O30 - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights: GeneralReturn

To better promote the transformation of the economic development mode and improve technological innovation, the Chinese central government adjusted the performance assessment criteria for local officials. This study explores whether the government green performance assessment can serve to promote technological innovation. Data from 288 Chinese cities from between 2009 and 2018 is taken as the sample and the fixed effects model is utilized as the methodology. The findings show that the government green performance assessment has significant direct and long-term effects on technological innovation. The promotion of technological innovation is more evident in industry-oriented, low-pollution, and center groups, in addition to among veteran, high-education, and senior groups. Proposed policy recommendations include establishing a performance system that emphasizes short and long-term effects, and developing performance standards that are tailored to local conditions.

Continuous technological changes in various industries are necessary for achieving economic development goals. Logistics, as an integral part of the supply chain, is gaining an increasingly significant role for national economies. To encourage its further development, especially in the era of intensive digitization and the context of Industry 4.0, innovations and new technologies are seen as important drivers. The paper examines the impact of capacity for innovation and availability of latest technologies on countries' overall logistics performance, as well as individual components of international logistics. Additionally, the role of export and import as moderators of this relationship are analysed, to see the patterns of its influence in open economies. The empirical results provide evidence of a positive direct impact of selected technological variables on the elements of international logistics, as well as a positive effect of export and import on the Logistics Performance Index (LPI), while the introduction of moderators into the analysis, using the Baron & Kenny model, points out that the impact of technological components is weaker in economies with a higher volume of exports.

Services have expanded rapidly over last twenty years and they play a dominant role in advanced economies today. The economic research reflects these structural changes by increasing interest in integrating services into the traditional value chain. This study aims at creating conceptual framework for measuring innovation in services and for identifying different innovation patterns in service sector. The need for the concept of innovation patterns in services results firstly from the different character of the innovation process in services and in manufacturing and secondly from the high degree of heterogeneity inside the service sector. The concept presented in this study summarizes recent approaches to service innovation and creates four groups of services according the types of their innovation activities. These groups are: science-based services, problem solving services, scale-oriented services and market-oriented services. This study represents a basis for follow-up analysis of innovation efficiency in Czech business services sector.

The core aim of this paper is to suggest comprehensive definition of the information economy and delineate the range of economic problems it deals with, paying particular attention to its connections to the economics of information. The text, in the extent provided, can not investigate thoroughly all the subjects associated with the information economy; it rather presents overview of the most important issues and illustrates them with examples from real and virtual markets. The major subjects concerned include: information asymmetries, revelation principle, network effects and externalities, economies of scale, standard wars, switching costs and lock-ins, multiple competitive equilibria, characteristics of online markets, impact of information technology on productivity, implications for governmental policies.