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The social, economic, and political landscape of northern British Columbia (BC), Canada, has undergone considerable transformation since a recession in the early 1980s. From this, there is an emerging recognition of the need to move from an economy based upon comparative advantage to one embracing competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper, drawn from ongoing regional research, is twofold. First, we apply a rural lens to the regional planning and development literature, which highlights the significance of competitive advantage as a tool for regional rejuvenation. Second, we add to this dialogue by exploring the relevance and meaning of competitive advantage in the non-metropolitan setting of...

Abstract In Varieties of Capitalism; The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (H&S) argue that technological specialization patterns are largely determined by the prevailing "variety of capitalism". They hypothesize that "liberal market economies" (LMEs) specialize in radical innovation, while "coordinated market economies" (CMEs) focus more on incremental innovation. Mark Zachary Taylor [Taylor, M.Z., 2004. Empirical evidence against varieties of capitalism's theory of technological innovation. International Organization 58, 601-631.] convincingly argued that Hall and Soskice's empirical test is fundamentally flawed and proposed a more appropriate test of their conjecture. He rejected the varieties of capitalism explanation of innovation patterns. We extend and refine Taylor's analysis, using a broader set of radicality indicators and making industry-level comparisons. Our results indicate that Hall and Soskice's conjecture cannot be upheld as a general rule, but that it survives closer scrutiny for a substantial number of industries and an important dimension of radicality. Article Outline 1. Introduction 2. Innovation in liberal and coordinated market economies 3. Tests based on patent citation indicators 3.1. Indicators of radicality 3.2. Construction of radicality quantiles 3.3. Analytical techniques 4. Data issues 5. Empirical results 5.1. Revealed Comparative Technological Advantages 5.2. Histograms for radicality distributions 5.3. Statistical tests on equality of distributions 6. Conclusions Acknowledgements Appendix A. Appendix References

Regulation and the Revolution in United States Farm Productivity Sally H. Clarke 0 Resenhas Cambridge University Press, 2002 - 328 páginas Since the 1930s when the government began active regulation, U.S. agriculture has undergone a revolution in productivity. Sally Clarke explains how government activity, from support for research to price supports and farm credit programs, created a climate favorable to rapid gains in productivity. Farmers in the Corn Belt delayed purchases of the tractor, the most important agricultural technology, despite the cost savings it promised. Tractor purchases required large sums of cash at a time when families faced unstable prices and unattractive credit markets. The New Deal inadvertently changed this investment climate. Regulation stabilized prices, introduced new sources of credit, and caused tool manufacturers and private creditors to revise their business strategies. Competitive farmers took advantage of these new conditions to invest in expensive technology and achieve new gains in productivity.

The Fabaceae (leguminosae) comprise the second largest family of flowering plants with 650 genera and 18000 species. The soybean is a member of the tribe Phaseoleae, the most economically important of the legume tribes. The soybean, Glycine max (L.) Merr. is the major source of vegetable oil and protein on earth. Soybean oil has garnered considerable recent attention due to its increased use for biodiesel production. The extensive genetic resources of soybean and the associated physiological tools available present a set of unique opportunities to study everything from seed development to the biology of polyploidization to a huge array of pathogenic and symbiotic plant-host interactions. The large plant size of soybean is an advantage for such studies, permitting the use of techniques not easy or possible with smaller plants. For these and additional reasons, soybean genomic research has seen major advances in recent years. Therefore, a book chronicling these advances and the potential for future discoveries would be timely. This is especially true given the very recent announcement that the Department of Energy, Joint Genome Institute will sequence the soybean genome. The soybean seed is unique in its accumulation of both high levels of protein and oil, which presents several opportunities for study. A typical soybean seed is 40% protein and 20% oil by weight. The somatic embryo methodology that exists for soybean is among the most advanced embryogenic systems available for any dicot and can be used to help study seed physiology and development. Furthermore, transgenic somatic embryos may be used to efficiently study seed genomics, without the need to recover an entire plant, byeither over-expressing or suppressing embryo-specific genes. This book covers the recent progress on genome research in soybeans, including genetic map including classical, RFLP, SSR and SNP markers; genomic and cDNA libraries, functional genomics platforms (e.g., cDNA, Affymetrix and oligo

Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin About the Author Search CEE Home | CEE | 2nd edition | Tragedy of the Commons In 1974 the general public got a graphic illustration of the "tragedy of the commons" in satellite photos of the earth. Pictures of northern Africa showed an irregular dark patch 390 square miles in area. Ground-level investigation revealed a fenced area inside of which there was plenty of grass. Outside, the ground cover had been devastated. The explanation was simple. The fenced area was private property, subdivided into five portions. Each year the owners moved their animals to a new section. Fallow periods of four years gave the pastures time to recover from the grazing. The owners did this because they had an incentive to take care of their land. But no one owned the land outside the ranch. It was open to nomads and their herds. Though knowing nothing of Karl Marx, the herdsmen followed his famous advice of 1875: "To each according to his needs." Their needs were uncontrolled and grew with the increase in the number of animals. But supply was governed by nature and decreased drastically during the drought of the early 1970s. The herds exceeded the natural "carrying capacity" of their environment, soil was compacted and eroded, and "weedy" plants, unfit for cattle consumption, replaced good plants. Many cattle died, and so did humans. The rational explanation for such ruin was given more than 170 years ago. In 1832 William Forster Lloyd, a political economist at Oxford University, looking at the recurring devastation of common (i.e., not privately owned) pastures in England, asked: "Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures?" Lloyd's answer assumed that each human exploiter of the common was guided by self-interest. At the point when the carrying capacity of the commons was fully reached, a herdsman might ask himsel

Abstracts for papers and proposals for sessions (no more than 500 words) will be considered by the conference Scientific Committee. For sessions an overview and 3-4 abstracts should be proposed, and a session chair identified. Both, paper abstracts and session proposals should be submitted to it-apn2010@ivm.vu.nl by 15 October 2010. The conference Scientific Committee will provide decisions on selected papers and sessions by the 30 October 2010. Those invited to present will be asked to provide short papers by 15 December 2010. These will be made available on the conference website: http://umconference.um.edu.my/it-apn2011 prior to the meeting. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to make 15 minute presentations at the conference. Guidelines for Fullpaper Submission The full papers should be up to 8000 words and include title, authors names and affiliations incl. address, telephone and email, abstract, main text and references. Pls number your pages. Figures and tables should be part of the text and not a separate file. We do not define font, spacing or format - just be reasonable by avoiding extremes. The full papers should rather be submitted as pdfs for better protection but of course word files will also be accepted. Papers Accepted for Presentation 012 The development of biofuel in Indonesia from diffusion and stakeholder interactions - Joni Jupesta   014 Niche management policy to increase the market share of Alternative Fuel Vehicles : A system dynamics model of the policy effect - Tae-Hyeong Kwon   015 Enhancing Sustained Adoption of Innovations: The Case of Bio-nitrogen Fertilizer in the Philippines - Linda Penalba   016 Enabling poverty relevant bio-fertilizer bio-innovation systems - lessons from India - Sunita Sungar   017 Ethical Market: Ethnographic Encounter with Global Market, CML patients, and Glivec in South Korea - Eun Jeong Ma   018 Surge of high-input vegetable production in northern Thailand: Is the innovation pro-poor and gende

Intellectual property rights, strategy and policy Economics of Innovation and New Technology Volume 13, Issue 5, 2004, Pages 399 - 415 Author: Lee Davis DOI: 10.1080/1043859042000188683 Online Sample       Subscribe Abstract This introductory essay to the special edition explores the changing role of intellectual property rights (IPRs), and the implications of these changes for firm strategy and industrial policy. Four recent, interrelated trends are important in this regard: (1) the growing prominence of intangible assets as sources of competitive advantage, (2) the globalization of business activities, (3) advances in digital technologies of replicability and transferability, and (4) changes in the legal framework governing the strength and scope of IPRs. We focus, in particular, on the impact of these trends on the importance and effectiveness of patents. We argue that while patents have become more valuable to firms, to fulfill a variety of strategic goals, they seem to have become less effective in actually motivating R&D. This distorts the 'bargain' implied by the patent system, increasing the social costs of patenting while decreasing the social benefits. To help restore this balance, various reforms may be implemented, including the use of alternative incentive systems.

LAVOI, B. F Market Structure in Botechnology: Implications for Lorg-run Comparative Advantages