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This licentiate thesis describes the development of the Swedish computer and video game industry. The main focus is on the Swedish game development industry. Little research on the industry has been done and the purpose is to define the companies involved and to create an initial overview of the development of the industry. This overview will later be used as a platform for the doctorial thesis. Games are a growing culture form and today a lot of people are playing different types of computer and video games. Internationally the industry has expanded and some of the successful games have generated spectacular revenues. In Sweden the industry has received attention from different actors like universities, government bodies and media. There are today educations that are focused on game development and there are programs which allocates grants towards game companies. The rapid development in the computers technology has had a great impact on the game industry, which is dependent on hardware development to create games. The first computer games were made for some of the very first computers in the 1940´s and 1950´s. In the 1970´s a market for games was created when arcade machines and somewhat later home consoles were introduced. The industry has grown and includes today some of the largest companies in the world. The Swedish industry follows the international pattern but developed a bit later and the first Swedish game companies were founded in the late 1980´s. The industry has expanded, especially between 1998 and 2002. In 2005 the number of people employed in the industry had increased to over 600. During the period under study the industry seems to have had a constant problem with making a profit. Especially in 2002 and 2003 the industry has had economic problems and some of the lager companies were bankrupt.

This thesis analyses the key developments in foreign trade for Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldova on a comparative basis between 1996 and 2006. It examines trade developments and restructuring with the region’s two major trade blocs: the European Union (EU) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Using dependable trade models pioneered by Béla Belassa and Herbert Grubel and Peter J. Lloyd, the analyses involve revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and intra-industry trade (IIT) to determine the extent to which structural changes have or have not occurred, which domestic industries are becoming more competitive and the degree of differentiation present. The reason for choosing the aforementioned measurement indices is straightforward. On one hand, RCA identifies those industries that have become relatively more competitive, and attempts to assess whether a given industry enjoys a comparative advantage in production by means of measuring exports. On the other hand, IIT supposes the opposite of comparative advantage theory, and affirms that differences between countries are not the only rationale for trade, because of the presence of increasing returns in scale economies. Thus, it examines the simultaneous import and export of identical, similar or differentiated products in the same industry often between similar countries. Although both indices are usually considered alternatives to each other, there is good reason to see them as complementary. The results of both indices, therefore, provide critical information from which to assess the degree of trade restructuring.

I present three essays on income taxation in Pakistan. The first essay investigates how taxes influence agents’ earnings, compliance and business organization choices. Using a tax reform introduced in Pakistan in 2010, which raised tax rates on partnership earnings as compared to sole proprietorship income, as a natural policy experiment, I (i) identify a full range of behavioral responses to the tax rate changes (ii) study the determinants of tax compliance (iii) investigate if VAT causes firms to be more tax compliant. Relying on administrative tax records that comprise the universe of income tax returns filed in 2006-11 and a rich set of firm characteristics, I find that the reform induced substantial extensive and intensive margin responses including reduction in earnings, income shifting, movement into informality, and spillover effects on VAT base. I also find that the firms that have greater fraction of their tax withheld at source, are registered for VAT, or withhold taxes of other agents are more tax compliant. This highlights the importance of the notion that information trails on arm-length business transactions facilitate enforcement. Comparing short-term responses of partnership firms – which arguably identify tax evasion – on both sides of the VAT exemption threshold, I find that the evasion changes discontinuously at the cutoff suggesting that the VAT causes firms to be more compliant. In the second essay, I along with my co-authors, analyze the design of tax systems under imperfect enforcement. A common policy in developing countries is to impose minimum tax schemes whereby firms are taxed either on profits or on turnover (with a much lower tax rate on turnover), depending on which tax liability is larger. This is a production inefficient tax policy, but has been motivated by the idea that turnover taxes are harder to evade. Such schemes give rise to kink points in firms’ choice sets as the tax rate and tax base jump discontinuously at a profit rate threshold. Analyzing responses to one such scheme in Pakistan, we find large bunching of corporate firms around the minimum tax kink. We show that the combined tax rate and tax base change at the kink provides small real incentives for bunching, making the policy ideal for eliciting evasion. Based on the methodology that we develop, we estimate that turnover taxes reduce evasion by up to 60-70% of corporate income. In the third essay, I along with Henrik Kleven, develop a framework for non-parametrically identifying optimization frictions and structural elasticities using notches – discontinuities in the choice sets of agents – introduced for example by tax and transfer policies. We apply our framework to tax notches in personal income tax schedule of Pakistan to estimate structural elasticities of taxable income.

Empirical studies in labour economics often suffer from endogeneity problems. Employing exogenous variations in policies and natural shock, this thesis investigates three topics. The �first two topics concern labour market phenomena in Thailand, whereas the third provides a case study of labour demand adjustment after an international supply chain shock. Chapter 2 assesses the impact of minimum wage policy on wage inequality in Thailand. The result is rather mixed. Although the minimum wage effectively reduces wage inequality among workers in formal sectors, it does not affect the wage distribution in the informal sector at all. The evidence suggests that such a result is mainly driven by weak law enforcement. Meanwhile, using changes in compulsory schooling law, chapter 3 provides consistent estimates of the rates of return to education in Thailand. Based on the IV method, only female employees experience a positive and significant return to (upper primary) education. Interestingly, the size and direction of bias of the estimator, especially for male sub-sample, are not consistent with the conventional result. The possible reasons underlying these �findings are elaborated. Chapter 4 relies on a different type of shock. The Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami 2011 is treated as an external shock to the international supply chain of Auto industry. Then I estimate the impact of the supply chain disruption on labour inputs adjustment in the US auto industry. Despite the break down in supply chain of motor vehicle parts and accessories among Japanese auto companies, these �firms do not seem to reduce their labour inputs (used as a proxy for changes in production) significantly except for a small drop in average monthly earnings of workers in Japanese assembly plants. Also, their competitors make only slight adjustment to capitalize on the Japanese loss. Regarding other margins of adjustment, there is no evidence in support of the adjustment through import or price. Yet inventories and sales incentive appear to be major tools employed to mitigate either positive demand or negative supply shocks on both groups of companies.

The thesis is a historical study of the first twenty years of the British motor cycle industry in terms of the development of its product. The main theoretical issue is standardization, not in its usual sense as a forma l activity aimed at the setting up of standards, but as a trend the effect of which is for products to become more and more alike across the industry as a whole. Standardization in this sense is to a large extent an unintended consequence of the wish on the part of producers to design products which operate more efficiently, which can be produced more cheaply, and which have the widest possible appeal in the marketplace; and of the preference, on the part of the majority of consumers, for products which are familiar and of known reputation and performance, as against those which are new and untried. The trend to standardization is analysed into its main components , functional efficiency, production efficiency, and marketing efficiency, and these are used as the basis of a number of propositions which make it possible to consider in more depth the development of the product during the three phases of industry development : experimental, developmental, and standardization . The more substantive chapters of the thesis are organized around three main themes, the development of the industry as a whole, and the development of the product from a technical point of view, and from a consumer point of view. The main conclusion is that the development of its product into a standard form--one on which newcomers to the industry can base their own products and which consumers can recognise as reliable and worthy of purchase-is the most critical stage in the development and consolidation of a new industry.

Four important and inter-related issues in the economics of agriculture in developing countries are production efficiency, tenancy, technological innovation and rural-urban migration. These issues are examined in this study by analysing the working of rural factor markets using empirical evidence on selected farmers in four villages and an important sub-division in Pakistans Punjab province. The pattern of land holding in Pakistan suggests that land is very unequally distributed. This observation is the basis for may proposals of land reform. It has been argued that inequality in land distribution is undesirable per se as well as because it leads to inefficiency in agricultural production. Empirical evidence from the villages suggests that an inverse relationship exists between farm size and productivity thus lending support to the second part of the argument. Explanations in terms of the working of rural land and labour markets are offered for the existence of the relationship. Tenancy is important in Pakistan. Its existence is explained in terms of adjustments in factor endowments by landowners and landless cultivators given that markets for labour and draught power operate imperfectly. Different tenurial contracts imply different sets of incentives that influence decisions regarding resource allocation on the farm. The empirical evidence suggests that adjustments are made - such as devising cost-sharing, input stipulation and supervision arrangements - to ensure that different tenurial contracts are equally efficient. It is argued that despite the apparent difficulties of access to 'green revolution' technology inputs due to imperfections in their distribution and scarcity of rural credit, small farms use inputs such as high yield variety seeds and chemical fertilizers no less intensively compared to the large farmers. The evidence suggests that new markets for factor services and intricate but more accessible networks of fertilizer and seed distribution may have developed to facilitate the use by small farmers. The relationship between migration and rural credit markets is examined. It is argued that migration may improve the credit ratings of households and thus may facilitate borrowing in the rural credit market. Detailed comments are also made on the role of other rural-end variables such as non-farm income, mechanization, output per capita, education and available land per capita in influencing the decision to migrate. The underlying theme of the study is the analysis of operations in rural factor markets. We analyse, carefully, interactions in these markets and then examine some important aspects of policies in the light of our analysis of the four issues.

The implementation of the Maastricht criteria, establishment of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), creation of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) raised several challenges for the European Union (EU) countries. The main aim of this dissertation is to analyse the economic implications of those institutional changes. Chapter 2 provides an empirical answer to the question of whether Maastricht and SGP fiscal rules have affected growth in the EU countries. Results from the estimation of a growth equation show that growth of real GDP per capita in the EU was not negatively affected in the period after Maastricht. The main conclusion of this analysis is that the institutional changes that occurred in some European countries after 1992 were not harmful to growth. Chapter 3 tries to identify the main causes of excessive deficits in the EU. A conditional logit model is estimated over a panel of EU countries, where an excessive deficit is defined as a deficit higher than 3% of GDP. Results indicate that a weak fiscal stance, low economic growth, elections and majority left-wing governments are the main causes of excessive deficits. They also show that the institutional constraints imposed after Maastricht over the EU countries have succeeded in reducing the probability of excessive deficits, especially in small countries and in countries traditionally affected by large fiscal imbalances. A widespread idea in the business cycles literature is that the older is an expansion or contraction, the more likely it is to end. Chapter 4 provides further empirical support for this idea of positive duration dependence controlling simultaneously for the effects of other factors on the duration of expansions and contractions. This study employs for the first time a discrete-time duration model to analyse the impact of some variables on the likelihood of an expansion and contraction ending for a group of EU and non-EU countries. The evidence suggests that the duration of expansions and contractions is not only dependent on their actual age: the duration of expansions is also positively dependent on the behaviour of the OECD composite leading indicator and on private investment, and negatively affected by the price of oil and by the occurrence of a peak in the US business cycle; the duration of a contraction is negatively affected by its actual age and by the duration of the previous expansion. Finally, Chapter 5 raises the question of whether central banks’ monetary policy can be described by a linear Taylor rule or, instead, by a more complex nonlinear rule. This chapter also analyses whether those rules can be augmented with a financial conditions index containing information from some asset prices and financial variables. A forward-looking specification is employed in the estimation of the linear and nonlinear rules. A smooth transition model is used to estimate the nonlinear rule. The results indicate that the behaviour of the Federal Reserve of the United States can be described by a linear Taylor rule, whilst the behaviour of the ECB and Bank of England is best described by a nonlinear Taylor rule. In particular, these two central banks tend to react to inflation only when inflation is above or outside their targets. Moreover, the evidence also suggests that the recently created ECB is targeting financial conditions, contrary to the other two central banks.

This study considers the mixed economy for medical services in Herefordshire between 1770 and 1850. Medical services were an integral part of wider systems of welfare and were provided within a mixed economy that included private practice, state provision, philanthropic activities and mutual societies. Significant resources were spent within the sector and influence over their deployment was of direct interest to parishes, the municipal council, magistrates, philanthropists and individual members of the elite. Four types of medical services are reviewed. These are the provision of personal care by medical practitioners in the private, public and charitable sectors, the establishment of Hereford General Infirmary, changes in institutional services for the insane and developments in public health. Two underlying themes are discussed throughout the thesis. The first of these is the complexity of the mixed economy for medical services. Important changes over the period are identified and the interrelationships between the various sectors investigated. The dominance of public, private or charitable provision shifted in the period as a result of both national and local factors. The second theme explored is the interplay between politics and the systems and institutions providing medical services. The importance of political considerations in shaping local policy towards medical services is demonstrated through detailed case studies. These include examining the link between the launch of the subscription appeal for Hereford Infirmary and the parliamentary election campaign in 1774, approaches taken towards the management of the cholera epidemic of 1832 and the campaign to establish a public lunatic asylum in the late 1830s.

This thesis examines the role of two international organisations (IOs), the OECD DAC and the World Bank, in shaping the international aid effectiveness agenda, a policy agenda encouraging reforms of foreign aid policy to improve foreign aid. With particular emphasis on a period in the 1990s, when both IOs faced criticism and the need to adapt to changing geopolitics, it argues that the OECD DAC and the World Bank contributed to shaping the aid effectiveness agenda, and specifically the policy problems the agenda highlights and the policy solutions it recommends, in ways tied directly to these IOs’ specific fields of expertise and their unique institutional interests at the time. In doing so, both IOs adapted, evolved, and expanded the mechanisms by which they exercise their authority as international expert bureaucracies, and both strategically expanded the way in which they interact with their political environment. As a consequence, both IOs helped shape the present-day ideational framework among foreign aid experts and policymakers on how more effective foreign aid is achieved, which, in turn, favours the authority of both these IOs to advice and to act in the efforts to improve the effectiveness of foreign aid. Helping to shape the aid effectiveness agenda thus allowed the OECD DAC and the World Bank to strengthen their authority as expert bureaucracies in this specialised field of policy.