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Reports that there are increasing trends towards the commercialisation of public sector information. Explains the concepts of information trading and discusses the role of the public sector. Describes three case studies within the UK government. Identifies the lack of a uniform approach to information trading within UK government departments in terms of attitudes to information provision, information costing and pricing and the resourcing of an information trading function. Discusses issues concerning the national and departmental policy on information distribution and trading; the resourcing and management of information technology to support the information trading function; the development of an information‐aware culture within the government and its departments and the development of contractual relationships with marketing agents within the private sector. Examines the effect of online information provision on information trading. Discusses the application of agency theory to the study of the role of marketing agents and identifies their importance in the development of a public sector information trading market. Concludes that there is a lack of clear direction for government departments concerning information trading.

Energy is a resource of strategic importance for high density cities. International trade reshapes the urban economy and industrial structure of a city, which will indirectly affect energy use. As an international trade hub, Hong Kong relies on the import and export of services. Energy performance in the international trading of these services needs to be properly understood and assessed for Hong Kong’s urban renewal efforts. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study evaluates Hong Kong’s embodied energy in service trades based on an input-output analysis. The three criteria used for assessment include trading areas, industry sector and trade balance.

Analyzed by region, results show that Mainland China and the USA are the two largest sources of embodied energy in imports of services, while Mainland China and Japan are the two largest destinations of exports. In terms of net embodied energy transfer, Hong Kong mainly receives net energy import from Mainland China and the USA and supplies net energy export to Japan, the UK and Taiwan. Among industry sectors, manufacturing services, transport and travel contribute most significantly to the embodied energy in Hong Kong’s imported services, while transport and travel contribute most to the energy embodied in exported services.

This study identifies the characteristics of energy consumption of service trading and establishes a feasible approach to analyze energy performance of service trade in energy-deficient Hong Kong for the first time. It provides necessary understanding and foundation for developing energy strategies in a service-based, high density urban economy.

This paper aims to investigate the value relevance of the European Emission Allowance (EUA) return and volatility on the equity value of the top listed European Power Generation Firms for the three trading phases of the European Emission Trading Scheme.

The authors use the multifactor financial market model over the period 2005-2016 on daily basis for the return relevance relationship, whereas time series models such as autoregression moving average and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity are applied on a weighted average portfolio of the sample firms to test serial correlation and volatility of returns.

The findings are novel in which a positive and significant relevance of EUA return on equity return is shown; however, a vanishing effect is seen as one moves to further trading phases. Another remarkable finding is that the return relationship remains constant until a certain level in EUA price then inverts. Finally, the authors present that EUA is considered a systematic factor as firm and country-specific features are not statistically significant.

At policy level, these findings signal policymakers for an appropriate design of the future trading phases in which they achieve the balance between public interests, as climate risk mitigation by reducing emissions, and the private interests of the market players to support innovative changes.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study would be the first to offer recent and comprehensive findings on the economic and financial implications of the European Emission Trading Scheme for the three trading phases. Additionally, the research offers time series robustness check besides the standard regression analysis and shows that there is an optimal EUA price that triggers polluters’ decision on emission and generation.

This study aims at evaluating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the export trade system for Mauritius during the first half of 2020 (January 2020–June 2020).

An initial analysis of the monthly export time series data proves that on the whole, the series have diverged from their actual trends after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic: observed values are less than those predicted by the selected optimal forecast models. The authors subsequently employ the Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) framework for causal analysis to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the island's export system.

Overall, the findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic has a statistically significant and negative impact on the Mauritian export trade system, with the five main export trading partners and sectors the most affected. Despite that the impact in some cases is not apparent for the period of study, the results indicate that total exports will surely be affected by the pandemic in the long run. Nevertheless, this depends on the measures taken both locally and globally to mitigate the spread of the pandemic.

This study thus contributes to the growing literature on the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic by focussing on a small island economy.

This study aims to explore the long-run equilibrium relationship between India’s real exchange rate and sectoral productivity trends using internationally comparable KLEMS databases on productivity for India, China, Euro area, the USA, the UK and Japan.

This study uses pooled mean group estimations for panel data suggested by Pesaran et al. (1999). This method is chosen because of the presence of variables with different orders of integration.

The results find support for an “extended” Balassa–Samuelson (BS) hypothesis which allows labour market frictions that does not allow for wage equalisation between traded and non-traded sectors within a country. This mechanism continues to find some support when we separate out distribution sector that comprises wholesale and retail trade in the domestic services sector. The empirical evidence suggests that India’s real exchange rate is anchored to domestic fundamentals and is closely aligned to its fair value over a medium to long-time horizon.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, unlike the available literature, which uses aggregate per-capita income as proxy for a country’s productivity growth, this paper perhaps makes the first attempt to validate the BS hypothesis by accounting for productivity differential at the sectoral levels using KLEMS data across countries. Moreover, this study takes the country’s productivity improvement rather than using a basket of countries, a prevalent practice in the literature. While this paper uses India’s data, which witnessed a prolonged appreciation in its real effective exchange rate and rapid technological progress, the authors believe its findings and policy implications could be applicable to the similar emerging market economies.

Resource‐based view (RBV) has been a very well‐known theory to explain performance over the past decades. The purpose of this paper is to apply RBV's concept to investigate the resources of firms in Lao PDR that influence its business performance.

Secondary data that are collected by Enterprises Baseline Survey in 2005 from Germany Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) is used. For this purpose, samples of 388 firms in three sectors: manufacturing, trading, and service are used. The resources of firms include human resources (developed through education and training); intangible resources (reputation among customers obtained by investment in marketing and advertising); and tangible resources (physical resources with technology and business finance). By the regression methodology, this paper examines how the resources of the firm affect firm performance in the case of Lao PDR. The ranking of the important critical firm resources and firm performance is also identified. The firm size, firm age, and industry sectors are controlled.

The findings suggest that human, intangible, and tangible resources selected in this paper have a positive impact on firm performance. The interesting finding is that physical resources for the manufacturing sector is insignificant to firm performance in the Lao context, which seems to be consistent with the economic development stage of the country.

This paper uses secondary data with limitations in selecting theoretical meaningful variables, obtaining the comprehensive performance indicators and controlling other variables. Future studies should conduct the survey and include other internal and external factors that affect firm performance.

This paper can provide the policy implications for both policymakers and implementers to emphasize on the key resources of the firms, which underline firm success.

The unique contribution of this study is twofold: first, it takes initiative to examine the importance of firm resources in the following subsectors: manufacturing, trading and service, so that the industry can emphasize on their priority resources to achieve better performance. Second, to date, a considerable amount of studies are mainly in the developed context. The dearth of study in this area has made it interesting to explore more the least developed countries (LDC) context.

Applying a computable general equilibrium model to assess the impact of tariffs between the US and China, Taiwan stands to gain from trade diversion of the trade war between the two largest world economies in the short term.

Initially, Taiwan suffered a minor loss from the sector-specific tariff on steel and aluminum imposed by the US. However, its loss is mitigated after counting counter measures from foreign countries. The cumulated US tariffs and China's retaliations led to trade diversion effect. Taiwan's initial loss from the steel and aluminum tariffs was over compensated by a series of trade war between the US and China.

Under the scenario of the cumulated tariffs of $250 billion of US imports and China's retaliations of $110 billion on US goods, the social welfare, exports, import and trade balance in Taiwan increased. Its terms of trade improved as well. Real wage increases slightly more for unskilled labor than for skilled labor. The short-term effect of the trade war has positive effect on all macro indicators of Taiwan's economy.

On sectoral shift, Taiwan's export will gain the most in precision engineering products ($2,941.6 million), followed by electronics ($310.7 million) and agricultural products ($31.3 million). The negative effects are in sectors such as business services ($58.323 million), other services ($46.9 million), transportation service ($36.6 million), trade service ($25.3 million), and finance service ($24.5 million). Taiwan's total imports will increase by 0.59%, whereas its total export will increase by 0.33%. However, total trade balance still increases by $451.1 million.

The study also finds that Taiwan has a high degree of overlapping export commodities with China in the US market, much higher than most major trading partners for the US, yet its market share for those products in the US is ranged from 1% to 5% only. Moreover, more than 60% of Taiwan's export to the US is in intermediate goods which have less product differentiation than those in final consumption goods. These two factors will provide an opportunity for Taiwan to exploit the US market.

Though the short-term effect of trade war is positive, Taiwan needs to have a long-range planning amid the external shocks. Policy implications for Taiwan are to map out a cosmopolitan view of its geo-strategy by diversifying outward foreign direct investment and trade destinations. It needs to reduce the “systemic risk” of relying on single market in China which is vulnerable to the uncertainty in the US–China relations. If the trade war lasts too long, Taiwan would need to reevaluate its triangular trade-investment nexus with China and the US as well as its role in the global supply chain.

This paper tries to locate the sectorial bubbles and examines the possibility for investors making extra profit from these bubbles in the Indian stock market.

The authors use two main indicators: (1) asset centrality and (2) relative value. Asset centrality signals crowded trading, which is associated with the formation of a bubble. Relative value separates the crowded trading during the bubble run-up from the sell-off. The authors observe whether these measures can detect the cycle of bubbles in each sector of the Indian stock market for the period 2004–2019.

The authors show the sectors going through the inflationary phase delivers much better performance than the index, whereas the sectors in their deflationary phase perform quite worse than the index. This provides attractive opportunities to investors, especially the institutional investors, and fund managers of the Indian market.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no study that looks into the idea of locating a sectoral bubble in the Indian financial stock market using the concept of centrality score and relative score. This work helps to locate a bubble and identify its phases successfully. Traders can enter a bubble in their inflationary period gain profit and exit the trade before the sell-off period begins.

This study aims to examine the extent to which UK directors failed to report their share trading in the timeframe required by extant regulations in the run‐up to the changes in insider trading law contained in the Financial Services and Markets Act.

The study investigates the extent of non‐compliance amongst the 7,461 trades reported to the London Stock Exchange by the directors of UK firms in the year 2000.

The results indicate that 1,055 (or 14 per cent) of directors' trades were reported late (or with the transaction date absent), with these being concentrated amongst “buy” transactions in both absolute and pro‐rata terms.

The evidence suggests that non‐compliance in the reporting of directors' transactions was common at the time when UK authorities chose to toughen the legal framework governing the conduct of trading based on private price‐sensitive information. Once sufficient time has elapsed, further studies should be able to provide evidence about the iterative impact of the new legal framework by comparing results with the findings of this study.

This is the first study to report a detailed examination of the extent of non‐compliance in the timing of directors' trades in their own equity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and assess the trends of bilateral services trade in the world segmented by trade for final consumption and intermediate usage across several service sectors. The differential trends, if any, are studied while examining the role of free trade agreements which have a chapter on services trade as well as the role of services trade restrictions. The study unravels differences across service sectors in this respect.

The author uses an augmented gravity model to address the above using OECD- World Trade Organization (WTO) TiVA data for bilateral trade in intermediates and final products (October 2015 release) and World Bank Services Trade Restrictions Index (STRI). The poisson pseudo maximum likelihood estimation technique is used in light of the structure of the data. Trade creating and diverting effects are identified controlling for time and country-time specific effects. The following sectors are specifically looked at: total business sector services, computer and related services, financial intermediation, post and telecommunication, transport and storage, R&D and other business services, hotels and restaurants, construction, and wholesale and retail trade.

First, services free trade agreements (FTAs) have had a trade creating impact with no trade diverting impact for services trade in aggregate with stronger effects on services traded for intermediate usage. Second, financial intermediation and post and telecommunication have been left unaffected by services FTAs. While no trade diversion is concluded for any sector, R&D and other business services, transport and storage and wholesale retail trade show maximum trade creation effects in response to FTAs. Third, trade restrictions of mainly OECD countries are responsible for lowering exports for most sectors. Finally, in terms of policy implications, at a general level, the author does not find a significant difference in the author’s results for services traded for intermediate usage or final consumption except for a stronger effect of FTAs on intermediate services trade. Hence, the policies to foster services trade on both counts are concluded to be the same and deal with behind-the-border policies of domestic industrial policy reforms like national treatment of foreign firms, licensing requirements, FDI policies, etc.

Statistics for services trade are limited. The data are only available for the years 1995, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. Additionally, the conclusions on services trade restrictions are based on statistics for 2011 alone, since this is the only year for which the statistics are available. A complete time series for the entire sample period would increase robustness of the study with a better time variant version of the trade restrictiveness variable. Finally, in the construction of the OECD-WTO-TiVA database of a world IO table, there may have been approximations in constructing statistics for services traded for intermediate usage and final consumption. The results remain sensitive to the same but this is the best possible statistics available for the purposes.

This is the first study which looks at services trade segmented by trade for final consumption and intermediate usage taking advantage of the available data for a number of service sectors. The role of restrictions is also studied for the first time segmented by trade in intermediates and final consumption. The stronger effects of FTAs on intermediate services trade as well as financial intermediation and post and telecommunication services being insulated from effects of FTAs are important findings, especially since services are mainly thought to be traded for final consumption. Similar trends of results for services traded for intermediate usage and final consumption and restrictions affecting exports from exporter countries and imports by importer countries highlight the importance of behind-the-border domestic policies in facilitating or inhibiting services trade on both counts and more importantly for intermediate usage which, in turn, would improve goods tradability.