Suchergebnisse

Lit.

The Pollution-Haven Hypothesis suggests that tight environmental standards reduce domestic producers' competitiveness and give rise to their relocating to countries with more lenient standards. This paper questions that relocation is always caused by reduced competitiveness at home. By using a signaling approach, I show that relocation can be undertaken for purely strategic reasons. Relocation is the producer's tool to convince the policy maker to refrain from a further tightening of environmental control. I show that trade liberalization increases probability of strategic relocation.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand it aims at extending King-Fullerton methodology to a larger scope of liabilities and primarily, in the empirical section of the paper, to statutory charges associated to labour costs, basically employers' contributions to social security. Thus it proposes substituting MESC or Marginal Effective Statutory Charge, for King-Fullerton METR, and enlarging the p-statistics to requirements in terms of labour cost coverage, then reinterpreting it in terms of marginal value added. A further extension to environmental levies as well as a generalisation to any market failure inefficiency loss are also presented. On the other hand the paper intends to emphasize the key role of factor supply elasticities or relative mobility and market rigidities in determining the impact of the - or part of the - MESC statistics on the location decision of an MNE, a Multinational Enterprise. Indeed, in a setting where no rigidities are at work on the market for the immobile factor, like labour, levies on the compensation of that factor don't matter for MNE decision. Unlike that, in a setting where such rigidities are present, they do matter since they refrain the possibility to pass the burden of the tax on the holder of the rather immobile factor. The ultimate goal of the paper is, through the topics mentioned above, to cope with issues especially relevant for interjurisdictional behaviour of multinational entreprises without the framework of a nex Federation like the European Union.

This paper investigates patterns of manufacturing location in the context of increased economic integration in Central and East European countries. Using regional data for the period 1990-1999, we identify and compare patterns and determinants of manufacturing location in five European Union (EU) accession countries: Bu1garia, Estonia, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia. Our research results suggest that, in these countries, regiona1 relocation of industries has taken place, leading in Bulgaria and Romania to increasing regional specialization. However, regional specialization has not changed significant1y in Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia. We find empirical evidence indicating that both factor endowments and geographic proximity to largemarkets determine the location of manufacturing in EU accession countries.