This paper is an attempt to look at the possibilities behind the federal government of Canada's proposal to create a new agency in the area of industrial export trade. According to the premises set down by the Government in its April 1980, Throne Speech, the initiative is primarily aimed at supporting small and medium-sized businesses in their efforts to penetrate foreign markets. It is natural for a government concerned with increasing competition abroad and rising unemployment in the industrial sector at home to start worrying about where industrial employment and overseas industrial markets are going to come from in the future. The wording of the Throne Speech and the policy studies undertaken prior to April 1980, regarding a potential national trading company seem to indicate that the Government had had the Japanese example of the trading house structure very much in mind, when closer study of such an enterprise was proposed, given Japan's thriving industrial sector and its successful export achievements. In the aftermath of the Throne Speech a Special Committee of the House of Commons was created in June of 1980 to further study the question of a future "National Trading Corporation." The Committee came down with its fourth and final report, Canada's Trading Challenge, in June of 1981, in which its basic recommendation after a year of deliberations was that "the federal government sponsor the development of a major Canadian trading corporation." This final conclusion by the Committee stands in direct contrast to evidence presented by witnesses before the Committee, and it seems to be an opinion reached by the Committee majority based on material and opinions obtained in addition to the briefs and the evidence gathered during the Committee's public hearings. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

My master thesis analyses the transformation process of the Czech Republic in the field of foreign-trade relations. In the first part focuses on analysis of foreign trade under centrally planned economy and on development of relations with the most important groups of countries. The second part deals with transformation of foreign trade. I attend to particular periods of transformation process, development commodity and territorial structure. Further I deal with changes that came with the EU accession.Very actual is also financial crisis and effect on Czech trade. Conclusion of my master thesis evaluates export support in the time of financial crisis.

The main aim of my thesis is to characterize and quantify the importance of SMEs to the economy and foreign trade of Slovak Republic. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter describes SMEs sector and its main features.The second chapter focuses on the analysis of the position of SMEs in the economy of Slovakia.The third chapter analyzes the significance of SMEs for Slovakia's foreign trade. The aim of the last chapter is to characterize the various support options available for Slovak SMEs.

The diploma thesis focuses on the impact of innovative activities for foreign trade of ŽĎAS, a.s.. The theoretical part defines terms in innovation, research, development and foreign trade. The practical part specifies the technical innovations of the company and their impacts on foreign trade. The dependence of research and development expenditure incurred with sales from selling their own products abroad, ROA, ROE, ROS and with quality of production. The dependence of sales from foreign trade to enterprise on the number of employees of the company are measured. At the end of the work, the results and proposed recommendations for the development of the company are evaluated.

The diploma thesis deals with the impact of innovative assets on the foreign trade of a selected food business. On the basis of theoretical part, an analysis is made of the selected company, which consists of a financial analysis, PESTE analysis, Porter's analysis, competition analyses and analyses of specific innovations. At the end of a thesis, the results achieved are evaluated. At the same time, solutions are proposed to improve the current state of innovation in the company under observation.

This licentiate thesis uses descriptive, mainly official,Swedish statistics to analyse industrial structure, productionand foreign trade in an industry that is traditionallydifficult to describe in numbers, that of medical devices. Forthe purposes of the thesis, the Swedish Medical Device industryis defined as companies classified in the SE-SIC manufacturingcodes 33101 (medical equipment and instruments, etc), 33102(dental products) and 35430 (invalid vehicles). Also otherbranches contribute, notably parts of SIC 51460 (wholesale inmedical equipment and pharmaceutical goods) and 73103 (medicalresearch and development) although their medical device volumecannot be specified. Additional items have been identified interms of specific product groups rather than as "belonging" toa specific SIC industrial code. Taken together, this is considered to correspond reasonablywell to the scope of the field as defined by the Global MedicalDevice Nomenclature (GMDN), a new European standard forclassifying medical devices in a more generic way than do theEuropean Medical Device Directives (or other pieces oflegislation). No quantification according to GMDN can be madeas yet, however, as that requires changing reporting habits inindustry as well as in official statistical classification andnomenclature regimes. With the manufacturing code SE-SIC 33101 as main object, thestudy for the first time presents data on the regionaldistribution, size classes of employment, company starting timeand company dynamics, in the form of entries to and exits fromthe code, over a six-year period. The latter analysis includesa follow-up of the "exits", some firms reappearing in otherparts of industry and others disappearing–surprisinglyfew among them being limited companies. Although this industryis comparatively mature, considerable mobility among themid-sized companies is indicated for reasons of real changes or(to some degree) factors inherent in the industrialclassification system. Some structural changes in companies inthe ≥50 employees bracket are identified. It is notedthat American actors, directly or indirectly, are increasinglyinvolved with the medical device industry in Sweden, and that anumber of technology-based companies that were started mostlyin the early eighties have recently reached the 50+ employeelevel. The analysis of identifiable production and internationaltrade in medical devices spans a period of 17 years based onofficial statistics following the HS/CN nomenclatures. Adatabase has been built, bottom-up, from the 8-digit CN levelwith production, exports and imports values for close to 100items collected in 12 product groups, for presentation purposesgrouped under three main headings. Compound annual growth ratesfor the latter are presented for three five-year periods1985-2000, showing that Swedish production and exports have hadan overall growth of 10 per cent p.a. This has kept Swedenahead of the international overall growth of 6- 7 per cent p.a.in recent years, products in the main group "Aids&Implants" growing more than 20 per cent p.a. Growth rates inthe most recent five-year period are lower, however. Healthynet exports figures are presented, the figure for 2002nominally representing 40 per cent of the production value incurrent as well as constant prices. Production figures are given at industry (local unit) levelas well as at product group level. The product-based figuresidentified for Production 2001 are estimated to SEK 13,3billion, Exports to SEK 13,7 billion and Imports to SEK 9,7billion. Figures for the Apparent Domestic Market arecalculated for the corresponding entities. It is obvious,however, that the statistics do not capture the real productionvalue as exports exceed production both at overall level and inmajor product groups, particularly those on a high systemstechnology level. The situation is not uncommon for a number ofreasons; further, cases in the statistics methodologyliterature confirm that medical instrument-related codes areliable to this phenomenon. Corrections, including adjustmentsof both production and exports values, are possible butdemanding already at one individual 4-digit HS/CN level. This,therefore, must be considered outside the scope of an academicstudy. The basic tablework developed for this thesis will be madefreely available to external parties for their own use providedthe author, with contact details, is named as the source.(Processing for commercial purposes is not expected, however.)Any suggestions for improvements are welcomed. / NR 20140805

No description available.

No description available.

This study attempts to provide detailed analysis of materials gathered from various sources and to an orderly presentation of facts and figures regarding railway construction in China.

This dissertation contains three essays in strategic trade theory. They focus on the effects of trade barriers on the social welfare of an individual country through the effects of these barriers on the behavior of firms. Our analyses are undertaken in models with imperfectly competitive market structures. The assumption of imperfectly competitive market structures leads to certain conclusions that differ from those in the existing literature, where perfect competition is assumed. The first essay is a survey sampling recent papers dealing with the topics mentioned above. Specifically, we choose papers on trade barriers in imperfectly competitive markets, according to the types of models--static vs dynamic--and to the types of trade barriers--quotas, tariffs, voluntary export restraints, etc. We consider the case of almost every combination of the previous classifications. From this survey we find that once the assumption of perfect competition is removed, the outcome for a particular trade barrier depends critically on details of the model used. In the second essay, simple oligopolistic models are used to examine the welfare effects arising from a quota. The trade-off faced by a policymaker (concerned only with the welfare of his own country) when there is ’competition’ between foreign and domestic firms for a domestic market, is highlighted. Moreover, the impact of differing numbers of and cost differences between domestic and foreign firms is investigated. The third essay considers a repeated game with three players, two quantity-setting firms and one quota-setting government. In this model the differing effects of quotas and VER’s on the actions of firms are explored. The focus is on how a quota (or the threat of a quota) can be used not only to break up collusive behavior but also to prevent the firms from colluding in the first place. Further, various ways in which quotas can be used by the government to actually improve on the static Cournot-Nash equilibrium outcome are examined. This last result is somewhat surprising since typically in quantity-setting trade models the static Cournot-Nash equilibrium (though second best) is the benchmark used to judge various outcomes (i.e. the closer to the C-N equilibrium, the better the outcome). Indeed, quotas are usually considered clumsy instruments, inferior to some other industrial policy. However, careful use of the threat potential inherent in quotas is shown to enforce outcomes which approach the competitive solution. / Ph. D.