Structural Change and International Competitiveness

Climate Change and Competitiveness

Pursuing International Competitiveness in Iranian Wheat Policy

After the war with Iraq which ended in 1988, Iran implemented several agricultural support policies based on Five-Year National Development Plans. The main objective of these plans in the agriculture sector was to make the agricultural economy more market-oriented and to encourage sustainable agriculture. This paper investigates the extent to which Iran's government has been able to achieve thi...

Business Taxes and International Competitiveness

Around the world, policymakers are obsessed with the competitiveness of their domestic companies and domestically based multinational corporations (MNCs). Such concerns frequently influence policy, especially tax policy. In this paper, I develop a theory of how taxes affect the international competitiveness of businesses. I then use that theory to evaluate basic tax policy decisions, such as th...

South Africa’s International Cost Competitiveness

Shadow prices, environmental stringency, and international competitiveness

Empirical tests of the relationship between international competitiveness and the severity of environmental regulations are hampered by the lack of pollution abatement cost data for nonU.S. countries. The theory of the firm suggests that environmental stringency can be measured by the difference between a polluting input’s shadow price and its market price. We make a first attempt at quantifyin...