manufacturing

About one million manufacturing jobs in California are at risk of ending up in other states or countries unless state government and manufacturers start taking action to keep them, according to the report from the Bay Area Economic Forum. The group notes that lawmakers and politicians need to address issues such as the cost of workers compensation insurance, energy expenses and corporate tax rates, all of which are cited as reasons that made California the most expensive state in the nation to do business in 2002.

The objective of the study is to test the trade-off theory empirically using the data of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey. Results confirms the well accepted manufacturing profile of low cost producers, which typically use a line process, and of flexible producers, which typically produce in a job shop.

Using evidence from a new panel data set for four high-tech, manufacturing industries covering a 10-year period, the authors show how differences in sales, materials, labor costs and capital across firms can be summarized by firm-specific, dynamic factors, which we interpret in view of a structural model.

The paper explores several dimensions of Danish industrys innovative performance with respect to the paradigm of the fifth generation innovation model that was suggested by Rothwell. Results indicate that Danish manufacturing companies demonstrate an innovative performance close to the fourth generation of innovation, which is slightly different than it is perceived publicly.

This paper investigates the determinants of vertical integration using data from the U.K. manufacturing sector. The authors find that the relationship between a downstream (producer) industry and an upstream (supplier) industry is more likely to be vertically integrated when the producing industry is more technology intensive and the supplying industry is less technology intensive.

Using firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries, the authors estimate the effect of exporting on efficiency. Evidence of learning-by-exporting suggests that Africa has much to gain from orientating its manufacturing sector towards exporting.

The paper examines the role of international trade theory in explaining why developed countries have experienced increases in manufacturing exports as a share of GDP, and declines in manufacturing value-added as a share of GDP.

The paper studies the degree of homogeneity of innovative behavior in order to determine empirically an industry classification of Dutch manufacturing that can be used for policy purposes. Dutch manufacturing consists of three groups of industries in terms of innovative behavior, a high-tech group, a low-tech group and the industry of wood, where firms seem to have a rather different innovative behavior from the remaining industries.

This paper measures the degree of job renewal in Canadian manufacturing as a whole and across provinces. This study uses a longitudinal microdata set that covers the population of manufacturing plants in Canada from 1973 to 1996.

This paper examines the determinants of innovation and the role of innovation in productivity growth, shifts in market share and survival in the Canadian manufacturing sector. It presents a model that examines the effect of innovation on plant performance and plant survival.