and significant policy initiatives, whereas other similarly situated states did not. The answer was in some ways profoundly simple: States in which there was a broad and highly developed consensus about the need to act did more, and did it better, than states where consensus was less broad and less developed. In short, a widely shared understanding of the need to act, coupled with the right ana...

The thesis studies Taiwan’s shifting role in international footwear sourcing networks over the last three decades. It draws on multiple sources of data, including in-depth interview, field observation, and published data, to construct phases and faces of the socially embedded market. The research points to the anomalies in the comparative advantage theory, evaluates the weakness of the state-ce...

This paper reviews alternative approaches to measuring an economy’s cost competitiveness and proposes some new measures derived from the economic theory of index numbers. The indices provide a theoretical benchmark for estimated real e¤ective exchange rates, but di¤er from standard measures in that they are based on marginal rather than average sectoral shares in GDP or employment. The use of t...

The Competitiveness of Thailand: Economic Analysis from Competitiveness Reports An important question for researchers and policy markers is how to efficiently allocate limited resources for sustainable economic growth. In this paper, Global Competitiveness Reports of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Competitiveness Yearbooks of the International Institute for Management Development ...

The article discusses and analyzes data from several economic experiments in a household sur-vey with mothers of preschool children. The researchers measured competitiveness by giving the subjects the choice between competing in a tournament or receiving a piece rate for a real effort task. The subjects also participated in lottery choices, which enabled the researchers to assess their risk pre...

Environmental taxation very often comprises special provisions for parts of the business sector in order to attenuate effects on competitiveness of emissionintensive activities. This paper discusses motives, alternative designs and criteria for the evaluation of such safeguards and analyzes if such provisions can reconcile environmental and economic objectives. It looks at theoretical aspects a...

It is not easy to formulate a precise, yet also general and elegant description of this method. In this expositary paper, we illustrate this method by discussing several applications where doubling is used, and these examples should be sufficient to elucidate the underlying idea. (This is not meant to be a comprehensive survey; we suspect that there are many more examples of doubling-based appr...

Around the world, the tax laws are shaped by concerns with competitiveness. This paper provides a general theory of how taxes impact competitiveness. As part of that theory, this paper also introduces the concept of tax-based competitiveness neutrality. A tax system is competitively neutral when taxes do not cause competitors to change their relative valuations of any investments. This paper th...