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The objective of this paper is to measure the efficiency loss of green innovation caused by local government competition and explore its causes and evolution characteristics. Based on the equimarginal principles such as the deviation of the allocation of green innovation output factors, this paper uses the panel data of China's provinces (excluding Tibet, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) from 2000 to 2020 and employs the spatial panel measurement model and the Kernel density estimation. The study finds that first, local government competition causes the mismatch of local innovation factors not only locally but also in neighboring regions. Second, the mismatch of innovative talents and capital caused by local government competition lowers the green innovation efficiency. Third, the shortage of innovative talents caused by local government competition is the main reason for the loss of green innovation efficiency in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. Fourth, the degree of efficiency loss of green innovation at the provincial level in China is heterogeneous in government competition strategies, and the loss due to tax competition is the most significant. Fifth, although the loss of green innovation efficiency generally decreases yearly, in the future, the institutional competition will still hinder the improvement of green innovation efficiency in the eastern, central and western regions of China. Our policy suggestions include promoting regional cooperation and cultivating innovative talents to further improve the efficiency of green innovation.

The 2004 antitrust reform is the most important change in the history of EU competition policy. It amounts to a major shift in both the mode of regulation (towards private enforcement) and the substance (towards the Anglo-Saxon model). These changes erode crucial elements of the Rhenish variety of economic organization. © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The paper examines an unusual case involving both a restriction of the freedom to provide services and possible state aid. Organismos Prognostikon Agonon Podosfairou (Organisation of Betting on Football Matches, OPAP), the Greek operator of games of chance, enjoys exclusive rights. The Court of Justice has found that Greece has not exercised sufficient control on OPAP. At the same time, the Commission has assessed the fee that OPAP pays to the Greek State for possible state aid. The Commission has concluded that the fee is high enough to prevent OPAP from earning excessive profits. However, the benchmark that the Commission used assumes that OPAP is a normal operator and not a holder of a legal monopoly with special public policy obligations. The Commission should have taken into account both the monopoly position of OPAP and the impact of those obligations on its profitability.

Brazil's democratic constitution granted municipalities responsibility to design and implement social policies, allowing for tailored programs to meet local constituent demands. Yet instead of pursuing local diversity, many governments chose to emulate programs made famous elsewhere. What explains the diffusion of social programs across Brazil? This article investigates whether policy makers are motivated by political self-interest, ideology, or socialized norms. It draws on an event history analysis of two innovative programs that have diffused throughout Brazil's largest cities: Bolsa Escola, an education program, and Programa Saúde da Família, a family health program. The author argues that political incentives, such as electoral competition, cannot explain diffusion. Rather, diffusion occurs when left-of-center mayors are ideologically compelled to enact these programs and when public officials with connections to professional networks are socialized to follow professional norms.

In recent years the New Keynesian Model with price stickiness of the Calvo type has become the most widely used theoretical framework for addressing various normative issues such as how optimal monetary and fiscal policy should be conducted. However, the New Keynesian Model has been criticized for having many severe shortcomings casting doubt on its appropriateness for advising policy makers. The main goal of this doctoral dissertation is the development of alternative dynamic general equilibrium frameworks which are immune to that criticism but are nevertheless able to explain a standard set of business cycles facts at least well as the New Keynesian Model does. In particular, the models proposed in the current monograph provide an endogenous explanation of price stickiness as well as of other important features of the observable data, e.g. the cyclical variation of average markups and the persistence in the reactions to nominal and real shocks. These results are achieved by combining dynamic or static market share competition in the goods market with different assumptions on households' behavior (non-separability of the utility function, inflation aversion, nominal transaction frictions). The monograph is organized as follows. Chapter I provides a brief review of the relevant empirical evidence and discusses the most important shortcomings of the New Keynesian Model. In Chapter II I develop a monetary customer markets model combining dynamic market share competition as proposed by Phelps and Winter (1970) with a non-separable utility function. Chapter III presents a model combining dynamic market share competition with the assumption that agent's behavior is characterized by inflation aversion. Chapter IV is devoted to the GMM estimation of crucial parameters of the inflation-aversion model of the previous chapter. A model featuring static market share competition and nominal transaction frictions is developed in Chapter V. Chapter VI concludes. ; In den letzten Jahren hat sich das Neu-Keynesianische Modell mit Calvo-Preissetzung zum Labor für die Untersuchung einer Vielzahl normativer Fragestellungen - wie zum Beispiel bezüglich der Gestaltung der Geld- und Fiskalpolitik - entwickelt. Aufgrund einer Reihe gewichtiger Mängel jedoch, ist es äußerst fraglich, ob dieses Modell den geeigneten Rahmen für normative Analysen darstellt. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist die Konstruktion von Alternativen zum Neu-Keynesianischen Modell, die seine Schwächen beseitigen und zugleich die konjunkturellen Zusammenhänge mindestens genauso gut erklären können. Die in dieser Monografie vorgeschlagenen Modelle sind jeweils in der Lage, Preisstarrheit sowie andere interessante Phänomene wie zum Beispiel das zyklische Verhalten der Markups und die Persistenz in den Reaktionen auf exogene Schocks zu erklären. Erreicht wird dies durch die Kombination dynamischen Marktanteilwettbewerbs mit verschiedenen Annahmen an das Verhalten des Haushaltssektors (Nicht-Separabilität der Nutzenfunktion, Inflationsaversion, nominelle Transaktionskosten). Die Monografie ist wie folgt aufgebaut. Kapitel I gibt einen kurzen Überblick über die relevante empirische Evidenz und stellt die wichtigsten Schwächen des Neu-Keynesianischen Modells dar. Im Kapitel II wird ein Modell entwickelt, das den von Phelps und Winter (1970) vorgeschlagenen dynamischen Wettbewerb um Marktanteile mit Nicht-Separabilitäten in der Nutzenfunktion kombiniert. Kapitel III präsentiert ein Modell, das den dynamischen Marktanteilwettbewerb mit der Annahme kombiniert, dass das Verhalten der Wirtschaftssubjekte durch Inflationsaversion gekennzeichnet ist. Im Kapitel IV widme ich mich der GMM-Schätzung wichtiger Parameter des Inflationsaversionsmodells. Gegenstand des fünften Kapitels ist die Integration statischen Marktanteilwettbewerbs und nomineller Transaktionskosten in ein dynamisches, allgemeines Gleichgewichtsmodell. Kapitel VI liefert die Konklusion.

Introduction -- Theoretical background : structures, agents and small state strategies in foreign policy -- Lithuanian foreign policy process and the role of the president -- The Baltic states : between cooperation and competition -- Russia : the reset that never was -- Relations with the USA : CIA prison, defensive plans, Obama, and Trump -- Relationship status with Poland : 'It's complicated' -- Ukraine : the revolution that started in Vilnius -- The European Union and the search for leadership : from the Nordic countries to Germany -- Relationship with Israel -- Conclusions : Lithuanian foreign policy changes and Grybauskaitė's legacy.

This article assesses the extent to which the reform strategy presented in the IBRD's sector policy paper on vocational education and training (VET) has been implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. The two main conclusions are, 1) to date, only a small group of countries in Africa have seriously attempted to implement the IBRD's reform agenda for skills training, 2) as currently conceived, it is unlikely that demand-led VET systems and related policies will be successfully introduced in most SSA countries. (DÜI/DSE)

This chapter aims to bring the study of ideas into the analysis of education policy and governance, and to explore their transfer, dissemination and feedback between the international and national policy making arenas. In a globalised education context, policy ideas about education often reflect changes in the dynamic relations between society and schooling – manifested for example in the pursuit of the knowledge economy as the future paradigm underpinning education reforms. Across Europe and other parts of the world, new policy ideas about education have driven major restructuring projects that dismantled older forms of schooling and welfare provision. Invariably, these have been replaced by new ways of defining education policy problems that draw on the market place as a new social and policy space where knowledge and policy solutions are contextualised and utilised differently to the norms of the past. The shifts in the assumptions about education policy knowledge and policy ideas, raise a number of interesting questions, such as, what produces policy changes in education systems and what is the influence of international actors? And, who are the agents of change in education reforms? Our ambition in this chapter is to connect some of these issues to the restructuring of Swedish education over the last 30 years. Sweden underwent a radical shift in the early 1990s from strong central state governing of education and very few private schools to a highly decentralized system promoting school choice and competition between public as well as private actors. Based on generous vouchers and liberal authorization rules, the private school sector expanded at a high pace, particularly in the 2000s. Allowing profit-making without demands on re-investment in schools, education has increasingly attracted large limited liability companies – something that makes the Swedish case out¬standing in an international comparison (Lundahl et al. 2013; Alexiadou, Lundahl & Rönnberg 2019). In this chapter, we discuss if and to what extent the introduction and continuation of school choice and marketization policies in Sweden were guided by policy learning from external actors, in particular supranational organizations such as the European Union and the OECD.

Contrary to the wide-held perception that increased international competition will lead to the erosion of environmental standards we show that economic integration, such as NAFTA, may instead lead to tighter environmental control. In maximizing political support the administration will trade off some of the gains from trade liberalization accruing to both the export sector and labor for increasing support by the environmentalists and the losers of protection (i.e. the import sector). This is effected through tightened environmental control - NAFTA will result in higher environmental standards in the US.

In campaigns, candidates often avoid taking positions on issues, concealing the policy preferences that would guide them if elected. This paper describes a novel explanation for ambiguity in political campaigns. It develops a model of candidate competition in which policy-motivated candidates can choose whether or not to announce their policy preferences to voters. It applies Eyster and Rabin's (2005) concept of cursed equilibrium, which allows for varying degrees of understanding of the connection between type (policy preference) and strategy (whether to announce). If voters updated according to Bayes' Rule, they would understand that candidates who do not announce positions are strategically concealing an unpopular policy preference. In equilibrium, only the most extreme candidates, those located furthest from the median voter's position, would choose to take no position. However, if voters do not sufficiently appreciate the informational content of a non-announcement, unraveling will not occur and both extremists and more moderate candidates will not announce positions.

We examine an issue at the nexus of domestic competition policy and international trade, the interaction between goods trade and market power in domestic trade and distribution sectors. Theory suggests a set of linkages between service-sector competition and goods trade supported by econometrics involving imports of 22 OECD countries vis-´a-vis 69 exporters. Competition in services affects the volume of goods trade. Additionally, because of interaction between tariffs and competition, the market structure of the domestic service sector becomes increasingly important as tariffs are reduced. Empirically service competition apparently matters most for exporters in smaller, poorer countries. Our results also suggest that while negotiated agreements leading to crossborder services liberalization may boost goods trade as well, they may also lead to a fall in goods trade when such liberalization involves FDI leading to increased service sector concentration.

The U.S. Department of Labor's "Work Force 2000" project has identified long‐term trends that will affect future employment and training policy. These include demographic trends such as a decline in the pool of young labor market entrants and an increase in women, minority, and immigrant workers; the continued shift from goods‐producing industries to the service sector; and continued technological innovation in response to increased international competition. These projected changes in the labor market and workplace present a national challenge and an opportunity to tackle the longstanding problems of disadvantaged workers. Cooperative public and private programs to eliminate illiteracy and increase job skills and competencies, ease labor mobility and provide retraining, and attack underlying social problems that support the cycle of welfare dependency and unemployment are needed to provide the workforce America needs for the future.