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The plant size distribution differs systematically across developed and developing countries. For example, in developing countries, less than one fifth of 1% of plants are large (employ 100 or more employees) and account for about one fifth of total employment. In sharp contrast, in developed countries, more than 1.6% of plants are large and account for more than two fifth of total employment. In this dissertation, I develop a model of plant size to account for the differences in the plant size distribution observed in the data. In the first chapter, I explore the link between plant size distribution and economic development. I also discuss the main features of the plant size distribution data. The purpose of this data set is to provide evidence of systematic differences in plant size distribution across developed and developing countries. In the second chapter, I present a dynamic employment choice model in a life cycle setting. Then I calibrate the benchmark model to match some key features of the U.S. plant size distribution. I find that my model can capture the critical features of U.S. plant size distribution, including the upper tail which accounts for the bulk of the employment and output in the U.S. economy. In the third chapter, I explore how exogenous differences in aggregate barriers to investment and technology across countries affect the plant size distribution. Results indicate that exogenous differences in aggregate barriers to investment and technology across countries can account for more than 50% of the variation in both the fraction of large plants and employment share in large plants across countries. For the same group of countries, exogenous differences in aggregate barriers also account for 36% of the variation in the mean size.
The typical size distribution of manufacturing plants in developing countries has a thick left tail compared to developed countries. The same holds across Indian states, with richer states having a much smaller share of their manufacturing employment in small plants. In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that this income-size relation arises from the fact that low income countries and states have high demand for low quality products which can be produced efficiently in small plants. I provide evidence which is consistent with this hypothesis from both the consumer and producer side. In particular, I show empirically that richer households buy higher price goods while larger plants produce higher price products (and use higher price inputs). I develop a model which matches these cross-sectional facts. The model features non-homothetic preferences with respect to quality on the consumer side. On the producer side, high quality production has higher marginal costs and requires higher fixed costs. These two features imply that high quality producers are larger on average and charge higher prices. The model can explain about forty percent of the cross-state variation in the left tail of manufacturing plants in India.
We investigate, using plant-level data for 79 developed and developing countries, whether differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants are a significant determinant of cross-country differences in income per worker. For this purpose, we use a standard version of the neoclassical growth model augmented to incorporate monopolistic competition among heterogeneous plants. For our preferred calibration, the model explains 58% of the log variance of income per worker. This figure should be compared to the 42% success rate of the usual model.
John Sutton sets out a unified theory that encompasses two major approaches to studying market, while generating a series of novel predictions as to how markets evolve. Traditionally, the field of industrial organization has relied on two unrelated theories—the cross-section theory and the growth-of-firms theory—to explain cross-industry differences in concentration and within-industry skewness. The two approaches are based on very different mathematical structures and few researchers have attempted to relate them to each other. In this book, John Sutton unifies the two approaches through a theory that rests on three simple principles. The first two, a "survivor principle" that says that firms will not pursue loss-making strategies, and an "arbitrage principle" that says that if a profitable opportunity is available, some firm will take it, suffice to define a set of possible outcomes. The third, the "symmetry principle," says that the strategy used by a new entrant into any submarket depends neither on the entrants identity nor on its history in other submarkets. This allows researchers to bring together the roles of strategic interactions and of independence effects. The result is that the considerations motivating the cross-section tradition and those motivating the growth-of-firms tradition both drop out within a single game-theoretic model. This book follows Sutton's Sunk Costs and Market Structure, published by MIT Press in 1991.
There are many issues relating to the new economy in Europe and the USA that are unexplored. Here, the authors present innovative theoretical and empirical analysis on Internet dynamics, productivity growth and organizational changes in selected OECD countries. New empirical findings related to telecommunications, Internet and growth also are presented. Based on the theoretical and empirical analyses, various policy options are developed. Policy measures, both at the regional and national levels, can stimulate structural change, knowledge diffusion and economic growth. Different governance strategies for the Internet and e-commerce are identified from a global perspective.
This synthesis of the growing body of information from research on epiphytes and their relations with other tropical biota provides a comprehensive overview of basic functions, life history, evolution, and the place of epiphytes in complex tropical communities. Epiphytes comprise more than one-third of the tropical vascular flora in some tropical forests. Growing within tropical forest canopies, epiphytes are subject to severe environmental constraints, and their diverse adaptations make them a rich resource for studies of water balance, nutrition, reproduction and evolution.
In this wide ranging exposition of the various economic theories of technological change, Stanislaw Gomulka relates them to rates of growth experienced by different economies in both the short and the long term. Analysis of countries as diverse as Japan, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom demonstrates that there is an interdependence between technological change and the institutional and cultural characteristics of different countries, which can have a profound effect on their rates of growth. All of the major, relevant models are discussed, including those of Kuznets and Phelps, but throughout the emphasis is on the creation of a unified theoretical framework to help explain the impact of technological progress on both a micro and a macro scale.
This study, originally published in 1987, addresses the question of small firm performance. Drawing on an extensive database containing financial, employment and ownership data for several thousand small firms, the book examines whether small firms do actually provide jobs, whether they grow and why small firms fail. Guidance is given on how to spot the signs of impending failure in a small business, which is of use to accountants small business PR actioners and government grant providers.
Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.