• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.385-432
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• 2017

This paper investigates how firm age, size and ownership are related with job creation and destruction, and how these patterns differ across transition and non-transition economies. The analysis finds that age is inversely related with gross job creation and net job creation in the two samples. This finding is consistent with the theory of the learning effect. The relationship between age and job destruction is indifferent in non-transition economies. On the contrary, old firms in transition economies destroy more jobs than young ones. The paper further establishes an inverse relationship between size and gross job creation in the two groups. However, there is divergence between the two samples; small firms in non-transition economies also exhibit a higher gross job destruction rate. Consequently large firms have a higher net job creation rate. In transition economies, small and large firms exhibit similar rates of job destruction. But small firms retain a higher net job creation rate. A more intriguing finding is that state owned firms do not underperform domestic private ones. This means these countries may be using soft budget constraint which allows state owned firms to overstaff. Finally, crowding out of SMEs by foreign owned firms is not evident in transition economies.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.3-27
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• 2018

This paper analyzes Cuba's market-oriented reforms to alleviate essential problems with socialist countries such as soft budget constraints and incentive problems. It also discuss about effectiveness of industrial policy as a development strategy. The soft budget constraints and incentive problems resulted in the collapse of Soviet bloc and COMECON in early 1990s. After the collapse, Cuban economy suffered a steep dive, and national income tumbling down rapidly. Cuban faced serious shortages of food, gasoline, and other basic necessities of life. To halt and partially reverse economic downturn and dire austerity in the 1990's, the Cuban government made some partial reforms to the inherited Soviet system of cental planningand faced severe shortage in food, energy, and daily necessities. In response to the economic crisis. Cuba introduced economic reforms and implemented industrial policy as a development strategy as long as Cuba maintained a strong socialist country. Cuban government established the economic free zone law and attempted to induce foreign direct investment by implementing export-led industrial policy. Fiedel Castro approved the Law No. 165 "Free Zones and Industrial Parks", in 1996. However, Cuba's ESZ strategy seems to have failed because of the U.S. sanctions, but also because of Cuba's own policies, which do not allow foreign investors to hire workers directly and impose a high implicit tax on wages. By limiting advanced techniques of personnel and organization management, indirect employment can result in lowering work efforts and productivity of workers, and aggravating production efficiency in the ESZs. Another reason to fail comes from the double wage structure due to the double monetary-exchange rate system. Most of the high non-wage costs result from the double exchange rate system. Due to Cuba's imbalanced industry and production structures, concentrated labor force, and urbanization and centralization of agriculture production, the industrial transformation development model suggested by Lewis has not been successful unlike other Asian agriculture-led development model. Cuba has to overcome many difficulties in implementing industrial policy as a development strategy.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.1-13
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• 2009

In this paper, we develop theoretical game models to determine the level of government subsidies for banks to provide policy loans to Innovative SMEs(small and medium sized enterprises) through banks, which otherwise would not finance them for the sake of their own profitability. For this, we compare net cash flows of each bank using different strategies against high risk innovative SMEs. A bank can decide whether to provide them loans or not In each period. Following Kim(2003)'s Infinite horizon model on the soft budget constraint, we introduce a situation in which banks compete against each other for higher net long-term payoffs from their loans to innovative SMEs and non-innovative SMEs. From the models, we show that competition among banks in general leads to a tighter decision against innovative SMEs, as a Nash equilibrium. It is not because the government bank is simply loose in providing loans, but because competition among commercial banks for fewer riskier borrowers results in tighter loan decisions against innovative SMEs. Thus, the competitive market for policy loans to innovative SMEs fails to reach the socially optimal level of loans for innovative SMMs. Commercial banks in the competitive market may require additional supports from the government to make up for the differences in their payoffs to support innovative SMEs, possibly much riskier due to moral hazards and poor discounted cash flows. The monopolistic government bank might also request such supports from the government to fund otherwise unqualified SMEs. We calculate an optimal level of governmental support for banks to guarantee funding such high-risk innovative SMEs over periods without deviating from their optimal Nash equilibrium policies.