information about its software products Microsoft has to give its competitors. In one corner, wearing EU-colored trunks, is the EU’s antitrust agency, which is levying fines of unimaginable size on Microsoft for not providing its competitors with the information it thinks those competitors are entitled to

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Since 1973 technological, political, regulatory, and economic forces have been changing the worldwide economy in a fashion comparable to the changes experienced during the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. As in the nineteenth century, we are experiencing declining costs, increaing average (but decreasing marginal) productivity of labor, reduced growth rates of labor income, excess capacity, and the requirement for downsizing and exit. The last two decades indicate corporate internal control systems have failed to deal effectively with these changes, especially slow growth and the requirement for exit. The next several decades pose a major challenge for Western firms and political systems as these forces continue to work their way through the worldwide economy.

The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies anlong societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply. Historical evidence from ancient Rome. early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses. It is often assumed that an economy of private enterprise has an automatic bias towards innovation, but this is not so. It has a bias only towards profit. [HOBSBAWM 1969, p. 401 When conjectures are offered to explain historic slowdowns or great leaps in economic growth, there is the group of usual suspects that is I am very grateful for the generous support of the research underlying this paper

this paper what we know about foreign trade and in what ways our understanding has improved as a result of the last 20 years of research

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www.bcs-hci.org.uk Find out what happened at HCI2004 Interacting with … music aeroplanes petrol pumps Published by the British HCI Group • ISSN 1351-119X 1

This paper discusses the prevalence of Silicon Valley–style localiza-tions of individual manufacturing industries in the United States. A model in which localized industry-specific spillovers, natural ad-vantages, and pure random chance all contribute to geographic concentration is used to develop a test for whether observed levels of concentration are greater than would be expected to arise ran-domly and to motivate new indices of geographic concentration and of coagglomeration. The proposed indices control for differ-ences in the size distribution of plants and for differences in the size of the geographic areas for which data are available. As a conse-quence, comparisons of the degree of geographic concentration across industries can be made with more confidence. Our empiri-cal results provide a strong reaffirmation of the previous wisdom in that we find almost all industries to be somewhat localized. In many industries, however, the degree of localization is slight. We explore the nature of agglomerative forces in describing patterns of concentration, the geographic scope of localization, and the coagglomeration of related industries and of industries with strong upstream-downstream ties.

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