Information, Innovation and Impacts - a joint project between the Program of Research in International Management and Economy (PRIME) at the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada - brings together economic, social and statistical views of the impacts of the innovative uses of information. It examines the costs as well as the benefits of rapidly expanding availability of data, of information, and of codified knowledge, and it provides suggestions for future work and research. This project fits into an on-going research program at Statistics Canada to develop indicators for science and technology (S&T) in a more coherent manner, and it fits into the research program of PRIME to better understand the dynamics of innovation in an information economy. Together, Statistics Canada and PRIME strive to tell the story of the activities in S&T systems, their interactions, and the outcomes as actors go about the generation, transmission, or mediation of knowledge, information, and of data, as part of the effective functioning of the system.

Over the past thirty years, urban economic theory has been one of the most active areas of urban and regional economic research. Just as static general equilibrium theory is at the core of modern microeconomics, so is the topic of this book - the static allocation of resources within a city and between cities - at the core of urban economic theory. An Essay on Urban Economic Theory well reflects the state of the field. Part I provides an elegant, coherent, and rigorous presentation of several variants of the monocentric (city) model - as the centerpiece of urban economic theory - treating equilibrium, optimum, and comparative statistics. Part II explores less familiar and even some uncharted territory. The monocentric model looks at a single city in isolation, taking as given a central business district surrounded by residences. Part II, in contrast, makes the intra-urban location of residential and non-residential activity the outcome of the fundamental tradeoff between the propensity to interact and the aversion to crowding; the resulting pattern of agglomeration may be polycentric. Part II also develops models of an urbanized economy with trade between specialized cities and examines how the market-determined size distribution of cities differs from the optimum. This book launches a new series, Advances in Urban and Regional Economics. The series aims to provide an outlet for longer scholarly works dealing with topics in urban and regional economics.

Regulation Under Increasing Competition brings together practitioners, regulators, and economists to examine the important policy and regulatory issues facing the telecommunications and electricity industries. This volume reviews such topics as competitive entry, stranded costs, pricing and market mechanisms. It provides a unique perspective on problems in a newly deregulated environment.

It is beyond any doubt that East-Central European countries such as Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia has dramatically changed its shape through its radical transition from centrally planned to the market economies in last 7 years. Many economists divide the process of economic transformation into areas of Stabilization, Liberalization, and Privatization/Restructuring. The traditional view is that stabilization and liberalization can be achieved rather quickly-by balancing budgets, balance of payments, tightening money supply, freeing prices and liberalizing trade-but that the area of privatization is one that could be moved to the future and will require much more time. Until 1991, none of the post-communist nations except former East Germany (which had a large decree of support from West Germany) had succeeded in privatizing large numbers of enterprises, even though more than two years had passed since the changes in government in these nations. The privatization has been, however, seen as an extremely important part of reform package together with stabilization and liberalization especially in the Czech Republic from the very beginning. The Czechs originally as a part of the Czechoslovak Federal Republic embarked on an unprecedented path that should have lead not only to stabilization and liberalization, but also to very rapid, mass privatization of its sector of large enterprises that have dominated its economy to an extreme extent.

Design Models for Hierarchical Organizations: Computation, Information, and Decentralization provides state-of-the-art research on organizational design models, and in particular on mathematical models. Each chapter views the organization as an information processing entity. Thus, mathematical models are used to examine information flow and decision procedures, which in turn, form the basis for evaluating organization designs. Each chapters stands alone as a contribution to organization design and the modeling approach to design. Moreover, the chapters fit together and that totality gives us a good understanding of where we are with this approach to organizational design issues and where we should focus our research efforts in the future.

We have undertaken this volume in the belief that there is now sufficient research completed on environmental risk to justify a retrospective assessment of what is known. Our authors and our intended audience are eclectic indeed. Environ mental risk assessment receives increasing attention in the media today. The populace is practically assaulted with stories, with anecdotes, and with conflicting evidence. It is our hope that these chapters will provide the reader with a comprehensive glimpse of a fast-growing field in public policy. No complete survey of the literature would be possible or meaningful. We offer here instead the integrative thoughts of some of the most respected analysts in the field. We believe that the coverage is coherent, the perspectives are illuminating, and the individual "treatments deserving of careful study. We are grateful to Warren Samuels of Michigan State University who is editor of the Kluwer series on recent economic thought. We are also grateful to our Kluwer editor, Zach Rolnik. Both have been gracious in their toleration of unconscionable delays. IX The Social Response to Environmental Risk Policy Formulation in an Age of Uncertainty 1 ENTITLEMENTS AND PUBLIC POLICY IN ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS Daniel W. Bromley* all rights] are conditional and derivative ... they are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist. They are conditional on being used to the attainment of that end."

Modeling Environmental Policy demonstrates the link between physical models of the environment and policy analysis in support of policy making. Each chapter addresses an environmental policy issue using a quantitative modeling approach. The volume addresses three general areas of environmental policy - non-point source pollution in the agricultural sector, pollution generated in the extractive industries, and transboundary pollutants from burning fossil fuels. The book concludes by discussing the modeling efforts and the use of mathematical models in general.

People want more from the government. One thing they want more of is a sense of personal safety, at home and at work (Regulation, Fall 1991). People also want the government to quit wasting money. The objective of having the government provide a safer life for us and our children at minimum cost leads logically to looking at policy within the system involving the private sector plus governments at the federal and sub federal levels. Using numerical simulations our book takes an integrated quantitative look at how the various institutions influencing workplace safety lead to the observed levels of illnesses and injuries among U.S. workers. Our innovation is piecing together the mosaic of interactions among workers, employers, state government, and the federal government that is numerically realistic in the sense of using economists' current knowl edge of quantitative connections. Our objective has been to write a Gray's Anatomy, if you will, of how the U.S. economic system, as tempered by government policy, jointly determines employment patterns, wages, and workplace safety levels."

Long before policy analysis emerged as a separate profession with its own graduate schools, economists offered advice about government policies. Positive economics provides the tools for predicting the impacts of prop osed policies; normative economics, especially welfare theory, offers a framework for valuing the impacts of policies in terms of efficiency and simple notions of equity. With the expansion of economic theory into ever wider fields of human behavior, it is no wonder that economists have prominence as teachers and practitioners of policy analysis. Indeed, many economists see policy analysis as essentially applied economics. Though other social scientists might object to this somewhat parochial view, economics and policy analysis share much in commom in terms of develop ment and prospects. The purpose of this volume is to trace these interrela tionships and explore the tensions that they create. Tensions arise for several reasons. Changes in the discipline of econ omics affect the findings, methods, and personnel offered to policy analy sis. For example, on the one hand, the "new institutional economics" appears to be extending the influence of economists to questions involving nonmarket oranizations, while on the other hand, the apparently growing emphasis within the economics profession on creating rather than empir ically testing theory suggests that fewer of the best young scholars will be drawn to policy-relevant research. Within the schools of policy analysis, the drift toward public management may reduce the demand for traditional economic training."

Computers communicate globally via satellite or fiber optic links, wide area networks share resources thousands of miles away, and the average home can have the capacity of access information at the push of a button - the digital information age has arrived! Several technologies have made this computer age possible, helped it grow, and affected its dynamics over time. This book addresses the problem of formulating a model that interrelates the factors that drive the supply of these technologies over time to the attributes of the computers that are manufactured from them.

Economics is taught in some form in the secondary schools of nations throughout the world. The subject is rarely taught in elementary schools, and while economics courses are offered in universities, the majority of students end their formal education with secondary school. Thus, the best opportunity for the economic education of the youth of a nation occurs in secondary schools. This book examines economic education at this critical level of the educational system. The teaching of economics in secondary schools varies across countries. These differences occur because of history, the structure of education, and other national factors. At the same time, there are common elements in the economic education of many countries, especially in content coverage. This contrast between the common features and the uniqueness of economic education in secondary schools of major industrial nations exemplifies the international perspective presented in this book. The international perspective is developed in the six sections of the volume. The first section discusses why nations should include economics in school curricula, and presents a framework for teaching economics that should have global appeal. Dissension and consensus on economic issues among North American and European economists are examined in the second section. The third section surveys the U.S. research literature on precollege economic education and assesses the current state of economics instruction in U.S. schools. The economics curricula and educational practices in seven other nations -- the U.K., Canada, Japan, Germany, Austria, Korea, and Australia -- are described in the fourth and fifth sections. The fifth section also presents international comparisons of economic understanding based on national testing in six of those nations. The sixth and final section explores the role of economic education in centrally planned economies, and its effects on the transition to a market economy, using Russia, Bulgaria, and China as case studies.

Electric utilities throughout the world continue to face new challenges involving ownership, market structure, and regulation. There are three related issues at hand. First, should ownership be private or public? Second, what operations should be integrated and where is competition feasible? Third, where is regulation necessary and can it be made more efficient? This volume bears directly upon these concerns. The book contains two sections. The first six articles discuss the British electricity experiment that has privatized and disintegrated the nation's generation, transmission, and distribution companies, introduced market competition for power purchases, and implemented incentive regulation for monopolized transmission and distribution grids. The remaining articles focus on the theater in which significant microeconomic issues will continue to emerge, most immediately in the U.K. and U.S.A. -- the coordination and pricing of transmission.

There is widespread acceptance that much of the developed world faces a potential pensions and welfare crisis as a result of declining birth rates and an ageing population. However, there is considerable uncertainty about the specifics of demographic forecasting and this has significant implications for public finances. Uncertain Demographics and Fiscal Sustainability addresses the economic consequences of uncertainty and, with particular reference to European economies, explores the impact of demographic risks on public finances, including pension systems, health care and old-age care expenditures. Covering a spectrum of theoretical and empirical approaches, different types of computational models are used to demonstrate not only the magnitudes of the uncertainties involved but also how these can be addressed through policy initiatives. The book is divided into four parts covering demographic, measurement, policy and methodological issues. Each part is followed by a discussion essay that draws out key elements and identifies common themes.

First Published in 2013. This landmark work centers on media management and economics within a diverse, international, historical and constantly changing environment. The chapters herein reflect the current state of research and present directions for future study. Developed at the 2012 Research Symposium in conjunction with the annual convention of the Broadcast Education Association, it represents the most current theory and research in the area.

Industrial production and consumption patterns rely heavily on the intensive use of both renewable and non-renewable resources and the consequences for the environment can be serious. Following a long period of time where the profit incentives of firms have prevailed over preservation of the environment and the world's natural resources, a new consensus has emerged concerning the need to regulate firm behaviour, aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the economic system in the long run. This book offers an exhaustive overview of current economic debate about these topics, taking modern oligopoly theory as a benchmark. The first part of the book covers static models dealing with incentives for green research and development, Pigovian taxation, cartels, environmental quality and international trade, as well as the role of corporate social responsibility, public firms and consumer environmental awareness as endogenous regulatory instruments. Then, the author moves on to examine the role of time while drawing from optimal control and differential game theory. This opens the way to the discussion of fair discount rates to ensure the welfare of future generations, as well as the long run sustainability of production and consumption patterns.

This book draws together the key contributions to the major areas of microeconomic theory from the last few decades. It is intended to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with an essential guide to the current state of the discipline. The articles have been carefully selected not only for the role they have played in the progress of microeconomics, but also for their usefulness and potential to inspire future research. The main themes covered include consumer theory, the theory of the firm, the theory of markets, pricing theory, and labor compensation theory, with the common threads of transaction costs, strategic decisions, and information imperfections. Unlike similar anthologies, this Reader also draws attention to methodological issues and heterodox approaches to microeconomics. Amongst those whose works appear here are Gary Becker, George Stigler, Harvey Leibenstein, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Avinash Dixit and Paul Klemperer. This Reader will be an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in economics, as well as casual readers interested in an "insider's view" of the discipline. It serves not only to collect in a single place the most significant papers in economics that have been published in recent decades but also, with several introduction chapters, to give the literature a coherent structure.

In the twentieth century, urban growth was one of the most powerful catalysts of geographical, social and demographic change in the Western world. When this book was first published in 1989, however, a massive process of counter-urbanization was underway, which saw the loss of population and jobs in cities and a pronounced urban to rural shift. This book analyses the causes and consequences of urban decline in Britain and the developed world during this period and beyond, and assesses the implications for urban planning and policy. David Clark's relevant and comprehensive title will be of value to students with a particular interest in urban geography and development.

Now fully adapted for the Europe, Middle East & Africa market, Microeconomic Theory: Basic Principles and Extensions delivers cutting-edge treatment of microeconomics together with an ideal level of mathematical rigour. Aimed directly at upper level undergraduate students and graduate students, the book teaches users how to work directly with theoretical tools, real-world applications, and the latest developments within the study of microeconomics. It provides clear and accurate coverage of advanced microeconomic concepts and illustrates how the theory applies to practical situations. In addition, the text s helps to build student intuition by including a new two-tier end-of-chapter problem that begins with simple numerical/mathematical exercises followed by more analytical, theoretical, and complex problems.

Upon its publication in 1989, this was the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of the Latin American School of Development and an invaluable guide to the major Third World contribution to development theory. The four major strands in the work of Latin American Theorists are: structuralism, internal colonialism, marginality and dependency. Exploring all four in detail, and the interconnections between them, Cristobal Kay highlights the developed world's over-reliance on, and partial knowledge of, dependency theory in its approach to development issues, and analyses the first major challenges to neo-classical and modernisation theories from the Third World.

This book provides a game theoretic model of interaction among VoIP telecommunications providers regarding their willingness to enter peering agreements with one another. The author shows that the incentive to peer is generally based on savings from otherwise payable long distance fees. At the same time, termination fees can have a countering and dominant effect, resulting in an environment in which VoIP firms decide against peering. Various scenarios of peering and rules for allocation of the savings are considered. The first part covers the relevant aspects of game theory and network theory, trying to give an overview of the concepts required in the subsequent application. The second part of the book introduces first a model of how the savings from peering can be calculated and then turns to the actual formation of peering relationships between VoIP firms. The conditions under which firms are willing to peer are then described, considering the possible influence of a regulatory body.

First published in 1984, this title discusses the emergence of both the orthodox and political economy based approaches to underdevelopment in geography , critically assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and showing the relationship between intellectual developments and changing material conditions. The work is primarily concerned with theories, though it does contain much empirical material drawn from throughout the Third World. The book examines the emergence of theories of development historically and considers the various contemporary theoretical 'schools', both Marxist and non-Marxist. It goes on to consider four aspects of development which are of particular interest to geographers, namely the world economy, regional imbalances, the human-nature theme and the analysis of urban space, and concludes by suggesting some directions for future research.

This work examines America's growing underground economy--its size, nature, and economic effects. The study begins with a critical analysis of the various methods used for measuring the size of the underground economy in the United States. It then develops a definition of the underground economy which is consistent with our system of national accounts. A sector-by-sector approach is used to measure the actual size of this sub-economy and to estimate the labor force involved. Finally, the author explores the economic consequences for the general economy of significant underground economic activity--for example: tax evasion, economic efficiency, and cyclical aspects.

This work will be of interest to scholars, students, and policy-makers in economics, economic policy, political science, and criminology.

It is often said that everyone understands precisely what is meant by the notion of probability-except those who have spent their lives studying the matter. Upon close scrutiny, the intuitively obvious idea of probability becomes quite elusive. Is it a subjective or objective concept? Are random variables simply improperly measured deterministic variables, or inherently random? What is meant by the phrase "other things held constant" that often appears in descriptions of probability? These questions involve fundamental philosophical and scientific issues, and promise to elude definitive answers for some time. The same type of difficulty arises when attempting to produce a volume on microeconomic theory. The obvious first question-what is microeconomic theory?--

? In his "Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prezzi in Firenze" (1939), Giuseppe Parenti, by Fernand Braudel regarded as an author who "se classait, d'entree de jeu et sans discussion possible, a la hauteur meme d'Earl Jefferson Hamilton. . . . " begins his opening lines with a description/de?nition of the price revolution which took place in the XVI in Europe as "that extraordinary enhancement of all things that occurred in European countries around the second half of the XVI; revolution in the true meaning of the word, as not only, like any strong price increase, it modi?ed the wealth distribution process and changed the relative position of the various social categories and of the different functions of the economic activity, but affected too, in a way that was not enough studied yet, the relative evolution of the various national economies, and ?nally, . . . . . . . . . ., certainly contributed to the birth, or at least to the dissemination, of the new naturalistic economic ideas, from which the economic science would have sprung." De?nition that can be taken as the founding metaphor of this volume."