Business Economics articles from April 1998

Business Economics archives from April 1998

U.S. telecommunications today.
April 1, 1998... PRESENTLY, the U.S. telecommunications industry is going through a revolutionary change. There are three reasons for this. The first reason is the rapid technological change in key inputs of telecommunications services and in complementary...

Telecommunications policy and the persistence of the local exchange monopoly.
April 1, 1998... Telecommunications policy has never been without controversy. Yet since passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, debates that traditionally have been reserved for staid and often obscure public utility commission hearing rooms have spilled...

New telecommunications technologies.
April 1, 1998... While many new technologies might be considered in this review of new telecommunications technologies, this paper will be restricted to a consideration of those likely to have a major impact on corporate networks and communications. OPTICAL...

Global information infrastructure: eliminating the distance barrier.
April 1, 1998... "The death of distance as a determinant of the cost of communications will probably be the single most important economic force shaping society in the first half of the next century."(1) The death of distance could have profound implications...

The future of telecommunications: connectivity through alliances.
April 1, 1998... By the year 2000, the global telecommunications market will grow to about $1 trillion from $700 billion of annual revenues generated during 1997. The United States and Europe will account for more than 50 percent of the total, but the Latin...

Economic sanctions: an emerging business menace.
April 1, 1998... Use of various kinds of economic sanctions has a long history, even in the United States. Some prime twentieth century examples include our oil sanctions against Japan in the early 1940s, various measures against the Soviet bloc, and the...

Patterns of advanced technology adoption and manufacturing performance.
April 1, 1998... Until recently, evidence for the contributions of technology to jobs, productivity, and earnings was based on highly aggregated country- or industry-level data (e.g., see Fagerberg 1994), on relatively small-sample surveys of manufacturing plants...

The business economist at work: Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board.
April 1, 1998... Five years ago, I definitely did not see a pension fund in my future. Like most economists, I knew little about pension financing. Spending the past three years at the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (OTPPB, better know as "Teachers'" to the...

Industry corner: plastics processing machinery.
April 1, 1998... In the 1967 film classic, "The Graduate," an ambitious young man is given a one-word advice for success in the business world: plastics. It turned out to be good advice. Plastics are the first new family of materials in the past 3000 years; they...

The statistics corner: an ownership-based supplement to the U.S. balance of payments accounts.
April 1, 1998... For many years, the current account of the U.S. balance of payments has provided a ready source of information on transactions between U.S. and foreign individuals and business entities. In it, data on trade in goods and services and on receipts...

BEA's surveys of international services. (Bureau of Economic Analysis)
April 1, 1998... In recent years, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has greatly improved the source data used to prepare the estimates of U. S. international transactions in private services. These transactions are an increasingly important and rapidly...

Superior software: metasearch engines.
April 1, 1998... The goal of this column is provide readers with relevant information available on the Internet. The first WoW column was devoted to surveying readers on their current Internet usage. Publication schedules were such that there was only limited...

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.
April 1, 1998... Presenting information, whether to a large group, to a small group, or even to a single person, now seems to require the creation and delivery of slick computer-generated graphics. The thought of giving a brief talk in this day and age,...

The Econometrics of Financial Markets.
April 1, 1998... The remarkable growth of interest in financial markets in the past twenty years has resulted in a large outpouring of books and articles, both theoretical and empirical, analyzing the functioning of these markets. The development of this...