnation in the industrialized countries has broken trade patterns that were supposed to bring welfare to LDCs. These implied a North to South food trade balanced by a South to North manufactured trade. To sustain 5 percent growth in shrinking industrial world markets, the Third World, and especially the semi-industrialized countries, would be forced to « export urban hunger ». At the end of the century, food would flow from South to North, in the opposite direction from what has been unanimously predicted by other studies.

Bien que la littérature sur l’équilibre temporaire jouisse d’une croissance soutenue depuis maintenant plus de dix ans (voir l’article-revue de Grandmont (1977) et surtout son récent livre (Money and Value 1982)), il existe encore très peu de résultats sur la statistique comparative des équilibres individuels sous-jacents. En conséquence, l’instrumentation nécessaire à l’élaboration d’une théorie des optima temporaires de premier et de second rang (first best, second best) fait actuellement défaut. De même, la contrepartie économétrique est faible, l’absence d’implications empiriques temporaires ne permettant pas d’engendrer des formes structurelles nouvelles et testables empiriquement.

Dans cet article, nous allons étudier l’équilibre temporaire du producteur en portant une attention spéciale aux utilisations théoriques éventuelles et aux utilisations empiriques éventuelles. Si, pour la théorie, l’on prend par exemple comme thème de référence la construction d’une théorie des optima temporaires de second rang, il est clair qu’il nous faut au préalable dériver les identités analogues aux identités atemporelles. Ce faisant, on peut garder ouvert le problème de la spécification des anticipations puisque l’optimum temporaire devrait précisément permettre la caractérisation d’une structure optimale des anticipations.

In an innovative and important paper Hall (1978) demonstrated that the assumption of rational expectations when applied to the life cycle or permanent income hypothesis would, given a number of further assumptions such as constancy of the real rate of interest, imply that real consumption follows a martingale. Thus in logarithms

log C - log C- 1 = α + ∊

where C is real consumer expenditure, α is a constant which allows for real growth in the economy and ∊ is a white noise error term.

Hall presented empirical evidence for the U.S. economy which was broadly consistent with the hypothesis. However, subsequent work by a number of authors (eg Muellbauer (1983) and Hendry and von Ungern-Sternberg (1980)) appears to be inconsistent with the hypothesis. Past values of economic variables, such as consumption or income, are significant determinants of the first difference of the logarithm of consumption which violates the hypothesis.

Dès sa constitution au cours du dix-neuvième siècle, l’économie normative a constamment eu pour assise philosophique cette doctrine particulière qu’est l’utilitarisme. Qu’elle doive s’inscrire dans une perspective utilitariste est même devenu, au fil du temps, d’une telle évidence que le nom même par lequel on la désigne habituellement — welfare economics, économie du bien-être — exclut qu’elle puisse avoir une autre assise. Or, depuis une dizaine d’années, l’utilitarisme doit faire face à une offensive en règle au sein de son propre bastion, la philosophie politique anglo-saxonne, sur laquelle pendant plus d’un siècle il a exercé un empire presque incontesté. Les deux livres récents les plus importants dans ce domaine — A Theory of Justice de John Rawls et Anarchy, State and Utopia de Robert Nozick — comptent l’utilitarisme parmi leurs cibles principales. Et le renouveau spectaculaire de la philosophie politique que ces deux livres ont engendré semble être allé de pair avec un effondrement du crédit dont l’utilitarisme paraissait jouir.

For a longer period than has ever been the case in the past, these last few years have been marked by historically high levels of interest rates, as well as by an inversion of the yieldcurve.

Given these extra-ordinary context, we think it right to renew our interest in the determination process of what is called the « domestic » interest rate in a small open economy. This is all the more important as the causes of interest rate volatility in the Belgian case may prove to be situated not only on an international level. They may also be found in domestic factors as e.g. the increase in the government debt (for a survey, see Fayt (1981)).

This article is another contribution to the series of studies made in the seventies by e.g. De Generale Bankmaatschappij (1971), Hernandez-Lopez (1973), Clavijo and Kervyn (1974), Vuchelen (1976 and 1977c) and a more recent contribution of Reding, Jehin and Abraham (1982).

Le développement de la théorie de la dualité a donné naissance à de nouvelles formes fonctionnelles de système de demande. Simultanément, les hausses importantes des prix du pétrole et du gaz ont suscité un regain d’intérêt pour les applications empiriques de ces systèmes aux facteurs énergétiques. Le modèle translog de Christensen, Jorgenson et Lau (1973) est de loin la spécification la plus couramment utilisée. Pourtant ce modèle ne constitue qu’un cas particulier de la fonction quadratique généralisée d’xordre β introduite par Denny (1974). D’autre part, la présence de facteurs tels les coûts d’ajustement, les attentes adaptatives et l’inertie à court terme des producteurs aux variations des prix relatifs, suggère qu’un modèle dynamique devrait fournir a priori, un meilleur outil d’analyse que l’habituelle formulation statique de la théorie classique de la demande.

Les articles anonymes consacrés à des sujets économiques étaient particulièrement nombreux dans les revues anglaises et écossaises du début du XIXe siècle. Leurs auteurs sont aujourd’hui identifiés par la reconstitution de l’index des principaux périodiques de la période classique. Une exception à cette règle se manifeste pour un article publié dans l’Edinburgh Review d’octobre 1819. La contribution qui demeure sans auteur s’intitule « Mr. Owen’s Plans for relieving the National Distress »; elle participe à la réfutation des thèses « utopistes » défendues par Owen dans son plan pour lutter contre la misère touchant les catégories les plus défavorisées de la Nation. L’origine de cet article est un discours prononcé par R. Torrens devant le Comité du Duc de Kent chargé d’examiner les Plans d’Owen. Les termes de ce discours sont déjà connus du public puisqu’ils sont reproduits par J.R. Mc Culloch dans un article du Scotsman d’août 1819. Aussi, l’article de l’Edinburgh Review déborde-t-il un peu le propos annoncé par le titre, à l’exclusion des passages qui reprennent l’esprit et souvent la lettre du discours. Plusieurs pages sont ainsi consacrées à l’exposé de principes économiques généraux dans lesquels les partisans des thèses ricardiennes pourraient se reconnaître. Par ailleurs, le sujet initial est franchement abandonné dans une longue digression qui occupe cinq pages à la fin de l’article. En raison des questions qu’il aborde, ce passage est considéré par les commentateurs comme un article dans l’article et désigné sous l’intitulé de « digression sur Sismondi ».

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper introduces the idea of a consumer who has a time varying Lancasterian matrix of characteristics imbedded in an intertemporal Stone-Geary utility function. The thrust of the paper is theoretical, its main aim being the generalisation of the theoretical contributions of Dixon and Lluch (1977). The main contribution in Dixon and Lluch (1977) is that DELES, a system of equations is proposed which describe the consumer’s planned and actual expenditure paths for durables. In order to derive these equations they have a consumer maximising an inter-temporal Klein-Rubin utility function defined on the stocks of durables, subject to a budget integral constraint and a vector of durable goods stocks’ adjustment equations.

This paper differs from Dixon and Lluch's contribution in that we assume that utility is not derived from the stocks of durables directly. Utility is derived from the characteristics that the durables yield. For example a car yields satisfaction to a consumer indirectly through characteristics like speed, comfort, safety, reliability, economy in petrol consumption, prestige and similar characteristics associated with the car. The idea of characteristics is best known from the work of Lancaster (1966, 1971), who assumes a constant objectively known characteristics matrix. This paper differs further from Lancaster (1966, 1971) in that we assume that characteristics of a durable change over time. Take the example of a car again. Over time, though, characteristics like capacity, associated with a particular car may be time invariant, most other characteristics like car reliability, petrol consumption, comfort, speed, prestige may change with the age of the car.