tailieunhanh - Concentration in the Belgian brewing Industry and the Breakthrough of Lager in the interwar years

Australian farmers continue to face the challenge of declining terms of trade in agriculture, yet remain internationally competitive through effi ciencies and productivity growth. The growth in the farm sector had increased steadily over the 30 year period from 1974-75 to 2003-04 at an average rate of percent, consistently out-performing other sectors. In more recent times, agricultural productivity growth has slowed to 1 percent per annum, illustrating the need for an increased spend on research and development to ensure the industry can meet the food and fi bre needs of the growing world population. Environmental Australian farmers. | KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics Department of Economics Concentration in the Belgian brewing Industry and the Breakthrough of Lager in the interwar years by Peter VAN DER HALLEN Economic History Center for Economic Studies Discussions Paper Series DPS http ces discussionpapers October 2007 DISCUSSION PAPER Concentration in the Belgian brewing Industry and the Breakthrough of Lager in the interwar Years Peter Van der Hallen 1. INTRODUCTION Among economists the work of John Sutton 1 on industrial organisation has greatly altered the way they look at concentration and market structure. In his works he stresses the importance of exogenous and endogenous sunk costs2 to explain the evolution of market structure in various industrial sectors. His theory has its foundations in the context of game theoretic literature w hich m odels increasingly dom inated the field of industrial organisation. Among econom ic historians though this theory has not yet gotten its deserved attention. Apart from a notable exception3 most economic historians have stuck with older models such as Bain s structureconduct-performance paradigm4 in their attempts to explain industrial concentration in the course of history. Sutton s m odel can be som ew hat com plicated if one is not accustomed to this economic literature and involves quite some explaining of econom ic m ethodology. Nevertheless better understanding of business history can probably be achieved by applying or testing Sutton s endogenous cost m odel on econom ic history. A side from some robust im plications of the m odel the eventual outcome depends delicately on historical and institutional factors giving way to historical analysis. Since the evolution of technology has an im portant place in the theory research on the history of technology can be very useful for the model. Some subsets of industries referred to as high-alpha industries are especially .