Is more intense product market competition and imitation good or bad for growth? This question is addressed in the context of an endogenous growth model with ''step-by-step'' innovations, in which technological laggards must first catch up with the leading-edge technology before battling for technological leadership in the future. In contrast to earlier Schumpeterian models in which innovations are always made by outsider firms who earn no rents if they fail to innovate and become monopolies if they do innovate, here we find: first, that the usual Schumpeterian effect of more intense product market competition (PMC) is almost always outweighed by the increased incentive for firms to innovate in order to escape competition, so that PMC has a positiûe effect on growth; second, that a little imitation is almost always growth-enhancing, as it promotes more frequent neck-and-neck competition, but too much imitation is unambiguously growth-reducing. The model thus points to complementary roles for competition (anti-trust) policy and patent policy.

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Despite being one of the most fundamental issues in political economy, the question of the appropriate boundary between public and private enterprise received relatively little attention in mainstream economic analysis until quite recently. In the 1980s, however, programs of ownership reform were started in many developed and developing countries. Dramatic though some of these policies have been, they are likely to be overshadowed in the 1990s by even greater privatization in the reforming socialist economies. The opening sections of this paper are organized around three broad and interrelated questions. How does ownership matter for the efficiency of enterprise performance? What is the role for privatization in financing public debts and deficits? What are the distributional and political implications of privatization? Finally we examine privatization in practice in three countries: Britain, Chile, and Poland.

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This paper presents a general analysis of the effects of monopolistic third-degree price discrimination on welfare and output when all markets are served. Sufficient conditions — involving straightforward comparisons of the curvatures of the direct and inverse demand functions in the different markets — are presented for discrimination to have negative or positive effects on social welfare and output. (JEL D42)

The paper presents two models of races in which there is both technological uncertainty and strategic interaction between competitors as the race unfolds. Most of the existing literature examines one or other of these features, but not the two combined. Our aim is to see how the efforts of competitors in a race vary with the intensity of rivalry between them. In our principal model, whch is of a one-dimensional race, it is shown that the leader in the race makes greater efforts than the follower, and efforts increase as the gap between competitors decreases. Under certain conditions the same results hold in our second, related model, which is of a two-dimensional race.