Competition, Innovation and Growth in Transition: Exploring the Interactions between Policies

32 Pages Posted: 28 Oct 2002

See all articles by Philippe Aghion

Philippe Aghion

College de France and London School of Economics and Political Science, Fellow; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Wendy Carlin

University College London - Department of Economics; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Mark E. Schaffer

Heriot-Watt University - Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Date Written: March 2002

Abstract

Transition has entailed the introduction of policies to stimulate product market competition, to establish effective corporate governance and to harden enterprise budget constraints. How do these policies interact; Are they substitute policy instruments or does one policy reinforce the effect of another; Although early endogenous growth models predicted a negative relationship between competition and innovation, Aghion, Dewatripont and Rey (1999) showed that this could be reversed if agency considerations were introduced. In their model competition acts as an incentive mechanism to reduce managerial slack, which produces the additional prediction that competition and corporate governance are substitutable. But in a profit-maximizing framework in which incumbent firms innovate to escape competition, there will be complementarity between increased product market competition and governance and between competition and hard budget constraints (Aghion and Howitt 2002). We use the EBRD-World Bank Enterprise survey of over 3,000 firms in 25 transition countries to test for interaction effects between policies. We find that competition and hard budget constraints are complementary. We also find that competitive pressure (a) enhances the performance of old firms, which is suggestive of a role if agency effects and hence of policy substitutability and (b) enhances the performance of new firms, which is consistent with complementarity. Finally, the evidence points to the prevalence of financing constraints facing new firms.

Keywords: transition, innovation, competition, corporate governance, hard budget constraints, policy interactions, enterprise survey

JEL Classification: G32 , L10 , O31, P20

Suggested Citation

Aghion, Philippe and Carlin, Wendy and Schaffer, Mark E., Competition, Innovation and Growth in Transition: Exploring the Interactions between Policies (March 2002). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=311407 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.311407

Philippe Aghion

College de France and London School of Economics and Political Science, Fellow ( email )

London
United Kingdom

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Wendy Carlin (Contact Author)

University College London - Department of Economics ( email )

Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT, WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
+44 20 7679 5858 (Phone)
+44 20 7916 2775 (Fax)

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

Mark E. Schaffer

Heriot-Watt University - Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation ( email )

School of Management - Department of Economics
Edinburgh EH14 4AS
United Kingdom
+44 131 451 3494 (Phone)
+44 131 451 3008 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.hw.ac.uk/ecoWWW/cert

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

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Germany