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Liberalization of trade has been high on the political agenda after the Second World War. First through the international corporation in GATT and WTO and later the creation of the internal market in Western Europe and the opening up of Eastern Europe and China. The breweries respond to these changes in institution by a global M&A strategy and the following concentration of ownership among breweries increased the large breweries' global market share dramatically. Why does this concentration in ownership take place, and was there some pay off to the breweries of this strategy? We will examine the market power hypothesis, how the increasing concentration has affected the growth of global brands and the beer prices. First, we examine where the increasing global concentration is reflected in a concentration of ownership in local markets. Next, we examine the effects of ownership concentration on the level of beer prices. Finally, we examine the effects of the global ownership on the market share of the global beer brand.

Large pharmaceutical companies will face serious challenges in the future when several of their blockbuster drugs run out of patents, and meanwhile a growing political pressure to stop the fast increase in health care expenditures has merged. The recent wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) within the industry can be seen as an effective means to reduce costs and compensate for the reduced earnings from patented drugs. The paper examines the main development in expenditure on research and development (R&D) and number of patents in the industry with a focus on the role of company size. The analysis builds on a data set containing information of both patents and R&D expenditure from the world's top 90 largest pharmaceutical companies, as well as their account data from 2002 to 2013. The empirical part estimates the firm size effect on R&D efficiency and the amount of investment allocated to R&D. Fixed effects estimation models have been applied to control for differences in firm characteristics. We find significantly lower innovation activities in large companies with low innovation productivity as well. The M&A strategy of the large pharmaceutical companies may have been their wise move to catch up on new drugs and revenues.

This book explores the role that institutions and ownership play in the transformation and development of the beer market and brewing industry, and the innovative ways in which breweries have adapted their strategies to respond to external challenges and the restructuring of the industry in recent years.

This paper examines the remarkable development of technology and the fast learning-by-doing in the windmill industry since it emerged in the beginning of the 1980s. Based on time series of prices of windmills a dynamic cost function for producing windmills is tested. The estimations verified that learning-by-doing in the Danish windmill industry has contributed significantly to improve the cost efficiency of the producers. The technological development has been stimulated both by process and product innovations as the capacity of the individual mills has increased. The learning effect created by early subsidies from the government has consolidated the competitive advantages of the windmill cluster in Denmark and preserved the first mover advantages at the world market. The article concludes that the industry probably will enter into a matured phase in the future with more modest technological growth.