Vittorio Valli

Publishing an E-Journal on a Shoe String: Is It a Sustainable Project?

The aim of this article is to report on an experiment in publishing an open access journal and learn from it about the larger field of open access publishing. The experiment is the launch of the European Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), an on-line refereed and open access journal, founded in 2004 by the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies and LIUC University in Italy. They embarked upon this project in part to respond to the rising concentration in the market for scientific publishing and the resulting use of market power to raise subscription prices and restrict access to scientific output. We had hoped that open access journals could provide some countervailing power and increase competition in the field. Our experience running a poorly endowed journal has shown that entry to the field may be easy, yet that making it a sustainable enterprise is not straightforward.

Structural Change and Economic Development in China and India

The comparison of the periods of rapid economic growth in China since 1978 and India since 1992 markedly show different patterns of development and structural change. However, both countries experienced some of the advantages of “relative economic backwardness” and some aspects of the “fordist model of growth”. China had an anticipated and deeper structural change, spurred mainly by economic reforms and the growth of the internal market in the 1980s and since the mid-1990s by a very rapid penetration of its industrial products in the world market. However, a substantial part of its exports in medium and high tech sectors are due to joint- ventures with foreign multinationals. India had a more balanced structural change and a slower insertion in the world market, although some sectors, such as software, steel, automotive and pharmaceuticals are recently increasing their share in the world markets.

The three waves of the fordist model of growth and the case of China

The main thesis of the paper is that, while the US economy has widely adopted a fordist model of growth since 1908, and this has largely contributed to the building and consolidation of its economic pre-eminence, Japan and most Western European countries have adopted it mainly in the 1950-1973 period, the golden age of European and Japanese growth, and China has adopted important aspects of fordist and post-fordist models in the 1980-2008 period.. The Chinese case shows that the crucial elements of the fordist model of growth - the economies of scale or of network, the rise of productivity, the increase in wages and in total wage bill, the increase in consumption, in total profits, in investment and in u GDP - can give a great boost to industrial and economic growth and then to exports in certain phases of the economic history of a country, although contributing to determine also some socially undesirable consequences, such as rapidly growing economic and social imbalances and income inequalities.