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AbstractRecent decades have seen substantial changes to the innovation systems of major economies, not least due to a paradigm shift caused by the digital revolution. Whether smaller advanced economies such as Australia have undergone a similar shift or moved to fill the void left by other countries is unclear. This issue is important as it sets the long‐term growth path of these economies. I use Australian patent data and show that there has been a similar surge in Australia in patenting, mainly driven by medical and digital technologies. Australia, however, is showing more strength in a few niche areas. At the same time, the scope of patents, as one measure of basicness, narrowed over the years. This has been driven by private companies opting for applied research and also refocusing their innovation efforts away from chemical and material technologies and onto digital technologies and other applied areas.

AbstractA host of industrialised countries have seen concentration in their industries grow. This trend is fuelling concerns about falling competition. This article focuses on the changing pattern of market concentration in Australia from 2002 to 2017. On average, market concentration has been rising. However, beneath the aggregate statistics, the pattern is rather mixed, with concentration falling in several sectors. The study also detects a pattern of strong productivity growth alongside a shift towards capital intensive operation and increasing trade where concentration is growing. Overall, the implications of these findings point to the possibility that rising market concentration in some industries is technology driven and not due to a lack of competition.

International cooperative initiatives (ICIs) are multi-country, multi-actor non-state actions that have the potential to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The article summarizes the literature on estimates of emission reduction potentials attributed to ICIs. This summary highlights three key issues: there is a plethora of uncoordinated initiatives, often lacking specific, time-bound goals; to a greater or lesser extent most initiatives overlap with the activities conducted under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); and few initiatives have set up transparent performance monitoring and reporting mechanisms. The article concludes with two considerations. Firstly, it advocates for the United Nations Environment Programme as one entity that could bring much-needed coordination among ICIs, and between ICIs and national government-led efforts to mitigate climate change. Secondly, it echoes calls for the initiatives to both adopt transparent monitoring, reporting and verification mechanisms, and ensure that their activities are cost-effective with regard to climate change mitigation. Finally, the article outlines the key issues that will need to be addressed to achieve these goals. Key policy insights •The emission reductions potential of international cooperative initiatives appears to be limited, which would question some of the rational for promoting them. •The extent to which international cooperative initiatives overlap with emission reduction efforts under the UNFCCC is uncertain, but believed to be quite large. •The UNFCCC is arguably ill suited to coordinate and strengthen the accountability of international cooperative initiatives.

AbstractA general framework is presented that incorporates dynamics and heterogeneity among both upstream suppliers and downstream producers to mimic the exit strategy of Hirschman (1970) in building vertical relations. An assortative matching develops between producers and suppliers based on their level of efficiency, which leads to an increase in the aggregate industrial productivity but also makes the distribution of firms more dispersed. Further experiments suggest that the nature of outsourcing relations is impacted in certain ways by business cycles and technological advancements.

Abstract A model of monopolistic competition is presented in which the relation between the productivity and input size of producers is non‐monotonic and bell‐shaped. The model predicts that markets matter and the average size of the producers is directly scaled by the size of the market. An indirect effect increases the cutoff productivity, making the bell narrower in larger markets or when the transportation cost falls. Empirical evidence from the concrete industry and a few other 4‐digit industries supports the model's predictions. The bell‐shaped relation has especially important implications on how size distributions are formed across localized versus globalized market industries.