manufacturing

This paper examines the role of private support institutions in determining small and medium enterprise (SME) growth and performance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It finds that SMEs in SSA get around market failures and lack of formal institutions by creating private governance systems in the form of long-term business relationships and tight, ethnically-based,
business networks.

This paper contains an uneven but parallel analysis of the automotive and precision instrument industries, and looks at the specific issues related to the role of SMEs in manufacturing in general. The authors conclude that in order to have a comprehensive view of the role that SMEs play in value chains attention should be paid to their innovative capacity but also to the way fruits of this capacity are shared along the value chain.

This report examines recent trends in manufactuing employment in seven states of the Great Lakes manufacturing belt and in the 25 manufacturing-dependent metropolitan areas in those states. Trends are compared with information on manufacturing output and on employment in the advanced service sector, consisting of the information, financial activities, and professional and businesss services industries. As with manufacturing, these industries both pay higher-than-average wages and generate export income for their home regions.

This paper analyzes the effects of the real value of the dollar on investment in US domestic manufacturing, using aggregate time-series data for 1973-2004. The econometric estimates reveal robust evidence for a negative effect of the dollar that is much larger than has been found in any previous study (and which is not sensitive to various alternative specifications). The results also suggest that the exchange rate affects investment mainly, although not exclusively, through the channel of financial or liquidity constraints, rather than by affecting the desired stock of capital.

The authors study the growth rates of 4-digit sectors in U.S. manufacturing. Two measures of size (value of shipments, value added) are considered, for each of the 38 years (1959-1996) of a sample of 458 4-digit sectors, drawn from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity database.

This paper studies the persistence of innovation and the dynamics of innovation output in Dutch manufacturing using firm data from three waves of the Community Innovation Surveys, pertaining to the periods 1994-1996, 1996-1998, and 1998-2000.

The paper investigates different implications of theoretical models for hierarchical structure. A sample of 6567 firms in the Brazilian manufacturing industry is considered and explanatory factors pertaining structural characteristics, network technology, technological innovations, managerial innovations and incentive mechanisms are investigated.

This study focuses on industrial concentration and regional specialization in Finland in the late 1990s. Results show increasing specialization and at least for some industries in-creased geographical concentration. Thus, there was no single process driving all industries in the same direction.

This paper builds a model of growth through industrialization, as machines replace workers in a growing number of tasks. The model shows that industrialization and growth take off only if the economy is productive enough. It also shows that monopoly power can stifle growth, as it lowers wages.

According to the register, there were 12,532 companies considered as having manufacturing operations in the state on Dec. 31. The state lost 3,355 manufacturing jobs during 2005 to 696,362 on Dec. 31, the regiser indicates.