Suchergebnisse

Until recently, government procurement bidding processes have generally favored domestic firms by awarding the contract to a domestic firm even if a foreign firm tenders a lower bid, so long as the difference between the two is sufficiently small. This has been replaced by an agreement abolishing this practice. However, the presence of other trade barriers, such as tariffs, can continue to disadvantage foreign firms. We analyze the bidding strategies in such a game and show that when domestic profits are valued, tariffs will be used to discriminate against foreign firms. Furthermore, we find that optimal tariffs can be more protectionist than the optimal price preference, resulting in lower expected domestic welfare and total surplus.

Historically, tariffs have been an attractive policy tool to protect domestic industries. The benefits of such a policy are based on theoretical models that assume foreign manufacturers sell directly to consumers. However, recent empirical evidence suggests that wholesalers and retailers play an active role in international trade. We present a model of retailers that illustrates how accounting for these strategic intermediaries can actually make some domestic manufacturers worse off in response to an increased tariff. Moreover, any production gains that occur are biased towards higher cost domestic manufacturers. This result is not driven by the cannibalization effect of the multiproduct firm literature rather it is the fact that retailers compete over the marginal consumer (the extensive margin).

Though 1984 is often praised for its prescience, critics in Orwell's time and ours have also condemned its pessimism. Orwell's despair, the argument goes, undermines the power of his warning, representing a retreat from politics, a betrayal of socialism, and a repudiation of utopianism. This article draws on the text of 1984 and Orwell's contemporaneous writings to reassess his thinking on power, socialism, and utopia and to reconsider 1984's appeal to the political imagination. Characterizing Orwell's late political sensibility as one of desperate radicalism, the article demonstrates that Orwell remained both a socialist and a steward of the utopian imagination and that he feared totalitarianism because it threatened to expunge utopian ideals from historical consciousness. 1984 depicts a world in which this effort has nearly succeeded, rendering Orwell's present as a moment of choice between an egalitarian future and a future of permanent hierarchy.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of boxes -- Introduction: What are Parties For? -- Part I: The Major Parties -- 1. The Labour Party -- 2. The Conservative Party -- Part II: The Minor Parties -- 3. The Liberal Democrats -- 4. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Parties -- Part III: Peripheral Parties -- Introduction -- 5. Right-wing Peripheral Parties -- 6. Left-wing Peripheral Parties -- 7. Other Peripheral Parties and Independent Candidates -- 8. Conclusion: What Kind of Party System? -- References -- Index

Abstract
This paper revisits the 'jobs versus the environment' debate and provides the first analysis for a country other than the US. We firstly examine the impact of environmental regulations on employment assuming such regulations are exogenous. However, for the first time in a study of this nature, we then allow environmental regulation costs and employment to be endogenously determined. Environmental regulation costs are not found to have a statistically significant effect on employment whether such costs are treated as being exogenous or endogenous. We therefore find no evidence of a trade-off between jobs and the environment.